THE

PILGRIM OF THE ABSOLUTE

 THE PILGRIM
OF THE ABSOLUTE

Leon Bloy

A selection of his writings,

edited by Raissa Maritain,
with an introduction by Jacques Maritain

CLUNY MEDIA
 Cluny Media edition, 2017

This Cluny edition may include minor editorial revisions to the original text.
For information regarding editorial revisions, please write to Cluny Media, Department of
Editing and Production 4619 Slayden Rd. NE, Tacoma, WA, 98422

Translations by John Coleman and Harry Lorin Binsse

All Scripture references are to the Douay-Rheims Bible, unless otherwise noted.

Cluny Media edition copyright © 2017 Cluny Media LLC

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781944418472

Cover design by Clarke & Clarke

Cover image: Alfred Sisley, First Snow at Veneux-Nadon, 1878, oil on canvas
(Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
 Contents

Introduction
by David Bentley Hart

Introduction to the 1947 Edition

by Jacques Maritain

The Thankless Beggar

Marchenoir

Art and the Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre

The Wisdom of the Bourgeois

The Poor Man

The Hurler of Curses

Modern Christians

She Who Weeps

The Mystery of Israel

Suffering, Faith, Sanctity

The Sense of Mystery

Random Thoughts

Sources
 Introduction

T here are many angles from which to view Léon Bloy (1846–1917),
but only a very few that present him in a particularly flattering light—
at least, as regards his personality. Concerning his almost uncanny gifts as a
master of French prose, or concerning the great variety of his achievements as a
writer, no one can entertain any serious doubts. In the full swell and surge of his
voice, his language shines, flows, shimmers, thunders, sings. And his fiction,
even at its most disordered or intentionally rebarbative, possesses a power and
energy that more than compensate for any formal defects of narrative structure.
But, for the great majority of those who made his acquaintance, to know him
was to dislike him (if not at first, certainly in fairly short order), and even a great
many of those who know him solely from his writings find him frequently
insufferable. He may have been a prophet, in the most biblical sense, but he was
not a saint (or, at least, certainly not any kind of saint recognizable to ordinary
perception). He was a man of extremes—rhetorical, conceptual, artistic,
religious, emotional—who was quite incapable of the safe and comfortable
middle where most of us have to live out our lives and forge our
accommodations with the world around us. It is a waste of time to look for
moments of moderation or vacillation, either in him or in his work; there is none
to be found. On the one hand, he was an indefatigable engine of theatrical rage—
torrents of indignation, vituperation, objurgation, bitterness, and spite—and he
gave vent to his hostilities with an extravagance so remorseless as to verge on
the psychotic. On the other hand, he was an inexhaustible wellspring of fervent
and genuinely tender pity for the sufferings of the poor and forgotten, and there
was an undeniable innocence in his implacable anger against the rich and
powerful who left the destitute to their misery. But one does not have the luxury
of choosing one side of his character over against the other. They were not
merely inextricable from one another; they were inverse but equally essential
expressions of a single indivisible temperament. He abounded in love and hate,
and was capable of the one only to the degree that he was capable of the other.
There was a single Bloy, and he was an angelic monster.
Though, on second thought, a better way of putting this might be to say
that he was French. Exquisitely French, even. Hyperbolically French, in fact.
Certainly no other people in Europe is as prone to wild oscillations between
extreme poles—emotional, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, political—or better
able to hide the violence of their contradictions behind an appearance of elegant
equilibrium. Despite the mythos of “Les Lumières,” the secret animating
principle sustaining France’s majestic cultural supremacy is an almost total
incapacity for sane moderation. Even the celebrated “rationalism” of the French
Enlightenment was nothing more than a momentary fashion, an entirely
irrational passion for a new vogue in desiccated abstractions (rather like an
inexplicably insatiable taste for chiaroscuro etchings or charcoal brass rubbings).
And this cultural habit of ceaseless polarity has often produced prodigies of
glorious contradictoriness, of a sort that transcends mere paradox. Only the
French, for instance, could have perfected a form of Christian literature
consisting almost entirely in the negation of Christian piety. Call it a kind of
Christian Tantra, or Aghori Catholicism, or Catholicism of the left-hand path.
Baudelaire (1821–1867) provides perhaps the prime example, having so
brilliantly succeeded at concealing his deep if eccentric faith in his journaux
intimes while presenting the public with a façade of dissipation, wantonness,
blasphemy, and even Satanism, as if hoping to shock bourgeois society into
acknowledging the reality of the diabolical, and therefore (ineluctably) of the
divine. Perhaps even Lautréamont (1846–1870) was a specimen of the type,
though he died before the unveiling of his promised “devotional” sequel to Les
Chants de Maldoror. Certainly, Bloy’s master Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889)
was, as also was Bloy’s (temporary) friend Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907).
And Bloy’s own literary imagination roamed many of the same “negative”
spaces. His Sueur de sang (1893) and Histoires désobligeantes (1894) brought
the fashion in “horrid” tales—pioneered by Barbey in Diaboliques (1874) and
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 1889) in Contes cruels (1883)—to a kind of
ghastly perfection. If anything, Bloy’s stories were more brutal in their
unadorned hideousness; they established an entirely new standard for sordid
fictional material: bizarre depravities, battlefield butchery, putrescent corpses,
insanity, mutilation, infanticide, incest, sickly erotic fantasy, even a prostitute’s
reanimated cadaver—all of it played over a basso continuo of morbidly repellant
physical (and physiological) detail.
 It was not, however, his taste for the macabre (which savored more of the
moralist’s bitterness than of the voyeur’s relish) that caused Bloy’s detractors to
find him so obnoxious. It was the man himself, or at least the indelible
impression he gave of himself in his writings. To be honest, a maliciously
exhaustive catalogue of Bloy’s moral faults would be all but indistinguishable
from a simple dispassionate account of his personality. While he attempted to
live the life of a holy renunciant, he excelled chiefly at subjecting his friends and
acquaintances to unremitting financial importunities; and the sanctimony with
which he demanded, rather than asked, for assistance earned him the title of “the
Ingrate Beggar.” True, as Bloy acutely observed more than once, Christians
should give freely, without any expectation of gratitude (lest the left hand
become aware of the right hand’s largesse.) Even so, he might have attempted an
occasional decorous expression of thanks, just to appear gracious. Moreover,
while his piety was undoubtedly deep and ardent, it frequently degenerated into
delusion, and of the most self-aggrandizing kind. Not only did he imagine that
this sinful world lay under the threat of some imminent moment of divine
reckoning; he seemed convinced that he himself would have a prominent role to
play in the final settling of all accounts. And his faith was often little more than
militant credulity. He was especially susceptible to the deliverances of religious
visionaries, so long as the revelations they proclaimed were sufficiently suffused
by an air of divine wrath. It was typical of him that he should become a truculent
champion of the Marian “apparition” reported at La Salette in 1846 by two
peasant girls, according to whom the Blessed Virgin had not only confessed
herself scarcely able any longer to restrain the impetuous rage of her Son against
the people of France, but had also threatened to kill countless children by famine
as heavenly retribution for the profanities regularly uttered by provincial cart-
drivers. To Bloy, the comic rusticity of the tale was rendered believable by the
very vindictiveness of it message. The again, by his own account he himself had
a positive genius for hatred, and it seems never to have occurred to him to draw
any kind of distinction between the sinner and the sin. Why then would God? It
is genuinely chilling at times to observe the unalloyed glee with which Bloy
contemplated the misfortunes, sufferings, and even deaths—the eternal
damnation, in fact—of those he disliked, either personally or as a class. He was
especially overjoyed by news of the deaths of the wealthy—wealthy women
most of all. The sinking of the Titanic or of any other luxury liner, though a
tragedy for the poor wretches making the crossing in steerage or laboring below
decks, filled him with delight. He could not contain the ebullience of his mirth
when a fire at the Opéra Comique in 1877 resulted in the “cremation of four
hundred filthy bourgeois.” Again, when a fire at the Charity Bazaar in May of
1896 (recounted in the pages of this volume) killed a great number of society
ladies and their privileged daughters, he rejoiced at the thought of all those
“chaste lilies” and “tender roses” being trampled to death under the feet of the
panicked crowd, and of their charred remains being swept up into dustpans the
following day. And, of course, he was a French chauvinist and bigot, even while
despising the complacency and moral lethargy of his fellow countrymen. He
adored Napoleon, oddly, with an almost idolatrous passion. He ventured out of
France only once, for a brief sojourn in Denmark, concluded that the Danes were
scarcely human and that their religion was a barbarous parody of Christianity,
and returned home for good. The British he hated with a vehemence bordering
on the genocidal. Russia he would have happily seen reduced to a sea of blood
spreading around high mountains of corpses. He was bellicose and choleric,
splenetic and vicious. His resentments were madly disproportionate to any
wrongs he had ever suffered. His prejudices were impregnable to any assaults of
charity. He was not merely irascible—he was cruel.
And yet...
This is the infuriating and baffling mystery of Bloy. All of this is true, and
all of it truly deplorable—and yet Bloy was a man of extraordinarily sensitive
and fierce conscience. His prophetic affectations were not, after all, completely
delusory. Underneath the searing fevers of his prose—the gleaming floods of its
lyricism, its vividly hallucinatory imagery, the chaotic opulence of its phrasing,
the sheer delirium of its verbal beauty—and even underneath the unabated
ferocity and malice to which it gave such overwhelming expression, lay a
bottomless reservoir of sincere compassion and incorruptible integrity. When
one encounters Bloy not in his role as a moralist but simply as a moral man, one
has to conclude that even his rhetorical savagery was an overflow of a deeper
and uncompromising spiritual purity. In those moments, it seems clear that his
polemical voice came from another age—perhaps early antiquity, or even
perhaps the days of the prophets of Israel—cursing in order to bless, calling
down God’s wrath in order to redeem. Even in its most extreme registers, there
is an audible tone of desperate, apocalyptic urgency, an almost frantic desire to
rouse Bloy’s contemporaries from their contented slumbers. Certainly Bloy often
seemed to speak out of a sense of God as the Lord who is wrapped in the cloud
and fire of Sinai, who dwells among his people only in the impenetrable
darkness of the tabernacle or of the sanctuary, or in the unapproachable and
deadly holiness of the Ark of the Covenant. His, moreover, was the Johannine
Christ, whose presence in history is already the final judgment, separating light
from darkness, life from death. And he clearly felt a certain contempt for those
of his readers who did not understand that Christian charity sometimes can—and
occasionally must—express itself in gall, indignation, sarcasm, even enmity. Or
rather, to put the matter somewhat differently, genuine love must often entail a
concomitant hatred. One is unlikely quite to catch the music of Bloy’s rages
unless one knows what it would be like to stand among the poorest and most
abused human beings, to see the neglect and heartlessness with which the great
world passes them by, and while standing there, amid that needless and ignored
human desolation, to imagine with satisfaction the rich of the earth made into
carrion for crows, and yet to do so out of a heart overflowing with charity. It
requires a very rare, delicate, and volatile temperament to be such a person; but
that is who Bloy was.
Something of the man’s measure can be taken from his vociferous
detestation of the anti-semitism of his time and place, especially the newly
fashionable variety promoted by the political journalist and pamphleteer
Édouard Drumont (1844 1917), but also the traditional, casually vicious French
Catholic variety. Even when the Dreyfus affair strained his loyalties from every
side (he sometimes seemed to resent Dreyfus for embarrassing his beloved
France by his innocence), and even when his rhetoric lapsed into the sort of
conventional supersessionism that his own more considered theological writings
rejected, Bloy never ceased to defend the Jews against persistent calumnies, and
to insist upon God’s special love for his people—indeed, for his kin. To Bloy’s
mind, it was not enough for him as a Christian merely to denounce lies about the
wealth and usurious ways of international “Jewry”; it was necessary to proclaim
ever and again “Le Salut par les Juifs” (to cite the title of his book of 1892), and
to insist that every Jew, being a cousin of God incarnate, owned a divine dignity
to which gentiles had no natural claim, and in regard to which the proper attitude
of any gentile was one of grateful humility. In fact, there is no other Catholic
thinker of the nineteenth or early twentieth century who better understood Paul’s
arguments about God’s enduring covenants in the ninth through eleventh
chapters of the Letter to the Romans chapters, or who was more immune to the
traditional Augustinian misreading of the text. For him, Christians are saved
only by being grafted into a vine that is eternally the vine of Israel. To appreciate
just how extraordinary all this was for a pious Catholic of Bloy’s time, one need
only compare his views to the noxious bigotries that pervade the writings of
Catholic apologists of the time—even some still held in high esteem today.
No less extraordinary, however, was Bloy’s profound and really rather
magnificent mysticism of poverty. —Poverty, that is, as opposed to destitution:
the former, he claimed, was the chief of Christian virtues, the most Christlike,
the most beautifully in keeping with the Son of God’s self-impoverishment in his
incarnation among the nameless of the earth; the latter is an abomination in
God’s eyes, the inexcusable sin of the rich against the poor, the condition of the
world’s suffering servants to whom—and to whom alone—Christ came to bear
glad tidings. There is no element in Bloy’s thought more purely biblical than his
conviction that true love for the poor must express itself as, among other things,
an unyielding condemnation of the wealthy. Here he proved himself an heir not
just to the prophets of Israel, with their ringing denunciations of the predatory
rich, but to the evangelists and the apostles. Of course, Christian culture has
spent the better part of two millennia studiously avoiding the plain meaning of
the New Testaments numerous pronouncements on the spiritual state of the
wealthy, and refusing to acknowledge Christ’s more or less exclusive concern
for the ptōchoi, the abjectly destitute. To Bloy, this willful forgetfulness was
perhaps the greatest scandal of Christian history; and he adopted a rhetoric
toward the rich that, for all its fierceness, is no more terrifying than the language
of the New Testament: the Magnificat’s prophecy of the condign downfall of the
privileged (Luke 1:53); Christ’s explicit prohibition upon storing up earthly
treasure (Matthew 6:19 20); his command that his disciples divest themselves of
all possessions (Luke 12:33); his assurance that no one who clings to his
property can be his disciple (Luke 14:33); the deprivations that he promises will
befall the rich in the age to come (Luke 6:24–25; cf. 16:25); James’s fiery
accusations of the rich as oppressors of the poor now facing the wrath of God
(James 1:9–11; 2:5–7; 5:1–6); and so on.†
For Bloy, the rich man seeking admission into the Kingdom really did have
only about as good a chance of gaining entry as the camel had of passing
through the needle’s eye; and more than once he limned hilarious psychological
portraits of those decent prosperous Christians who are absolutely convinced that
God truly adores the rich, and that any apparent scriptural statements to the
contrary have been misunderstood or distorted in transmission. One of the most
brilliantly acid and yet oddly moving witticisms in this volume is his suggestion
that the builders of the Tower of Babel were seeking to storm heaven not merely
by rising to its threshold, but chiefly ascending high above “the naked angels”
thronging the streets below. To Bloy’s mind, the most witheringly contemptuous
name he could assign to the devil was that of Le Bourgeois—the eternal
Bourgeois, in fact, who is a murderer from the beginning. To be honest, his
language at times verges on a kind of Manichean or gnostic dualism, with the
rich cast in the roles of the Archons of this aeon, under whose power the whole
cosmos languishes in torment and darkness. To his mind, the disproportionate
wealth of the fortunate few, having been extracted from labor and common
resources, is not theirs by right, even if it is also the product of their industry and
ingenuity; still worse, to the degree that it is withheld from the poor it is nothing
less than theft and slaughter. This is a moral, not an economic, claim; Bloy did
not speak as if the world’s wealth were some sort of fixed quantity, or as if one
man’s surfeit is necessarily another’s scarcity; he merely believed that those who
are wealthy and who keep their wealth for themselves, even as the poor continue
to suffer and perish, are in God’s eyes the murderers of their brothers and sisters.
It is in this sense only that he claimed that the joy of the rich is the suffering of
the poor, and that—to cite one of his most famous images—the gold of the rich
is the blood of the poor, flowing through the institutions and estates of the
propertied few. Great wealth is the ultimate vampirism, the most ubiquitous of
cannibalisms. And yet, says Bloy, from the diabolical vantage of this age it is
poverty that is the greatest shame, the one truly immeasurable guilt; and so
Christ in becoming a man assumed also the real material poverty of the forgotten
and exploited, and thereby assumed also the “guilt” of all men and women. In
his reading of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Lazarus is Christ himself, left to
die in the dust, pitied only by the dogs. And this mysticism of poverty plumbs
the deepest fathoms of Bloy’s faith. More to the point, his picture of our social
world as a Satanic economy of sacrifice, fed by the ceaselessly spilled blood of
the destitute—as astonishing as it may be in its sheer uncompromising intensity
—is an expression not only of his “genius for hatred,” but also of his heroic
capacity for love. And (for what this is worth) it also happens to be true.
In any event, there is no need to say more. Bloy is more than able to speak
for himself, and in these pages he pours out the full range of his passions and
rancors, loves and hates, prophetic inspirations and narcissistic delusions. It is a
voice like no other, so eloquent and earnest that even its moments of pettiness
can seem sublime. Above all else, it is the voice of a man who was hard to love
but impossible to ignore precisely because he was apparently incapable of lying
about his convictions, of temporizing in order to avoid causing dismay, or of
seeking to evade the consequences of his beliefs. And such men, rare as they are,
invariably offend. Happily, Bloy was able to delight as well.
 ~David Bentley Hart
South Bend, Indiana
August 1, 2017

† Scripture references not to Douay–Rheims Bible.

 Introduction to the 1947 Edition

W e can give nothing we have not received, being in the likeness of

Him who has received everything from His Father. That is why the
more one gives, the more one needs to receive, the more one is a beggar. Bloy
was a fearful beggar who would not put up with mediocrity in men, and whom
God was to satisfy only with the vision of His Glory. It seemed at times that in
his desire for the beatific vision he voluntarily closed his eyes to ordinary lights,
and preferred to grope his way toward the pure Effulgence. This mystical
impatience is, to my mind, at the very source of his art.
His main concern was to “give the idea and the impression of mystery,”
that is, of our incapacity of looking directly at the light which shines on us, and
to give at the same time, by means of a most riotous flowering of images, a
perceptible likeness of that truth which we do not yet know by intuition, which
we know only through a mirror, in riddles. “It is essential,” Bloy would say,
“that Truth be in Glory. Splendor of style is not a luxury, it is a necessity.”
Basically Léon Bloy was a pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre. “Art is part of my
baggage, so much the worse for me! My only recourse is the expedient of
placing at the service of Truth what has been given me by the Father of Lies. A
precarious and dangerous device, for the business of Art is to fashion Gods…”;
“I am simply a poor man who seeks his God, sobbing and calling Him along all
roads…”; “The clearcut truth, which bursts forth in all my books, is that I write
only for God,” Bloy was the very opposite of the Anarchist who hates all
“bourgeois”; he was a Christian who hated the Bourgeois, which—for those who
understand—is one of the modern names of the old Enemy. He had a horror of
disorder, lack of balance, sentimentalism, the negative and revolutionary spirit.
“I write the most vehement things with great calm. Rage is powerless and suits
especially those in revolt. It happens I am an obedient meter-out of justice.” He
placed above everything absolute fidelity to supernatural truth. “Too much
human knowledge and too little divine knowledge,” he said in speaking of
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. “I get the same impression from him as from Edgar Poe.
These poets did not pray, and their contempt—while sometimes eloquent—is but
the bitterness of their earthly impatience. They are full of earth, like idols.”
I know it is as easy as it would be unjust to sketch of Bloy a heinous
caricature, using for documents absurd bits of gossip, or lining up a certain
number of texts chosen from a work that includes a great diversity of matter, part
of which has vituperation as its main object. Do we reproach Juvenal for not
having composed bucolics? The important thing is to put these elements in their
place—time, in any case, will take care of all this—and to give our attention to
what is foremost in a soul so exceptional by its prodigious lyrical gifts, its
excessive sufferings, and its great love of Christ crucified.
Despite his profound affection for the Middle Ages, Bloy was a
contemporary neither of Saint Bernard nor of Saint Thomas Aquinas. An
anachronism even more violent and strange is that he was in fact a contemporary
of Tertullian and Origen, a Christian of the second century astray in the Third
Republic. How could he not have “vomited forth” his seeming contemporaries—
those thankless shades in whose reality he could never believe?
To get an idea of Bloy, one must put aside easy analogies. In him were
confronted as in their pure state, as if outside the climate of human reason—
whether it take on the clothing of philosophy or the clothing of prudence—the
privileges of the Christian and those of the Poet. The theological virtues and the
gifts of the Holy Spirit planted in a profound and intuitive soul famished for the
divine vision, a soul whom genius oppressed; a poor human heart preyed upon
by all that is superhuman in the divine requirements, and by all that is inhuman
in the despotism of art; the great storms, the nights, the tears of a most harsh
mysticism in an atmosphere of violence and passion, above an indomitable earth,
finding no other outlet than in the dazzling forms of a ferociously Spanish
imagination…. Impatient as was Ernest Hello to see and to touch, Bloy, it would
seem, never was willing to renounce completely the splendors of the tangible, in
order to seek beyond, in the darkness of a purely spiritual contemplation, Him
who is above all images and all thought. Perceptible and tangible signs of God—
such were the objects of his never-sated hunger. Thus it is in the world of forms
and images that the mystical keys have their repercussion, and there take shape
the melodies of a most genuinely Christian sense of the absolute requirements of
the Lord. But this likewise leads to discord and disproportion: the feeling of
mystery, so pure in itself, so lofty in Bloy, sometimes translates itself by means
of lightning flashes and a darkness which are too material. The true perception of
what is unique and exceptional in the operation of the Holy Spirit in every docile
soul (at least as far as the manner of doing ordinary things is concerned) was to
become, with him, a taste for extraordinary deeds and romantic grandiosity
which he projected in his double, Marchenoir.
But what of it! These venial deficiencies were the ransom paid for the
incomparable efficacy of his work in turning toward God the hearts of men—of
men who most of the time live in the senses, and who need to be led to the
intelligible by means of the tangible. Imagine the three theological virtues
donning the sumptuous and squalid rags of a most violent lyrical sensibility, in
order to go about begging in city squares and streets. Bloy liked to repeat that he
wrote not for the righteous—neither for the perfect, nor for those who are
progressing, nor for those who are beginning—but for the sleeping ones who
needed his suffering and his outbursts, for publicans and “for scoundrels.” A
category to which you certainly do not belong, “hypocritical reader, my fellow
man, my brother,” but to which belong, in these miserable days, a sorry
multitude, redeemed, nonetheless, by the blood of the Lord. Without grace, what
are we? Buried souls, muttering as in a dream; Bloy draws these souls out
toward the light by very reason of the union in his work between the tangible
and the spiritual. The individualistic and imaginative aspect, the esthetic
splendor which the religious absolute takes on with him, somehow puts this
absolute within the grasp of such souls. They hear him when he tells them; “All
that happens is divine…”; “There is but one sadness and that is for us not to be
saints…”; “You do not enter paradise tomorrow, or the day after, or in ten years,
you enter it today when you are poor and crucified.” A beggar sitting at the door
of a church, showing his bleeding sores to passers-by. Thus does Bloy call these
souls into the house of truth and then take them up to the altar of the living God.
“When a lover of grandeur and of the forsaken passes before a forsaken
man, he will recognize grandeur, if grandeur be there.” To what forsaken man
does this line of Ernest Hello—which Bloy often repeated—apply better than to
Bloy himself?

But I hear people asking: How do you account for Bloy’s personal attacks?
His violence, his injustice toward this man or that? Let the reader take note, at
this point, of what is exceptional in the case of Léon Bloy. Villiers de l’Isle-
Adam, in the presence of someone importunate or impudent, would look at the
person with extreme and manifest effort, blink, stretch out his neck, bringing his
head forward, and exclaim, discouraged, “I’m doing all I can, sir, but I can’t see
you.” Bloy was by nature incapable of seeing and judging in themselves
individuals and particular circumstances. He did not discern them. From this
came—for anyone considering their immediate object—the immoderate excess
of his fits of violence. The truth was that they were aiming at something else.
In these demonstrations of violence one must first of all see the
consequence of a very special kind of abstraction, certainly not philosophic, but
artistic; or, if one prefers, a very special kind of typification: every event, every
gesture, every person, here and now, was instantaneously transposed, torn from
all contingencies, from the concrete conditions of the human setting which
explain it and make it plausible, and was transposed, in the eyes of this fearful
visionary, into the pure symbol of some devouring spiritual reality.
One must also see in these fits of violence a consequence of his strange
absorption in his own interior world. Bloy was among “those who are troubled
by the outcries of the Disobedience, and live withdrawn into their own souls.”
When he was but a young child his mother often found him sitting silently,
bathed in tears, weeping for hours without ascribable motive. A boundless
melancholy—both natural and supernatural—weighed on him; a certain number
of apperceptions of mortal acuteness, such as the mystical gifts can awaken in a
soul of this kind, filled his heart. The crucifying vision of universal forgetfulness
for God and His Love; the vision of hatred for the Poor, of the abjectness and
cruelty peculiar to a world where the Gospel is no longer known-—all this made
the passion of the Lord perpetually present to him; fashioning his spiritual life
upon the agony and the abhorrence of the Mount of Olives. That is what existed
for him: this spiritual universe—and his faithful sorrow. The rest were but
phantasms, a useless and uncertain show. And as apperceptions existed in him
from the start, with their attendant aura of vigorous reality, and very early
exerted pressure from all sides upon his mind, it was enough that some exterior
object, passing in the shadow of his suffering, present some appearance of the
vices or the tepidity he detested for Bloy to seize upon it as upon a detestable
symbol, and submit it to his indignation as an “obedient meter-out of Justice.”
His blows might fall most deplorably wide of the mark; the victim chosen might
deserve neither to be impaled nor scalped, might on the contrary deserve every
laurel: through this victim—a perishable form—he reached the invisible
monster, the monument of spiritual iniquity which oppressed his heart and the
hearts of a great number of his brothers.
Without doubt this way of acting offered, for many, serious disadvantages.
His love of God showed itself in none too charitable colors, and his zeal for
Justice, which was really Léon Bloy’s constant passion, seemed somewhat to
neglect the moral virtue of the same name. Yet we would be quite
unperspicacious if we did not discern either this love or this zeal, of which only
He who will judge us has measured the intensity; and if we did not realize that
the very enormity of Léon Bloy’s verbal violence made it much less dangerous
to his enemies than to himself. Could he be said to be an exasperated, envious,
soured “pamphleteer”? No picture could be more false. “My anger,” Bloy used
to say, “is the effervescence of my pity,” and those words are very true. Seeing
his own life as a symbol of higher realities, and exposing it for this reason to
public view, he felt he could treat men like signs or counters with which his art
spelled out the mercy or the indignation of God.
I was hungry, and you gave Me to eat, I was in prison, and you came to
Me…. But when did we see Thee in prison and come to Thee?—Léon Bloy
wrote to set souls free. If his violence roused the indignation of a few righteous
people who neither knew nor understood him, it broke the fetters of many a
sinner, and there is more joy in Heaven for one sinner who repents than for
ninety-nine righteous souls having no need of penance. “Some people ask for
baptism after having read me. What divine sanction for my violence!” Blessed
were those fits of violence—which alone were capable of shattering the brass
doors that kept those souls imprisoned. To these, through his life and his work,
Bloy had given “a foreboding of the mystery” of the supernatural truths, he had
manifested Christianity in its antique simplicity, in its eternal greatness, in the
fearful and sweet absoluteness of its divine requirements. “It is no laughing
matter that I have loved thee…” He wept—I can still see him—as he read those
words of Our Lord to Angela of Foligno, and these of Ruysbroeck: “Ah! if you
but knew the delights God gives, and the delicious taste of the Holy Spirit.”
Driven by his lively faith into the mystery of the communion of saints, he had
asked to suffer in an exceptional manner—a Job on the dung heap of modern
culture—and his wish had been heard.
Bloy’s frequent reference to excrement, which has scandalized some
people, was nothing but his own rather unusual means for insulting the pomp
and display in which we complacently rest, and for keeping himself separated
from the world: it was something like the vermin of Saint Benedict Labre, and in
any case, something just as subordinate. All his life he hated injustice, loved the
poor and the forsaken, hoped—with what impatience!—for the revelation of
God’s Glory. He ardently desired martyrdom, he thought himself destined to it,
he expected it in the form of a bloody and extraordinary immolation that was
refused him—which does not mean that the heavenly Father did not award him
the grace of an invisible martyrdom, inflicted by means of the threefold anguish
of silence, in which his cries fell as into an abyss of solitude and destitution
endured for the love of God. He entered, led by the saints, the supernatural
depths of Suffering and Abandonment, of all sufferings and all abandonments:
the suffering and abandonment of the Poor—who are the image of God; the
suffering and abandonment of Israel—the people of God; the suffering and
abandonment of Mary—the Mother of God. The great flames that spring up in
his work are like reflections of the beatitude of Tears. “Our unutterable
wretchedness comes from our continually taking for figures or inanimate
symbols the clearest and most living statements of the Scriptures. We believe,
but not substantially. Ah! the words of the Holy Spirit should enter and flow
through our souls as molten lead, in the mouth of a parricide or a blasphemer.
We do not understand that we are the members of The Man of Sorrows…. When
we shed our blood it flows on Calvary, and from thence over the whole earth.
Woe to us, therefore, if this blood be poisoned! When we shed our tears, which
are ‘the blood of our souls,’ they fall on the heart of the Virgin, and from there
onto all living hearts.”
Whether they be souls of poets or of prophets, the souls elected to speak in
the name of a great number of people dead or suffering are not free to decline
their obligation. The Thankless Beggar was to lend a voice to the impatience and
agony of a multitude of poor and forgotten men who were knocking at the door
of his heart. His fearful irony was to denounce the baseness of the conceited
world which crushed them. Woe to you, ye rich, for ye already have your
consolation. Woe to you who are sated, for ye will be famished. Woe to you who
laugh at present, for ye will weep and lament. The Lord cried woe eight times
against the Scribes and the hypocritical Pharisees. Each of us, in the misery of
this present life, bears in himself a resemblance to one of the multiple aspects of
the simple and only Truth. In a world where man has taken all the room, and
where self-admiration, decorum, conventions and care to conform to the present
age seem to be the main concern of many children of light, Bloy’s mission was
to give echo to the execrations of the Gospel, to the vengeful exultation of the
Magnificat, and to bear witness to God, taking nothing into account but God, and
thus to open the eyes of many a strayed person who foolishly believed the
Church of Christ occupies itself more with safeguarding the possessions of the
rich than with consoling the poor. Ah! There was needed a voice that would
unsparingly cry out the truth; with regard for no one, with no extenuation or
concealment, with a cry fierce enough to break all the veils with which men
enshroud it. To acquit himself of such a mission without losing a sense of
measure, as also to bring to a full inner equilibrium the contrasting gifts that
collided within him, let us make no mistake—and Bloy himself was well aware
of it—what was strictly required was sanctity, the heroic armature of all the
virtues. At least, he desperately desired it. “Here it is more than thirty years that I
have sought the one and only happiness, Sanctity. The result makes me ashamed
and fearful. ‘I have this much left, that I have wept,’ said Musset. I have no other
treasure. But I have wept so much that I am rich after this fashion. When you
die, that is what you take with you: the tears you have shed and the tears you
have caused to be shed—your capital of bliss or of terror. It is on these tears that
we shall be judged, for the Spirit of God is always borne upon the waters.…”
Do you wish to have a glimpse of the real feelings this great Christian had
concerning himself? Read the admirable letter to Jean de la Laurencie which
appears on p. 292 of this volume.
In my mind’s eye I see Bloy’s last communion, received with very humble
love in 1917, on All Saints’ Day, in his poor sickroom, while far away the bells
for High Mass were ringing, and over the whole earth the Church was singing
the Gospel of the Beatitudes. Three days later he died peacefully. Further back in
the past I see him in the evening, surrounded by his family, saying the rosary as
he knelt on the floor—slowly, in his low voice that was so distinct, with so much
simplicity and so much love, an unforgettable picture of faith and humility. I see
him at dawn—at that “hour when the heart, yet unsoiled by the enchantments of
light, pours itself out toward the quiet tabernacles”—taking himself with his
heavy and weary gait to early Mass, to which he went every day. He lived on
Holy Scripture; every night he recited the prayers for the dead.
I remember the gentleness and the tender love of this extraordinary man,
the marvelous hospitality of this poor family, in whose house the icings of
miracle seemed soundlessly to beat. Yes, all this comes before me again. This
life with the unforeseen, this cheerfulness, this truly Christian simplicity; so
much innocence, so much fundamental serenity—sometimes accompanied by
childlike behavior, unconquerable fits of stubbornness. And what want! what
anguish! Theirs was a massive and powerful faith, an absolute trust in
Providence, a perpetual recourse to Mary.
It has been said that Léon Bloy had many “former friends.” He also had
faithful friends, some of whom owe to his prayers and tears their coming to
divine truth. These are and always will be ready to bear witness to him. Those
who have known and loved Bloy, and who have seen him suffer, those who have
seen him pray and die, know the depth of his supernatural life, his humility, his
pity, his generosity, his love of God. “Lord, I weep very often,” he would say.
“Is it from sadness at the thought of what I suffer? Is it from joy at remembering
You?” They knew that his violence was the obverse of a charity lashed by
incomparable storms, which had reached the end of its patience.
I understand quite well that for certain minds, fortunate in having been
spared the dizziness of any abyss, whether from its brink or from its depth, the
case of Léon Bloy is a singularly obscure puzzle. But I must repeat: there are
perishing souls who seek beauty in darkness, and on whom quiet apologetics
would be without avail. Nor would pure theology act on them, for their reason is
too weakened by error; they imagine that obedience to faith is incompatible with
boldness of the intellect, or with the play and freedom of art and beauty; in short,
the mediocrity of a great number of Christians frightens them off. Bloy, in
crying out his disgust at all lukewarmness, in shouting on rooftops his thirst for
the absolute, inspires these famished ones with a presentiment of the glory of
God. But nothing, in the last analysis, would have any effect without the secret
of this magnificent beggar and vociferator, I mean without his charity: it is his
love of God and souls that does everything.
He was deeply aware that it is better to give than to receive; this was one of
the phrases he most often repeated, together with this other one: “Everything
cooperates to the good of those who love God.” “My secret,” he would say to
me, “consists in loving with my whole soul, to the point of giving my life for
them, the souls called to read me some day.”
For many of these souls Léon Bloy has been and will still be the voice that
calls, because he is first of all a witness of God, of the absolute requirements of
His Justice and His Love. He was a free man, whom no man and no human
interests ever made bend. A free man, but obedient to God; free because
obedient to God. In the face of the bloody myths and the fleshly greatness which
this apostate world adores to the strains of trumpets and psalteries, he says: “I
shall not serve your gods, nor shall I adore the gold statue you have erected. I
know only Christ crucified; anything else to my eyes is but dung.”
He does not argue, he affirms. Not in his own name, but in the name of the
first Truth that speaks to us through the Church. A writer of genius, devoted to
beauty as to one of the names of Him who is, jealous of the purity and integrity
of his art—which he never prostituted—he makes of that very art, in perpetual
magnificence and splendor, a monstrance of truth.
 “I understand only what I guess,” Bloy would often say. Having no taste
for the rational discursus or the demonstrative virtues of the intellect, backing
with the three theological virtues and the mere organism of the infused gifts the
most powerful gifts of intuition, his natural habitat was dissatisfaction, in the
intellectual order as in all the others. Disconsolate at not possessing now on this
earth the vision of the divine glory, he did not use human language, as do
metaphysicians and theologians in their formulas, to try to express, according to
the imperfect mode of our concepts, whatever we are able to know of
transcendent reality, but on the contrary he used it to try to evoke that which in
this reality goes beyond the mode of our concepts, and remains unknown to us.
In other words, he made use of the signs of language and reason only to make up
for being deprived here below of the beatific vision—which precisely no sign
will ever be able to express—and his words tended less to state truths directly
than to procure, as he used to say, the feeling of mystery and of its actual
presence. As he used reason and intellectual speculation according to a mode
more experimental than demonstrative, to express reality in the very darkness
that joins it to this feeling, the writers among whom Léon Bloy can suitably be
classed necessarily make use of the parables and hyperboles to which mystical
expression has recourse. “These,” Saint Thomas notes (in Isaiah, ch. 5 and 13),
“are to be found in Scripture. Thus Our Lord says: ‘If thine eye scandalize thee,
pluck it out; thy hand, cut it off.’ The mystical style is not the scholastic style; it
would be an error to uphold…as scholastically true, propositions that are true
only in mystical language, where hyperboles are taken into account…”1 The
point is that mystical language endeavors primarily to make you divine reality,
to make you touch it without saying it, whereas philosophical language
endeavors to say it without touching it.
From this point of view, it is important to note that the very extent to which
a word is used primarily to make tangible the inexpressible, the pure and simple
statement of what is becomes for that word a kind of asymptotic limit: language
then does not commit itself altogether to the logical and demonstrative
expression, it goes no further than evoking analogies, making images and
similarities spring up and pass before the mind in a superabundance of meaning,
but moving away immediately. Is it not thus that you must try to decipher the
figurative meaning of Scripture? It is with this figurative meaning that Léon
Bloy constantly nourished his thought; this meaning it was which in reality
dominated his own style. From this can be seen what makes him absolutely
removed from the philosophers. To judge his texts like ordinary propositions of
assertion would thus be to expose oneself to serious error. There is nothing
esoteric in Léon Bloy. What he believed and affirmed was the symbol of the
Apostles, and nothing else; he never intended to enclose in his statements
anything other than a perpetual reiteration of the articles of faith. All his literary
efforts—while he waited for the day of the Vision—consisted in projecting in
the mirror of enigmas and similitudes the rays of this substantially luminous
night.
I set forth these remarks only in an attempt to help the reader spiritually
locate Bloy’s work. Read in the light of these thoughts, Le Salut par les Juifs
takes on with greater ease, it seems to me, its true proportions.

Doubtless it was necessary that Léon Bloy, surrounded with the thorns of
malediction, live for a long time alone and almost without friends. This was a
kind of state of separation imposed by the very nature of the testimony he was to
bear, in the midst of the world and against the world.
Bloy had frequented literary circles at the time of the Chat Noir and
Barbey’s old age. After the publication of Le Désespéré he had left them,
breathing out against them the most passionate contempt. Until very recently it
happened as a matter of course that a few survivors from that vanished age, more
or less washed pale by time and success, fished up out of their memories all sorts
of anecdotes about Bloy’s young days, anecdotes distorted by the spontaneously
debasing recollections of good companions and men of wit. How could they
have guessed the secret of a soul itself hidden in the darkest regions of the spirit?
We who have known the old age of the olive tree, we know that the fruit bears
witness to the sap and to the root.

In June, 1905, two children of twenty were going up the everlasting

stairway that leads to the Sacré-Coeur. They bore within them that distress
which is the only serious product of modern culture, together with a kind of
active despair illumined only—they did not know why—by the inner assurance
that the Truth for which they hungered, without which it was almost impossible
for them to accept life, would one day be shown them. A kind of esthetic
morality sustained them feebly, to which—after they had tried some experiments
with it, probably too beautiful to succeed—the idea of suicide seemed to offer
the only outlet. In the meantime they had cleansed their minds, thanks to
Bergson, of the scientistic superstitions with which the Sorbonne had nourished
them—but knowing well that Bergsonian intuition was but a too flimsy refuge
against the scepticism all modern philosophies logically bring in their train. On
the whole they saw the Church—hidden from their view by inane prejudices and
by the appearance of many of its self-righteous members—as the rampart of the
powerful and the rich, whose interests supposedly lay in maintaining in people’s
minds the “darkness of the Middle Ages.” They were going toward a strange
beggar who, disdaining all philosophy, was shouting on rooftops the divine
truth; and who, a totally obedient Catholic, condemned his times and those who
have their consolation here below, with more freedom than all the
revolutionaries of the world. They had a terrible fear of what they were going to
meet—they were not yet acquainted with literary geniuses, and it was something
quite other that they were now seeking. Not a shadow of curiosity was in them,
but a feeling most likely to fill a soul with gravity: compassion for greatness
without refuge.
They went through a little garden of olden times, then entered a humble
house with walls adorned with books and beautiful pictures; they first came up
against a tall pale person that seemed all goodness; her air of nobility was
impressive. It was Madame Léon Bloy. Her two daughters Véronique and
Madeleine looked upon the visitors with their great surprised eyes. Léon Bloy
seemed nearly shy, he spoke little and in a very low voice, trying to say to his
two young visitors something important, something that would not disappoint
them. What he was revealing to them is not capable of repetition in words: the
tender love of Christian brotherhood, that kind of trembling from mercy and fear
which seizes, in the presence of another soul, a soul marked with the love of
God. Bloy seemed to us the very opposite of other men—who hide their serious
deficiencies in the things of the spirit as well as so many invisible crimes under
the carefully maintained daubing of the social virtues. Instead of being a whited
sepulchre like the Pharisees of all times, he was a charred blackened cathedral.
The white part was inside, deep in the tabernacle.
From the fact of your having crossed the threshold of his house, all values
became displaced, as by the shifting of an invisible ratchet. One knew, or one
divined, that there is but one sadness—not to be a saint. And all else became
twilight.2

~Jacques Maritain

1. Le Carmel, April 15, 1927. Letter of postulation addressed to the Sovereign Pontiff
in the name of the Collegio Angelico by Fathers Hugon and Garrigou-Lagrange,
 June 14, 1926, with a view to obtaining for Saint John of the Cross the title of
Doctor of the Universal Church (which title was conferred upon him on August 24
of the same year).
2. These pages are adapted from a book entitled Quelques pages sur Léon Bloy,
published in French, in 1927, in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Paris.
 The Thankless Beggar

WOE TO HIM WHO HAS NOT BEGGED

The most beautiful names borne by men have been the names
given by their enemies.
~Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly

Woe to him who has not begged!

There is nothing more exalted than to beg.
God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg.
The Dead beg.
Everything that dwells in Glory and in Light begs.
Why should anybody want me not to be proud of having been a beggar,
and, especially, a thankless beggar?…

The first and most fearful part of my life is told in Le Désespéré.

Here follows a record of the last four years,1 which perhaps may seem
black enough.
I have thought it well to publish some of the thoughts my anguish every day
inspired in me.
Purely from the standpoint of the history of French Letters, it will not be
useless for people to know how the generation of those vanquished in 1870
treated a self-respecting Writer who would not prostitute himself.

LETTERS TO HIS BETROTHED

Mat God bless you, my dear love, for your so kind and healing letter. I
sorely needed it, for I was suffering in my soul, and you have somewhat soothed
me.
You know me to be unhappy, but you do not know how greatly I am
unhappy. I want and I must have nothing hidden from you.

I’ll explain to you when I am stronger, that is, when I am less

overwhelmed with sorrow. I was utterly without money, and I had to have some
that very day…. I can never send but very small sums, and therefore I am
eternally having to start all over again. I am without means, and I earn absolutely
nothing. … Thus I must every day find some new makeshift, even should I die
of it. This involves desperate shuttlings about Paris, infernal efforts toward
getting this or that, humiliations, weariness and deathly anguish which very few
men, I assure you, would have the courage to bear. Ah! the happy ones of this
world who are assured their daily bread—that is, all the things necessary to
bodily life—and who, not wishing to know Jesus, have never for one single
instant had the idea of suffering for their brothers, of sacrificing themselves for
the wretched: ah! indeed! such people are assuredly well qualified to judge me
and to reproach me for not having what the world calls dignity! What if they
knew that this frightful existence has lasted for over ten years? And what if they
knew that possessing nothing and never keeping for myself any of what had
been sent me by God, I have always placed my soul and my body at the service
of poor people, even to the point of begging for them, as I told you day before
yesterday.
Ah, the dignity, the DIGNITY of mediocre souls—for a long time have I
known it, that sinister mockery of my crucified Redeemer!
In my book on money, which I shall some day write, there will even be a
chapter called “The Dignity of Money.”
Yet you cannot very seriously indict a man whom no one on earth can
accuse of selfishness, and who has always been seen to suffer of his own free
will. For believe me, it would have been easy for me not to suffer at all had I
wanted only to think of myself. But enough of that.
Reflect, my darling Jeanne, that for a very great number of years, ever
since I was born, I have never had anything but suffering.
During the last ten years, especially, remember that I have almost
continually endured hunger, cold, heat, vast weariness, vast sadness, and black
solitude, and that I have inflicted these things upon myself because I pitied
others, even as today I beg for pity on my own account. For in truth I can’t go
on, I am overburdened and crushed down…. I have already told you this, my
beloved, and you must have understood.
I have often been accused of laziness. Perhaps this is true. And yet is it not
surprising that I have managed to write some few books in the midst of these
many tribulations? God alone is our true judge, because He alone sees
everything. When I am working at home—that is, on the few and rare occasions
when my entire day is not taken up in scurrying hatefully about—there often,
without my willing it, come to me fearful thoughts: “Where will I find money
tomorrow…. How shall I keep myself from dying of hunger this evening?—
How shall I pacify my landlord, whom I have not paid, and who, if he sees fit,
can crush me with humiliations?” So then, you see, the anguish of this obsession
grows so strong that my pen falls from my hands, and I am no longer able in any
way to order my thoughts.
I never cease crying out toward God, begging Him for what He is always
refusing me: the peace I so badly need. What I should have is steady work that
might give me security, or a sum of money that might allow me to write without
worry and to produce some of those books I am so visibly called upon to write. I
get nothing; and yet God knows how short the time is and how greatly I am in
danger!
Among my best friends, only two understand me a little. They are he to
whom I dedicated Le Désespéré, and a poor man, very simple and very loving,
whom everybody scorns on account of his great mental weakness. These two
exceptional beings trust me, trust me absolutely, and they have never dreamed of
accusing me of pride. Surely it is a little ridiculous for a man to argue his own
case against the accusation of pride, and yet I do not in all conscience believe
that that is my vice. But there are two things of which I am very sure: the first is
that I have received the gift of “understanding” profound realities, and the
second is that, over and above this, I have borne the burden of being the
depository and the trusted friend of an astounding secret which I can tell no one
—a crushing, terrible burden, which has often hurled me to the ground, drunk
with sorrow and sweating death. My beloved Jeanne, how could you expect such
an abnormal man to take his place among other men and not appear to them a
monster of pride—whatever he might do or whatever he might say? In 1882,
after I had been struck with that thunderbolt which was the great calamity of my
life, seeing myself of a sudden plunged in darkness where before I had swum in
light, made foolish in despair, I became in very fact like unto a wild beast. My
old friends remember the horrible heaviness of heart which I everywhere carried
about with me and the excessive bitterness which emanated from me whenever I
was not speaking to a poor man. And when, in the hope of earning a living, I
took up journalism, when I saw myself forced to look face to face on the
abomination of this world, after I had been saturated with the splendors of God,
could my writings have been anything else—my nature abetting—than what they
actually were: a vomiting forth and an anathema? By now I have grown calm,
my heart has become softer, more tender; I am no longer the same person.
Nonetheless I am unable to repent of those violences which were imposed on
me.
My darling Jeanne, my sweet betrothed, you are my consolation, my sole
hope after God, who threw you into my arms. Here are true words come from
the bottom of the heart of that proud fellow: I am a man who is very poor, very
unhappy, very weak, very ill, very forsaken. I am the least among the destitute, a
being who is trampled, a man dying of thirst for love. If you should happen to
fail me, everything at once would fail me. I love your soul, your mind, your
body, and I hope that all this will be given to me, because we shall marry,
because I have an infinite need for you; because you have been offered to me
and—I have not sought you. Your protection is necessary to me, and that
protection, my God! must not hold off too long, for I feel as though I were one
dying.

The defect, perhaps the only defect in your upbringing is that it has given
you too great a confidence in the speculations of the mind, and I must admit that
it worries me and saddens me sometimes when I think of it. I should want you to
live much more by the heart than by thought, because that is what I have always
done, and thus we should be far more united.
Since you are to be my wife, since you are such already by my choice and
by our irrevocable formal will, you must thoroughly understand me, you must
know exactly what kind of a man I am. A most grave and disastrous mistake,
since it would keep you from being completely united to me, would be for you to
believe that I am a thinker, an intellectual. I really know little, and I have never
understood anything but that which God has made me understand, when I made
myself like unto a little child.
I am especially—never forget it—a worshipper, and I have always seen
myself as being lower than the animals every time I have presumed to act
otherwise than through love or the workings of love. God gave me imagination
and memory, indeed nothing more. But my reason is very sluggish, more or less
as might be the reason of an ox, and any analytical faculty, as philosophers
understand it, I totally lack.
My mother, whom I strongly resembled, often said to me, applying to me a
famous dictum once uttered by a great doctor of the Church: “My dear child, it is
true you’re an ox, but an ox whose lowings will one day astonish Christendom.”
Poor dear and sorrowful mother—she preferred me to all my brothers because
she felt God had planted in me great things. I don’t know if my bellowings will
one day end by having so great a power; but I do know that the faculty of loving
is developed in your friend in extraordinary fashion. That, I assure you, is
enough for me, and I ask nothing more, perfectly assured that the rest will be
added unto me. Philosophy bores me, theology overwhelms me, words without
love are meaningless to me, the reasonings of the wise seem to me a shadowy
sewer, and the pride of the human mind makes me vomit.
Remember, I implore you, the words of Our Lord, in the eleventh chapter
of Saint Matthew, verse 25: “I praise thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them to little children.”
Do you believe, my beloved, that those proud reformers who dared to take
it upon themselves to turn away from their Mother hundreds of millions of souls
remembered those words?
I once knew a very poor girl, Véronique, as devoid of knowledge as one
can be, but whose heart blazed like all the stars of the constellations of heaven.
She knew nothing, except her own nothingness and an unreasoned obedience
such as is demanded by pure love. Because of this, she was raised to the
contemplation of the glory of God and received such great illuminations that I
can’t think upon it without dying of wonder and of dread.

It is about midnight; total silence reigns about me, I am alone and sad, and
I want to write you while waiting for sleep, beneficent sleep which makes the
unhappy forget their sorrows. I am truly overcome by sadness, drunk with
sadness, cast down by discouragement. You see, my beloved, God must soon
have mercy on me and deliver me before long, for I feel that I am losing my poor
soul and that my best hopes will be extinguished. Ordinary consolations,
exhortations to patience, to resignation, cannot help me, after such long years of
suffering. I have waited so long, desired so long, prayed so long, and my heart
has been so riddled with sorrows that I feel I can no longer live if a little
happiness does not finally come to me. This morning I got up, prey to a frightful
melancholia, as I thought about this new day which would probably be like so
many others, and which would doubtless bring me no joy. The fine sunshine,
which I would have hailed with delight had my soul been freed of its anguish,
increased even more my affliction. For a long time now I have had deep inside
me the very clear impression, which must relate to some deep mysterious reality,
that I am not where I ought to be, that I do not have what I ought to have, that I
am in some fashion deprived of an inheritance which is mine and which is
withheld by unjust hands. I know this idea may seem mad. Yet I have never been
able to put it aside, even in prayer.
In the days when I continually watered the feet of Our Lord with my tears,
the same formula kept recurring: Set me free, break my chains, take me back to
my father’s house, into my own country, into my home, into my inheritance, and
make what belongs to me be returned to me, so. that You may be glorified in
Your justice! For years did I pray in this manner with an unspeakable fervor and
force, and with torrents of tears. In those days these were tears of love, joyous
tears of hope and joy. But catastrophes came, the pains of hell, endless
disappointments, and I was made like unto a well of bitter tears. When that
exceptional being of whom I have spoken to you began to lose her mental
balance, I amounted, in the midst of her heart-rending and grief-stricken
supplications, to no more than to some pitiful captive oppressed by demons.
Heaven! what frightful memories! This agreed so well with my earliest
premonitions, with the instinctive motion of my endless prayer, that it seems to
me that that word “captive” was something like one last flash of light on the
brink of the abyss into which that astounding and pitiful soul was about to fall.
People have often wondered at my retaining hope in the midst of my
abominable wretchedness. But, my dear Jeanne, it was because much has been
promised me, and in a way which does not allow me to doubt it. I say this to you
before God, with infinite assurance: there is no living man to whom more
marvelous promises can have been made, in a more clearly divine manner,
accompanied by signs more certain and clearer to the senses. A mistake on this
point would be monstrous, inconceivable, for God does not make mock of His
creatures. How and why do such terrible disappointments take place? I have no
idea, I understand nothing about it; but it is not possible that I could have been
mistaken. I have my witness, Job’s witness, who is in the midst of the heavens,
and I have often, very often, desired, in the fury of my prayers, that this witness
might be like some king present and visible on our earth, so that I could
importunately hang on to him, hold on to his coat, until he agreed to give
evidence on the side of justice, in favor of the wretch who received his promise,
and who can count on none but him. Oh, no! a thousand times no, I was not
mistaken, and I would more easily give up life than that certainty—were it
possible to die without abjuring the very promises of which with boundless faith
I await the infallible accomplishment. But, my God! what a thing it is to wait so
long in darkness, in mourning, in the most abject slavery, in affliction, in
continual anguish! Where is the man who would be willing to endure so hard a
life?
My darling bride, you whom the will of God has placed beside me, upon
my grief-stricken heart, in order to share my mysterious fate, do you remember
what I told you about money? Oh, what a fine symbol! Well, it was needful that
I be always deprived of money in order to signify my utter lack of the ineffable
substance which money represents in the marvelous order of the divine
prefigurations. I wish I were able, I wish I knew how to explain to you the things
I half see and the distant vision of which burns my heart when I remember what
was once promised to me. Of course I fully understand I must wait, but how
much longer, O Lord! and how shall I be able to wait? for my strength is
destroyed, and I fear I may fall into the disheartenment of despair and into the
sloth of death. All I am here writing must seem excessive, because no one but
myself can see and feel as I do. If you but knew, my poor friend, all the distress
of my spirit, your heart would be rent by it. Reflect that by dint of living in a
single thought, in one feeling alone, I end by being seriously stricken in my will,
in my memory, at the center of my faculties. Sometimes, when my thoughts give
me too great suffering, I no longer know what I want or what I love, and I
scarcely know what I am doing. My mind becomes incapable of any unfettered
and continuous effort. All concentration begins to be impossible for me. I live in
a kind of heavy and stupid drunkenness, caused by the fumes of misery.

I am sad by nature as one is by nature slight or fair-haired. I was born sad,

deeply, horribly sad, and if I am possessed with the most violent desire for joy, it
is by virtue of the mysterious law which attracts contraries. If you become my
wife, you will have a sick person whom you must nurse. You will sometimes see
me pass, without known cause or perceptible transition, from the liveliest joy to
the darkest melancholy. But here is a very strange thing and one which I do not
presume to explain. Despite the powerful attraction exercised over me by the
vague idea of happiness, my nature, more powerful still, inclines me toward
suffering, toward sadness, perhaps toward despair.
 I remember that as a child, as a very small boy, I often refused with
indignation, with a feeling of revolt, to take part in games, in pleasures the very
thought of which transported me with delight, because I felt it nobler to suffer,
and to make myself suffer by giving them up.
Note well, my dear friend, that this took place without any reasoning on
my part, without any religious idea. My nature alone was acting, obscurely. I
instinctively loved unhappiness; I wanted to be unhappy. The very word
unhappiness carried me away with enthusiasm. I think I inherited this from my
mother, whose Spanish soul was at the same time so flaming and so shadowed,
and Christianity’s main attraction for me has been the vastness of Christ’s
sorrows, the magnificent, the transcendent horror of His Passion. The amazing
dream of that lover of God, that woman who requested a paradise of tortures,
who wished to suffer eternally for Jesus Christ, and who thus conceived beatific
joy, seemed to me then and still seems to me the most sublime of all human
ideas. I wrote all this in Le Désespéré, in chapters X, XII, and XIII. Obviously a
poor human being made in such fashion was certain to be his own greatest
enemy; his own executioner.
When I became a man, I cruelly fulfilled the promise of my woeful
childhood, and most of the truly horrible sufferings I have undergone have
undoubtedly been my own work, were decreed by myself against myself with
savage ferocity.
You see, my poor Jeanne, that I am a strangely sick man. I am sure of
loving you greatly, but I am not sure of not making you desolate, of not some
day breaking your heart. And this fear fills me with anguish.
My reason, ever whole and ever illumined by the faith, has never for a
single instant faltered, but my heart, alas! my poor heart! Who could believe that
the very same man who sees so clearly the glory of God, who says things able to
reawaken the courage of his brothers in despair, and who cannot speak of the
Holy Trinity without weeping with love—who could suppose that this same man
is every day given over to the most violent temptations, and that he is not for a
single instant master of his own heart?
You know, my beloved, that once, many years ago, I asked during long
months to suffer much for the glory of the Lord. My almost continual prayers
were so ardent, so passionate, that I could not convey to you a clear idea of
them. I have already told you this, I beg pardon for coming back to it. But
believe me, of all the events of my life, that is the only one which can explain it.
God, who knows us perfectly, listens to our prayers with kindliness, and He
gives us not what we ask of Him, but what we need. This thought should be the
principle of all Christian resignation. I asked Him to make me suffer for my
brethren and for Himself, in my body and in my soul. But I was thinking of very
noble and very pure sufferings which, I now well understand, would indeed have
been joy. I had no thought of the infernal suffering He has sent me, and which
consisted in seemingly withdrawing from me, in leaving me defenseless in the
midst of my most cruel enemies. When I was entrusted with that prodigious
being whom I have called Véronique, I thought my wish had been fulfilled,
having much to suffer daily from the continual anguish of an extreme poverty,
which I had to spare this vessel of endless praises. But at the same time, I had
revelations, celestial joys which the very angels would have envied. Thus here
was as yet no suffering. But when God came and took back from me what He
had done me the honor of entrusting to me, I knew at last what it is to be truly
unhappy!

FROM THE DIARY

I do not have your temperament. In me pity cannot extinguish anger,

because my anger is the daughter of an infinite foreboding. I am devoured by a
need for Justice as though by some dragon famished ever since the Flood. My
anger is the effervescence of my pity.…

We are discussing the Invisible. I say that all we see, all that takes place,
exteriorly, is but an appearance—an enigmatic reflection in a glass, per
speculum—of what takes place, substantially, in the Invisible. What is the most
obvious, the most exterior thing in my life? It is that, having declared war on the
world, the world is unleashed against me. The substantial reality behind that
breed is perhaps enough to make fearful the greatest of the Angels. None but
God knows what I unleashed in 1878. At that period my destiny declared itself,
my queer destiny, which has remained so undecipherable for the phantoms who
make believe they appear around me. I was not aware then of the existence of
literary pillories. I was not even yet aware that my contemporaries existed, and I
walked, weeping with love, on the golden carpets of Paradise.

I am dead drunk with sorrow, weariness and terror! For more than sixty
hours, now, practically all alone, I have been tending two sick little children and
their mother-—not eating, not sleeping, overwhelmed with sorrows, and without
a penny. I am the anvil in the abyss, God’s anvil at the bottom of the abyss! …
Enough. I can go on no longer. Come! eat, dogs! Here are the guts of a
man.
Most assuredly she must have been particularly and frightfully singled out
in order to meet me, this noble Scandinavian girl, the first-born and the well-
beloved daughter of the poet Christian Molbech!…
Could that soul, eager to immolate herself, have descended lower? By
choice to be the companion of a universally detested poor man! To share the
humiliation and the scanty fare of a maker of books whom the vilest scribbler
feels he has the right to smear with his filth! To accept as her portion being
totally forsaken, suffering odious insults, ridicule, contempt, calumny!… This
magnanimous woman wanted to do what no man had the courage or the thought
of undertaking, and now here she lies dying…and of what a death!…
The wheel of several weeks, turning as weightily as the chariots of the
Prophets, has crushed my heart. My beloved wife will not die, it is true. The cup
of suffering is yet too full, and who would help me to drink it?
But somewhere there lie two little graves, and sometimes we must hear,
amid the inhuman cries of the populace living around us, this plaintive and heart-
rending dirge sung by our innocent Véronique, the last child we have left:

My little brother Andre is dead.

My little brother Pierre is dead.
My little mama is dead.
My little papa is dead.
There is no more garden.
There is no more house.
The little girl is all alone in the street.

I still see her, I still hear her, the dear child, sitting on one of the steps of
our humble door stoop, lost in her dream and singing—for whom, O Lord?—
these sad words which she herself put together—in the inexpressibly grave and
gentle voice of a turtle-dove stricken unto death!…

The wretch must fall! Nothing would save him, for God Himself wants
him to fall.
Vainly did he attempt to clutch at the heavens. The shuddering stars drew
back.
Vainly did he call upon the Angels and Saints, and on the Chieftains of the
Angels and the Chieftains of the Saints.
Vainly did he implore the sorrowful Virgin.
The Four Rivers of Paradise shrank back toward their Sources to keep from
hearing his outcry….
Ah! so you wanted to say something, did you? You took seriously the
Words and the Promises, and you railed at men, forgetting that they themselves
are become Gods! You sought Strength, Justice, Splendor! You sought Love!
Well, here’s the abyss, here’s your abyss. It is called SILENCE….
Here is no ordinary ditch. You must not ask it the mercy of possessing a
rocky bottom against which the unfortunate wretch hurled into it may crush
himself. On the contrary, its walls grow ever further apart; its mouth becomes
increasingly vast, and the drop is infinite. There is no adieu comparable to this
swallowing-up.
Fallen is this blasphemer of the Rabble, fallen surely forever. One dares
believe it.
Yet who knows? The depths at times afford strange surprises.
Indeed, who knows whether amid the Rabble, the satisfied and gluttonous
Rabble, this Poor Man will not reappear, some day, on the surface of the
shadows, holding in his hand a magnificent mysterious flower—the flower of
Silence, the flower of the Abyss?

We had been speaking once again of the astonishing multitude of friends

who have abandoned us, particularly about one friend whom Jeanne happened to
remember and whose behavior is horrible. “There’s nothing simple,” I replied, “I
am the enemy, the enemy of all, cujus manus contra omnes, et manus omnium
contra eum: et a ragione universorum fratrum suorum figet tabernacula (whose
hand will be against all men, and all men’s hands against him: and he shall pitch
his tents apart from the camping ground of all his brethren). My friends
themselves feel this. A man has to be so greatly with me to be my friend!”
The vast difficulty of truly serving God. God wants everything, He
requires everything, and one cannot escape Him.—”We are sold to God,” my
wife said to me, “we are caught in His net, and we know this net cannot be
broken.” O terrible joy, that begins with a cry of distress!

A week so dreadful that I give up any attempt to write anything whatever.

Yet would to God, dear friends, that you were as little downcast as I! The
more I suffer, the less I despair. No affront casts me to the ground, no reef makes
me founder, no hammer crushes me. I am unshatterable.
How many times have I not written you that I hope for everything, that I
expect everything, even were it at the bottom of the abyss, of the deepest and
most horrible abyss!
Literature, for which I do not live and which is not my aim, has for a long
time seemed to me as though some instrument of my torment, while awaiting the
coming of my day. But the special form, the willed aspect, the essential species
of my tribulation is utter misery2 and destitution.

As I was on my way to consult, once again, that discouraging lawyer to

whom I have alluded, for aid against my landlord, I suddenly felt profoundly
wretched, profoundly helpless, profoundly incapable of interesting as important
a personage in my cause, and I gave up the notion in favor of going to
confession, deciding to write him later. But write what? Ought not this
confession to be enough, ought it not to be preferred to anything else, and ought
I not to count on God, exclusively? My landlord is a phantom, my lawyer is a
phantom, I myself am a phantom; but God will not want the oppressed to be
confounded.
Good effect of my confession. I breathe God, as one breathes the breath of
heaven through the open door.

A poor devil of a Protestant remarked a few days ago, as have so many

others, that in me much hatred was to be seen. The words of this man, a well-
meaning fellow what’s more, came back to my mind this morning, I don’t know
why. Yes, it’s true, I have been filled with hatred ever since my childhood, yet
none has loved men more ingenuously than I have. But I have abhorred the
things, the institutions, the laws of the world. I have hated the World infinitely,
and the experiences of my life have served but to aggravate this feeling. Who—
even among Christians—could understand that?

Easter Sunday. I am chilled to the very center of my soul and am as near as

possible to despair. Such is the effect on me of this great feast. I find Easter
Sunday as a rule painful, sometimes terrifying. It is vain to hide my distress,
which takes approximately this form: I do not succeed in feeling the joy of the
Resurrection, because—so far as I’m concerned—the Resurrection never comes.
I always see Christ in His agony, Christ on the cross, nor can I see Him in any
other way.
Then also this morning I too intensely recalled the past, already so far
away (1879-1882) and yet still so living, when I saw the real Véronique, in tears
and torn by the tigers of compassion, before the image of Christ delivered to His
tormentors.… How climb out of this abyss?… This perpetual rebirth of the
ecclesiastical Year, ever the same, without the Lord ever bursting forth!…
Non venit regnum Dei cum observatione (the kingdom of God does not
come with observation). I know this well. But because this Kingdom is to be
accompanied by no sign, does that mean we must await it eternally?

Véronique. Shall I ever forget the consolations this child gives me? When I
came home this evening she was in bed. I sat beside her and said: “Papa has his
troubles.” At which the dear creature hugged me and covered me with kisses,
sighing with tenderness. What sweet tears came to me, O God!
What frightful destitution. Yet I surely believe I had not gone in vain on
that interminable errand, I had to come home on foot, just as I had gone, without
a farthing and my heart brimming with tears. Such disappointments are frequent.
It sometimes seems that an idea has been he-stowed on me by an angel, and very
soon after I think I hear a devil bursting with laughter. Hi sunt qui venerunt de
tribulatione magna (these are they who are come out of great tribulation). For
twenty years I’ve endured this torment, having asked for it to make the cowardly
friends who were to abandon me become the friends of God.
Not long ago Véronique, seeing me in deep sadness, came up to me; she
put her arms about my neck and with great tenderness said: “Dear little daddy,
don’t cry, I’ll give you something.” And the poor child looked among her toys
for something she might offer me.
Today at Mass, the memory of this moved me too much for it not to be
linked to something divine. Can there be anything more heart-rending than the
compassion of someone who has nothing and yet wants to give something? And
is not God the Poor Man of the poor?

Jeanne told me she felt a kind of enthusiasm at the thought that tomorrow,
the feast of Pentecost, we shall be utterly without any resources.
Pentecost. A day of abstinence and fasting. Véronique has what is needful.
Everything therefore is all right. We vainly await the child’s godfather. After all,
he knows we are suffering and he could help us. A mere two francs would do us
so much good! And on such a feast day! It’s frightful! In former times, for three
years, he feasted—that’s the exact word—at our place every Sunday and
holiday. Now we can die.
The day is coming to an end, however. So also the lettuce. We have lived
the entire day on a head of lettuce. All this in “exterior” darkness. For here is a
most strange circumstance: this Pentecost evening we are without light!…
To escape a most probable fit of melancholy, I studied the first three
chapters of the Acts. Immediate relief. Once again I experienced the divine
sensation of eating the invisible and powerful food of which Raphael speaks in
the book of Tobias.
Jeanne asked whether the twenty-four old men dressed in white and
crowned with golden crowns, in the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, might not
simply be twenty-four little children.
An overwhelming beauty sprung from this: that old age should be looked
upon not as a downfall, but as an ornament, as is the case with youth. Introibo ad
altare Dei, says some very aged priest before mounting up to the altar, introibo
ad altare Dei; ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam (I will go unto the altar
of God: to God, who giveth joy to my youth).

“I so greatly desire from you a work of pure glorification, cut free from
earthly accidents!” you write me. In earlier letters you had already expressed this
desire, as though it were a fully accepted and incontestable fact that I have never
done anything in that category.
Now this is profoundly unjust and seems to me all the harder to bear
because, being a friend, you ought to realize that I, more than another, need
justice. Have you not read Le Salut par les Juifs, to say nothing of my two works
on Christopher Columbus? The former is beyond compare the weightiest of my
books, the one of which I am most proud and the only one, up to now, which I
would dare present to God, without the least fear. It is the ripe fruit of fifteen
years of labor in Biblical exegesis or sacred hermeneutics, and of an even greater
number of years spent in sufferings chosen by myself, for the love of God—
whereof you are absolutely incapable of having any conception, for some were
worse than the most miserable destitution.
This work of “pure glorification” had no success, nor could it have had
any. God alone was witness to my struggle and sole judge of the frightful
difficulties I had to overcome in order to concentrate, in so few pages and in so
searching a form, the vastest theme there is. In an age long past when men did
not scorn these things, such a work would probably have attracted attention. It
appears that today this cannot happen, since even my friends are unaware of its
existence. Therefore let it exist solely to glorify God, like some poor little star
lost beyond sight in the sky’s depths.
I needed to give vent to this complaint, without bitterness for all that,
before going on to explain the “benefaction” your so friendly letter has been for
me. It’s very simple. I am just about alone in the world. Like so many others, I
could have had many friends, and even friends without number. With my literary
debut, which, miraculously, made something of a splash, I at once won applause.
Those who like strength, even among the atheists, were with me. But I was not
yet the author of Le Désespéré. When they found out the road I was taking,
when it became notorious that I was a man of the Absolute, no one would follow
me…

From a Letter to Octave Mirbeau. You have at least thoroughly grasped

the fact that I am not of this century, and I could not have said it better. Ah!
indeed no, I am not of it! I entered literary life at thirty-eight, after a fearful
youth and as a consequence of an indescribable catastrophe that wrenched me
away from a life exclusively contemplative. I went into it as one of the elect,
stripped of grace, might go into a hell of mud and murk, scourged by the
Cherubim of an implacable necessity, but with an Angel of the Lord restraining
him. At the sight of my revolting new companions, horror exuded from all my
pores. How could my literary efforts have been anything else than sobs or
howls?
 Letter from Maurice Maeterlinck. Sir, I have just read La Femme Pauvre.3
This is, I think, the only work of today showing evident signs of genius, if by
genius one means certain flashes “in depth” which link what one sees with what
one does not see and what one does not yet understand with what one will
understand some day. From the purely human point of view, one thinks
automatically of King Lear, and one does not find any other point of reference in
all literature. I beg you to believe, sir, in my very deep admiration. Maurice
Maeterlinck.

From a Letter to an Unknown Person. Long before I had written a single

line, I had understood that the sacrifice of all earthly happiness was required of
me, and I had made that sacrifice. I commend to your attention pages 179 to 184
of Le Désespéré. These are, I believe, the most crucial pages of the book, those
which explain everything, and it was by their means that, ten years beforehand, I
answered the letter you have just sent me…
You judge me humanly without being aware that, in very fact, I stand
outside all human points of view, and that here lies all my strength, my only
strength. The clear-cut truth which bursts forth in all my books is that I write
only for God. You deeply regret that I should have put myself in a situation
where I cannot do all the good that could legitimately be expected of me. Come,
dear friend, what do you know about it? You speak to me of the teachings of
Christianity—all right. There’s one thing the Church has always taught and
which is the teaching of all saints, without exception. It is that the salvation of
one soul matters more than bodily help given to a hundred thousand poor men.
This is not defined in dogmatic form; but it is so linked to the essential Doctrine,
to the Word of God, that it is impossible to be a Christian if you doubt it.
Well then, if the gift of writing has been granted me, is it not infinitely
plausible to conjecture that above all I have a mission to act upon souls? Such a
mission is assuredly quite foreign to the spirit of the world, of that world for
which Jesus formally said that He did not pray (non pro mundo rogo) and which
looks upon souls as less than nothing. But you who live in this infamous world
in the fashion of a stranger, since you have given your best toil to a cause it
holds in contempt, you cannot and you must not fail to understand me.
Here is the second time you reproach me for being medieval as though you
yourself were not a man of those Middle Ages which, second only to Apostolic
Times, were the most beautiful period in the world’s history. A period when
people believed, when people loved to the point of dying from love, when
people were faithful even through torture, when people sacrificed themselves
completely, when the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ came ahead of everything
else. Of what period are you or do you believe yourself to be when you
spontaneously give your money to an outcast artist, spit upon by the multitude
and hardly known to you, all for love of an unhappy Prince whom the whole
earth has denied? By your leave you are, without your knowing it and in the way
in which it is given you to be—yes you are simply one of those who went on
their way to conquer the Holy Sepulchre, and God who “knows his own” will
know you.
You say, alas! or rather he whom you think yourself to be says that “all
truths are not always suitable for print.” What queer truths would those be which
sometimes we must keep hidden! As for myself, I stick to the praedicate super
tectam (preach ye on the rooftops) of the Gospel, and I would rather be roasted
over a slow fire than withhold a single truth.

Vast sadness. Sadness, without murmur, of those condemned to death.

Hodie mecum eris in Paradise (this day thou shalt be with me in paradise).
That is the word which both consoles and fills with despair: Hodie. Today. To
understand what this outcry of one crucified means, it is needful to have known
utter destitution.

My past, my whole tormented past! How I would like to be able to wipe

away my memory of it! If men only knew from what a splendid height I have
fallen and by what a catastrophe! Mysterious interlude, sorrow that seemed
above a man’s strength. And those years of universal abandonment, disloyalty,
ignominy which came after that heavenly ravishment! I have on occasion—I still
can see the place, in a solitary house very near Paris—sat through whole nights
of a fierce winter, interrupting work on the first chapters of Le Désespéré, with
such doleful groans that some of my neighbors were upset by them … God, who
had willed this trial, knew it might be for me an occasion of falling into, of
rolling in the bottom of an abyss. But I kept falling before His blood-stained
Face and not for a single day have I ceased to see it. Thus was it possible for Le
Désespéré to be written. People say it is a frightful book. If they only knew! … I
have been abandoned, dropped by a multitude of friends, some of them more or
less worthless, some more or less aware. People were quite willing to be on good
terms with me, provided it did not cost them too much, or inconvenience
them…. Then, abierunt tristes (sorrowfully they went away)….
There is the Heart of Jesus—let us flee through that adorable door. The
baker, the butcher, the coal dealer, the landlord will not follow us. Everything
will come out all right, the phantoms will vanish. For ten years my wife and I
have been living after this fashion. Are we not the Bohemians of the Holy Spirit,
the tramps of the Consoler?

No letters. Utter silence. A very special sorrow. Silence reigns over me on

a magnificent throne of wretchedness.

Words to seduce. I am not and I do not want to be either pro-Dreyfus or

anti-Dreyfus or an anti-Semite. I am simply anti-swine, and by this token the
enemy, the spewer-forth of all men. I am, if you wish, the wild man of Genesis,
manus cujus contra omnes et manus omnium, contra eum (whose hand is against
all men, and all men’s hands against him). With me you are sure of taking sides
for no man, unless on my behalf, against everyone else, and then you are sure of
immediately catching it from all sides at once.

Nothing is easier than “to be close to me.” The infallible recipe is to have, I
do not say kindliness, but good fellowship, and not to plague me by looking
upon me as a bonze, which I find ridiculous, belittling, uselessly humiliating,
and which appalls me. But instead you are stiff with awe. That you must change.
Only then shall we be able to move along together. I thirst to be looked upon as a
poor man, very lonely and filled with love. Nothing more. You do not realize
how weak I am, how ignorant, how truly lowly, or my demonic sadness, and you
know nothing of the Joy which lies at the bottom of my soul.

A disciple of Our Lord, the least of all, who had witnessed Saint Peter’s
Denial, would have been within his rights had he reproached the Prince of the
Apostles for his cowardice with the most extreme indignation, and he would
even have had the duty to do so, on condition that immediately thereafter he
clearly asserted his formal will to obey the Head of the Church. Such is my case.
You know, dear friend, that I would accept the most fantastic tortures, God
helping me, before refusing obedience in matters of faith and discipline to the
infallible Successor. But everything else is my own business, and every
Christian ought to be grieved at any human failing of the Pope. There we are,
and it seems to me extremely simple. I am with you in obedience. I was settled
in it before you were a Catholic, before you even came into this world, and I
have suffered much because of that. How could we be separated, as you seem to
fear?…

…you believe that with me religious feeling is a special form of rebellion.

It is precisely the opposite. However mad this may seem to you, I am in reality
an obedient and soft-hearted person. That is why I write implacably, having to
defend Truth and bear witness to the God of the poor. That is all. My most
vehement pages were written out of love and often with tears of love during
hours of unutterable peace.

Today for several hours I read Joseph de Maistre’s Le Pape. This writer
fascinated me during the days of my adolescence. Now I enjoy him better for
seeing his limitations. Undeniably a genius, but a narrow one. Purely a
traditional genius. You might think that his “Providence” is a machine. He did
not understand that in 1789 God had changed the face of the world.

Lord, I weep very often.

Is it from sadness at the thought of what I suffer?
Is it from joy at my remembering You?
How untangle this, and how not weep as I seek to untangle it?***
…I am dying from the need of Justice.

July. On this feast of the Visitation, I have vainly awaited a certain visitor
until ten o’clock at night. We are terrified at our suffering. For over twelve hours
I have endured such a throbbing in my heart that anything at all seems
preferable.***
 For some time I have not dared speak of my awakenings. It must be
piteous for God and His saints to see a soul suffering so greatly from the very
first hour of the day.

As much as one can one hangs on, but reason flickers out. One no longer
sees. One is like animals which groan as they lie pressed against the ground.
This torment is truly unbearable. If, at least, one had a sign, some slight help, a
kind word. When I went to buy a siphon of soda water in the neighborhood, the
old man who waited on me gave me a stalk of lilies in bloom taken from a bunch
he had just cut in his garden. These flowers were half wilted—but no matter. I
had trouble holding hack my tears, because I had the illusion or the evidence of a
motion of kindliness.

The introits of the last two Sundays express anguish. They are a cry toward
God to obtain from Him help. Especially in the second of these the anguish is
extreme: Ad te, Domine, clamabo, Deus mens, ne sileas a me; nequando taceas
a me et assimilabor descendentibus in lacum (unto Thee will I cry, O Lord: O
my God, be not Thou silent to me, lest if Thou he silent to me, I become like
them that go down into the pit).
Today’s introit is a canticle of victory: Jubilate Deo, in voce exultationis
(shout unto God with the voice of joy). It is only up to our agonized hearts to see
here our own mysterious history.***

I am shrouded in shadows wherein, almost without seeing them, I can hear

weeping and bleeding those whom I love.
Our poor children ask for bread before going to sleep…

How is it possible, O Mary, for you to resist so many tears? If my beloved

little daughters entreated me on their knees and in tears, I should be quite unable
to resist them.
Here is something as astonishing as it is painful. Véronique has composed
—and this is the right verb—a tune to fit some insignificant words found in a
children’s anthology; a melody of a sadness, of an incredible power of sadness,
and, delighted, Madeleine sings it all day. I cannot utter what I feel. Can my
Véronique have received that special infusion of the Holy Spirit which is a
genius for music?

Epiphany. At seven in the evening we were all in the throes of death. With
Jeanne and the children suffering from Hunger, I rushed to the butcher’s, who
agreed to let me have a few more items on credit. Never, even in ’95, have we
been so short.
Help has come. Before going on with this frightful diary and since we have
been given a moment’s breathing spell, I wish to tell something which fills my
heart and which will remain here as a testimony to be read with emotion, in ten
years or so, by my beloved daughters.
The poor children have been hungry, no doubt of that, and their complaints
could have afforded us ground for despair. But the darlings, thanks to an
understanding and a resignation far beyond their years, gave utterance to no
complaint, limiting themselves to frequent requests for bread—the only food
there was in the house, as the baker had not withdrawn credit.

May God bless them eternally even as I bless them!***

Will God at last want me to live by my work as do other workmen? a grace

I ask with tears and have asked for so long!***

“When for the first time I saw Léon Bloy, and asked: ‘Who is that man?’
people answered: ‘A beggar.’ I felt then that here was fate. Six months later we
were married.” Jeanne.***

I have been induced to write to one Mother Mercedes, a celebrated and

powerful nun whom some consider able to change my life, if she wished to, and
about whom I have been hearing for a month. I am writing this nun a letter I defy
her to forget. Among other things: “I should like to finish my book. I ask for this
like a devout child asking to be allowed to finish his prayers before going to
sleep. I ask for this and nothing more.”
Exurge, quare abdormis, Domine? (Arise, why sleepest Thou, O Lord?)
says the liturgy of today, Sexagesima Sunday. Jeanne reminds me of the
following astonishing thing. In ‘95, in that horrible little house in Petit-
Montrouge where we were so miserable, Véronique was barely recovering from
an illness that had nearly killed her, so shortly after the death of her brother
Andre. One morning she said to her mother, pointing to the crucifix: “Mama, tell
Him to awaken!” And it was the morning of Sexagesima.***

To two priests who remember the Passion of Jesus Christ. “Dear friends, I
avail myself of these days in which Christ is so especially tortured to beg you to
remember me before His exposed Body. You know the hope that has been given
me. I feel slightly more unhappy than before, owing to my fear of a new
disappointment after so many others. Then there is the length of the delays. One
must have endured the torture of the wheel, applied by sleepy executioners in a
lethargic solitude, to know the suffering which delays, and especially unheralded
delays, can cause a wretch who needs to be rescued or finished off then and
there. Ah! a kindness is not enough. It must not come too late, and there is
reason to fear that by dint of being desired in torments it may end by losing its
savor and efficacy. This last remark may not apply to the present case, but I am
nonetheless obsessed with it. You know what my old friend Ernest Hello, who
suffered so greatly from unsatisfied desire and from unanswered prayer, often
used to say: ‘People want to see the hand of God; and it is promptness alone
which shows this Hand.’
“You know our lovable children. Imagine something more heart-rending
than to hear these innocent little girls asking us for what is necessary or wholly
useful, and what we are unable to give them. We have already suffered this
immense sorrow which threatens to return. Then, all the rest which you well
know. Old or new creditors, impatient, barking tradesmen, the daily quest for
makeshifts and the almost insuperable difficulty for a writer plunged in such a
hell, to recollect himself, to recover his spirit sufficiently. Where is the galley
slave who would want such an existence, and how could I bear it did I not
receive, every morning, the Body of our crucified Savior? This morning I felt the
first, so delicious, breath of spring, and that caress filled me with melancholy. I
dreamed of a very humble little house, with a garden where my poor daughters
could run and play while I worked in peace. All this in your neighborhood, O my
dear friends! And, at the same time, I was telling myself it was an empty and
painful dream, that those things, though easily attainable, were not for me.
Console me, if you can, but above all pray for me, pray like the Princes of the
Blood of God which you have the honor to be…***

Jeanne, coming home from church: “Reminding Christ of our extreme

indigence, I was saying to Him: ‘Give me what is in Your hand, open Your
Hand.’ Then He opened His Hand, and I saw it was pierced!”

Letter to Mother Mercedes. Very Reverend Mother, I hear you are

planning to come to Cochons-sur-Marne and thus to see me. I beg of you not to
follow out the second part of your project. The sight of you would be profoundly
distressing to me. Need I tell you why?
You have done me much harm, infinitely more, perhaps, than you can
understand or believe, and I have told it as a secret to God, asking Him for
redress.
That you left my letter of February 15 unanswered, so be it. The greatest
writer in the world, if he is destitute, is entitled to nothing—I realize it—not
even to the most rudimentary consideration, and people gifted, as you are, with
exceptional intelligence realize that I am not the greatest writer in the world.
But to deceive a Poor Man, to promise him deliverance and not give it to
him, to make him drunk with joy, for NOTHING, at the risk of driving him,
soon after, to despair—can one imagine any meaner act, any more cruel
injustice? To scoff at a Poor Man is to trample over the Heart of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, do you know that?
Ah! how easy it would have been for you to have promised nothing! All
you had to do was to wash your hands of it, as so many others have. But to
promise, and to promise to such an extent, and so emptily, to such a wretch as
myself, and in such circumstances! It’s too terrible!
I therefore beg you not to try to see me, unless it be to humiliate yourself.
For me to remain calm would exceed my strength. What’s more, we’re going to
die, both of us, tomorrow or the day after, and it is the Father of the Poor who
will judge us…
Accept, very Reverend Mother, the assurance of my respectful
compassion.

The Quest for the Absolute. That’s the title of one of Balzac’s novels, very
beautiful and very poignant.
Yet Balzac was far from having said everything, for this great writer does
not himself seem to have properly understood what the Absolute is.
The Spanish sailors who accompanied Christopher Columbus mutinied
several times, going so far as to threaten him with death if he did not issue the
order to turn back, long before they had reached the vicinity of San Salvador.
Nothing less was needed for America to be discovered than the marvelous trust
in God of this incomparable man, who said to the incredulous: “Give me three
more days and I will give you a world.”
But America was not the Absolute. It was a point of arrival where it would
be possible to catch your breath, and from which in the end you would come
back. The Absolute, on the contrary, is without return journeys. One does not
come back from it because it is a journey without end.
The mystery is that the Absolute is not only an abyss opening on Eternity,
but that it is at the same time the one and only point of departure, the starting
place. One sets out from God to go to God, and this is the only shift in place
which has any appreciable meaning, any usefulness. Everything else, that is, any
journey in which one thinks one is going somewhere, is literally stupid, and the
faster one goes, the more idiotic it is.***
But, once again, the Absolute is a journey without homecomings, and that
is why those who start on it have so few companions. Think of it! always to want
the same thing, always to go in the same direction, to walk night and day,
without even once veering to right or to left, and—were it only for an instant—to
conceive the whole of life, all thoughts, all feelings, all acts down to the least
heartbeat, as the perpetual working out of an initial decree of the all-powerful
Will.
Try to imagine a man of action, some sort of explorer, about to set forth on
a journey. His powers of persuasion have aroused a few enthusiasts who have
decided to follow him. The start of the journey is a triumph. A rain of flowers,
wild applause, the delight of the crowds. In towns and villages flags are out,
there are displays of lights, the bold travelers are feted. The very countryside
revels over their passing through it.
Yet the joy soon dims. The wayfarers enter new lands which know
nothing, understand nothings and care less. Sometimes also our travelers arouse
misgivings. Their passionate desire for the Yea or Nay of the Gospels, excluding
all other forms of discourse, assuredly does not recommend them. Little by little
the food and fine wines are replaced by potato peelings, and the contents of
chamber pots succeed the flowers.
The enthusiasm of his companions is already wholly extinguished. Several
of them have withdrawn on various pretexts and have not returned. The faithful
few, in their turn, seek means to flee without too greatly disgracing themselves.
They had not foreseen that there would be suffering.
Still, those who are left resign themselves from shame or from pride. As
long as there continue to be human dwellings and men good or bad, a little effort
still makes the journey bearable.
But now it happens that both the one and the other become sparse. We are
entering into the desert, into solitude. Here are Cold, Darkness, Hunger, Thirst,
vast Weariness, dreadful Sadness, the Agony, the Bloody Sweat….
The rash traveler looks for his companions. He understands, then, that it is
God’s good pleasure that he be alone amid torments, and he goes on into the
black immensity, bearing his heart before him like a torch!

Terrible and useless scurrying about, as in the worst days of my

pilgrimage. A man suffers just as much as he is able to suffer. The high terrace
of suffering is furnished with a barbarous parapet, high like a Byzantine
battlement, which even those in despair cannot clear in order to escape into the
abyss.***
Brou has put my bust on exhibition at Rey’s—one of the two large
booksellers on the Boulevard des Italiens. After running errands fit to make me
despair, I noticed it as I was passing by in the back of the shop, where it is rather
well displayed. I reflect with excessive bitterness on this that the “great man” in
effigy visible at that bookseller’s is in the process of dying from sorrow in his
own skin, on the sidewalk.

To one of the most appalling Catholic and Royalist pests. Sir, I beg you to
rid me of your visits and of those of your family, I am very busy and I see only a
very small number of friends whom I have chosen myself, who are at one with
me in perfect community of ideas and feelings. You and I stand too far apart
from, each other, in every respect, and we could never understand each other.
You rely on men, whether princes or priests, who are rejected equally by God
and by other men for their stupidity, their cowardice, their avarice, or their moral
corruption. I rely on God alone, and, while waiting for the heralded cataclysms, I
am preparing myself for martyrdom in solitude. I beg you to respect it.
Some people ask for baptism after having read me. What divine sanction
for my violence! Those who condemn me, believing themselves wise, do not
understand that I am a Witness, that my function is to bear witness in a day of
renegades, and that that is why my books pierce a few souls to the quick.

Letter to Father L., Chaplain at the Sacre-Coeur. My dear Father, the

outcome of your first conversation with van der Meer has somewhat disturbed
me. I had hoped things would go more quickly. Doubtless you have your
reasons. Yet allow me to tell you a rather sad little story.
Last year, a young Jew, a brilliant engineer, married and the father of a
family, with a mind of high cultivation, a man of the rarest intellectual and moral
distinction, came to me one fine summer’s day. Extraordinarily drawn by grace,
impressed by my books, and mightily labored over by me, he acknowledged
himself conquered and unable to find in himself any further objections. With
renewed tenderness I recall this so noble man throwing himself in my arms and
saying to me: “At last I am a Christian! I want to be a Christian like you.”
Together we wept. Ecce vere Israelite in quo dolus non est (behold an Israelite
indeed, in whom there is no guile), I thought to myself.
My answer was very simple: “Just learn the questions and answers in the
little children’s catechism, which indeed you know in part, then ask for baptism.
It’s strictly within your rights, and the holy deacon Philip required nothing of the
Ethiopian eunuch except an act of faith and of desire. The grace of the sacrament
will do the rest.”
The sequel is endlessly regrettable. He sought out a priest, some Sulpician
fellow stuffed with formulas, who postponed the baptism, saying that first it was
needful thoroughly to instruct oneself, as though God expected His poor children
to be theologians. He required my friend to read I don’t know how many
apologetical works, Freppel and others, which would inevitably repel and make
vomit a man already very busy, not to say overworked, in his regular tasks. This
priest went so far as to say to him these truly monstrous words: “Your
conversion must not be a marriage of love, but a marriage of reason!!!”
Result. Thus rebuffed, the zeal of my neophyte was utterly quenched, and
all the fruits of this magnificent conversion, which could have been vast, were
lost. I would not want to be at the deathbed of that priest….
I have sent you a very gentle and very humble child whom God is calling.
Why do you not let him at once come to Jesus Christ? Ego plantavi, tu sacerdos
riga, Deus incrementum dabit (I have planted, thou, the priest, water, God shall
give the increase). Pius X, worthy of all our admiration, would not tell you
otherwise. You have given him the voluminous Council of Trent. Surely there is
no more profitable reading for a man already won over, but this not being so, is
it the right sort of reading? Above all, is it prudent?
He will obey you, being, up to this day, a man of good will, but the Enemy
in whose claws he still remains will not fail to make use of this very reading to
suggest to him apparently insoluble difficulties of which he has now no notion.
You can see what will follow.
 Why not have a bountiful and full trust in God? Is it not He who forms all
our good desires? My young friend is filled with them. What more can we ask of
him? I had hoped, dreamed—eyes fixed on our Holy Father at Rome, whose
supernatural trust is one of the most beautiful sights that has ever been seen—
that he could be baptized at Christmas, or at least at the Epiphany, and that
marvelous results would follow. Must I forfeit this dream? I am sad and
anguished. May Our Lord and My Lady of Compassion, to whom I have given
my life, inspire you!

Written to a friend. I warned her against the reproaches aimed at my books

which she might hear in her circle, explaining to her that the pamphleteering
style of which people speak with so much bitterness is for me really only a
breastplate, an armor to protect the missionary. If I were not what people choose
to call “that fearful pamphleteer,” I could never have made anyone swallow my
Christianity. They all would have vomited me forth.

Epilogue to “Le Pelerin de l’Absolu.” Here I am, arrived at the end of the
twentieth year of this Diary. Twenty years in six volumes. Shall I go on with this
work which seems to interest a few solitaries, and which others, perhaps,
consider useless or tiresome?
I have no idea. At the age of sixty-seven I am so tired and so disgusted!
For far more than a quarter of a century I have suffered everything in order some
day to obtain, by dint of art, an adequate degree of authority, a sort of
professorship in the Supernatural, whereby to make myself heard by souls. For
in all truth I have something to say to them, something that was entrusted to me
for them, and which another could not tell them.
Certainly it will work out as God wills. Until this very moment it has
pleased Him to sate me with sorrows and shame. I must, at the same time, grant
that He has sent me a few friends, themselves poor, without whom I could not
have lived; yet it suited His Providence that I be all my life as grieved as one can
be without dying. Doubtless this had to be in order that, resembling neither the
happy nor the half-happy of this world, and even lacking a place among
ordinarily unhappy people, I might possibly write at least a few lines in
testimony to the Savior’s Agony…. A few wandering and sorrowful souls—this
I know—have been moved by them, and this is for my own soul a marvelous
blessing.
But today there are made manifest to me at last thoroughly incontestable
signs of power. People come to see me as though I were some most rare animal
imported from some unknown land. They want to look upon a man who is said
to resemble no other, and they travel all the way to Bourg-la-Reine to do it. This
supreme outrage had until now been spared me.
Rich people come running to my house, declaring themselves my admirers;
in reality they come simply to see a monster, and they leave without a word of
consolation or encouragement, happy at having swindled one or two hours out of
a poor artist who had not been able to refrain from expecting some sure comfort
from those unexpected visitors. Then I see that I am a fool for agreeing freely to
exhibit my soul, for it is truly my soul that I show them, just as I might show it
to a beggar who would be a friend of God. If it is a monster they think they are
looking at, I said to myself, they should at least pay for their seats, as at a circus
or in a zoo. Silly thought and even sillier complaint…
Well, I call that a sign. Unhappy writer, you had dreamt of winning souls
and you have won nothing but ears! You had hoped that the beloved and noble
images flowing from your heart would serve as a river to carry to God many
another heart! But, as you see, people are afraid of getting wet. They stay on the
shore, they even luxuriously linger to watch you shed your tears and your blood;
here is a prime spectacle which has the advantage of costing the spectators
nothing. Have you not then understood, or have you already forgotten, what the
Belgian prophet said: “Léon Bloy is admirable, but let us take care not to follow
him and especially not to do anything for him. That would be vandalism. His
cries are so beautiful when he suffers!”
Such words were written and even printed. The pilgrims clad all in gold do
not say exactly that, but it is so truly their thought! Hoc tibi signum quia unxit te
Deus (this is the sign that God has anointed thee). Suffering and ignominy were
not enough. You had to suffer the Judaic derision, and at last you have been
granted it!

“I am an ocean of contempt,” I explained to a certain man, “and I was the

one who hurled the block of ice which burst the sides of the Titanic.” How could
I ever become a flower-sown meadow in which would graze the cattle of
contemporary stupidity?
 Yes, my friend, I am very certain there is something left for me to do, that I
have been entrusted with a task which no one else can accomplish, and that the
strength I need will be given me. I have been suffering for a few days, all the
more grievously as my illness cruelly deprives me of what I found in church
every morning, but my soul is not cast down. I am waiting with a marvelous and
unshakable confidence. The monstrous events we have been witnessing for
almost a year I have expected for more than thirty-five, and I see very clearly the
inevitable cataclysms that will follow. The threats of La Salette must be fulfilled.
The time of penance is over for Nineveh. However the simpletons or the artful
may chatter, there is no more faith—this is only too certain; there is no more
flock and there are no more shepherds. That is what I behold, and soon it will be
eleven months that I have lived with a continual tightening of my heart. But God
knows the remedy and He will know how to apply it to me the day He chooses
to make use of His creature. Do not grieve over me, my most dear friend, my
portion is truly beautiful, and we shall be consoled together and very amply so.

Conclusion to “Au Seuil de l’Apocalypse.” Let what God wills befall! I

leave off, having had the joy, after so many months of uncertainty and anguish,
of being able to observe an important military success which our politicians did
not succeed in thwarting and which seems at last to presage the final ousting of
the German brutes.
Will Mercy, in its utter extremity, consider the immense effort France has
put forth for a year as sufficient expiation? Once we have crossed the lake of
blood, are we to fear a bridge over the Abyss, a Devil’s bridge stretching further
than the Abyss? Shepherds are no longer wanted, and the shepherds have
condemned themselves. The one who ought to speak louder than all the cannons
is silent.
Scarcely two months ago there was talk of an appeal for peace by Benedict
XV. Silence would be preferable, even the silence of death. As a result of the
most inconceivable injustice, the Holy Father would have addressed identical
reproofs or entreaties to all the sovereigns and all the peoples, making them all
jointly and especially responsible for the monstrous iniquity of the aggressors.
The oppressed, the despoiled, the tortured, the murdered—all would sit on the
same bench with the criminals at the assizes of the Vicar of Jesus Christ!
In olden times, when the Pope was truly a Pope, he would on the very first
day have stood up and said to the scoundrels, as did the prophet Nathan to
David:
“Tu es ille vir qui fecit hoc (Thou art the man who hast done this thing).
William, thou art the culprit! Franz-Joseph, thou art the culprit! I cut you both
off from my flock, I release your peoples from their allegiance to you, and I
abandon you to the vengeance of man, while awaiting the anger of God which I
call down upon your impious heads.”
However miserably unbelieving the Christian world may have become, the
ecumenical power of such a naming of names would have been incalculable.
One would at least have had the illusion of a renewal in the supernatural Life,
and the consequences might have been infinite. But we are a long way from the
Gregories and Innocents. All greatness is exiled to the depths of History; and if
God wishes to act openly, He will simply have to act by Himself, victoriously, as
He did two thousand years ago, when He was resurrected from the dead.
I am awaiting the Cossacks and the Holy Spirit.

Letter to Madame X. You tell me your daughter is driving you to despair

by excess in her devotional practices, and you see no other remedy than to call
on me. I must first answer you that I know nothing at all about the excess you
mention, and that I’m in no way to blame for it. I’ll even add that the word
excess—when it comes to the love one must bear God—seems unintelligible to
me. It’s a little as though you told me, for instance, that your daughter had an
excessive love for you. But no matter. I shouldn’t like to allow myself to
suppose for a single instant that a Christian like yourself could resemble those
people who say that “God does not ask for so much,” that one always does
enough for Him, and that the saints are not to be imitated. Far be it from me to
harbor such a thought, which would surely be in the highest degree unjust to
you.
Again I say, I know nothing, or very nearly nothing, about your daughter’s
pious practices. She has done me the honor of consulting me several times,
imagining perhaps rashly that I was in a position to give her useful advice. I
could give her only what I had, the fruit of an experience already long. I am an
aged man of over seventy, a sort of patriarch who for all that is not very
venerable. I said to her: “Do what I do, receive communion every day. You will
thus be in the true spirit of the Church, you will be living in perfect obedience,
and God will be with you in all your actions. I have had no other resource during
my life, which has been deeply sorrowful.” Had I spoken otherwise, I should
have been a false friend, a liar and a renegade.
But that’s all, absolutely all. Feeling as you do that the hard daily work you
mention is a sufficiently harsh penance, I was most careful to avoid suggesting
additional mortifications to her. If I knew she fasted every Friday, as you say she
does, I should certainly find fault with her. But are you not confusing this
supposed fast, which would be arbitrary and supererogatory, with the simple
abstinence which the Church enjoins upon all the faithful? I believe your
daughter is very generous, but I do not believe her unreasonable. Otherwise, she
could not be my friend, she would not even interest me, you may be sure. You
scarcely know me at all if you think me capable of urging excesses upon her.
Just the opposite, I am the mortal enemy of the extravagant and the foolish
whom I have spent my life fighting. And I characterize by these names all those
who, relying on their own poor petty judgment, and forgetting that God is
master, propose to rule others by obliging them to see and think as they
themselves see and think, without any regard for the particular vocation to which
each of us is called. These poor people describe as wisdom or reasonableness
what in reality would be nothing more than the stifling of souls in the most
abject mediocrity. To think that fifty years ago very wise people wanted to make
an office worker out of me, and looked upon my artistic vocation as folly! What
farsightedness! True wisdom consists in doing simply, obediently, what God
asks of one’s soul, the way He wants it and when He wants it. I can never have
said anything else to your daughter, in whom I see a soul far above average. If
her confessor does not see this, he is incapable of directing her. She should in
that case look for another, something absolutely within her rights.
You say that for her I am “the good Lord, who makes the heavens to rain.”
This little dig is enough to warn me that your trust in me is not great. I assure
you that you are wrong. I am a very dependable friend and a most charming old
fellow. If you knew me you wouldn’t resist. You would love me as does your
daughter, perhaps even more. You would cease worrying and everything would
go wonderfully well. That is the grace I am asking for. Amen.
Begging you to forgive this long letter from a sick old man, I respectfully
bid you a most affectionate good day.

Have been reading a number of Pays, Cuillaux’s paper. What astounding

garbage this sheet is. Dated Friday, it contains an article by Laurent Tailhade
which certainly ranks among the most stupid, the lowest, and the filthiest. In the
guise of a letter to Benedict XV, it spits forth at Christianity, at the very face of
Christ, all the bloody pus in this clown’s low soul. What we have here is at once
so silly and so vicious that it is impossible to quote from it. He needs to be
knocked down with a cudgel, and I should be all the happier to do the job
because the dirty wretch, who uses me to the top of his bent, seized upon the
conclusion of my Au seuil de l’Apocalypse with which to belabor the Pope.
It is astonishing what happens to an outburst of righteous indignation when
it passes through the mouth of a sewer.

Answer to my unknown correspondent. I told him I am not exactly the

friend of the poor, as he names me, but the friend of the Poor Man who is Our
Lord Jesus Christ. Utter poverty was not thrust upon me; I espoused it out of
love, though I could have chosen a different companion. Today, old and worn
out, I am getting ready for death. I am announcing my new book.

The Virgin to the Pilgrim. “You and I, dear child, are the people of God.
We are in the Promised Land and I am myself that land of blessings, even as I
once was the Red Sea which had to be crossed. Remember!… My son said that
those who weep are blessed, and it is because I have wept all the tears and
endured all the agonies of generations that all generations will call me blessed.
The marvels of Egypt are nothing, and the marvels of the Desert are nothing
either, compared to the glory I bestow on you for Eternity!”

1. Bloy here refers to his diary for the years 1892–1895 (Le Mendiant Ingrat),
excerpts from which are quoted later in this chapter. (R. M.)
2. The French word misère is very difficult to translate. It is often used in contrast to
“poverty,” an honorable state, especially by Bloy and Peguy. “Poverty” is the lack
of everything superfluous; “misery” is the lack even of that which is needful. It is
utter destitution; cf. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the title of which is never
translated. See also the footnote on p. 165 of the English version of my We Have
Been Friends Together (Longmans, Green). (R. M.)
3. Translated as The Woman Who Was Poor (Sheed & Ward, 1959). (R. M.)
 Marchenoir1

MARCHENOIR AT THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE

[Moral and Physical Portrait.]2 Marchenoir had been born without hope.
His father, a shriveled little bourgeois employed in the Périgueux tax collector’s
office, had, on the advice of the Master of his Lodge and as a kind of challenge,
outfitted him with the name of Cain—to the unutterable dismay of his mother
who had hastened to have him baptized with the Christian names Marie-Joseph.
His mother’s will having, extraordinarily enough, been the stronger, he was
called Joseph during his childhood, and the accursed appellation, entered in the
civil register of births, was not dug up until later, at moments of solemn
displeasure.
Other people need the failures or misdeeds of their own lives in order to
realize how nauseous they are. Marchenoir, better endowed, had needed only the
trouble of coming into the world.
He was one of those beings miraculously shaped for misfortune, who seem
to have spent nine hundred years in their mother’s womb before sadly arriving to
drag out a hoary youth amid the decrepit society of men.
From his earliest day he was marked by that deplorable faculty, too rare to
have been systematically observed, of bearing, all around his consciousness, as it
were, a mist of ancient and undiscernible things, a halo of dreams; which for a
long time allowed him only a refracted vision of the surrounding world. Even his
swaddling clothes were reminiscent, if one is allowed thus to express something
by nature inexpressible.
“This abnormal ecstatic disposition,” he would recount when he was thirty,
“this gripping tyranny of the Dream, which made me incapable of all
concentration by leaving me in a perpetual stupor, drew down upon me
tribulations and terrors enough to supply a children’s martyrology. My father,
hardened by foolish prejudices regarding education and resolutely enclosed in
the impregnable fortress of a tiny number of absolute ideas, never was willing to
see me as anything but a sluggard, and he spanked me with Spartan firmness.
“Perhaps he was right. I have even come to the opinion that the intensive
training of the thinking reed is, in general, the intellectual outcome of application
to the posterior. Unfortunately the poor man made his thrashings fruitless by
never following them up with a return to tenderness that would have
intellectualized their sting. By nature inclined to affection, this unfortunate
educator, nourished at Plutarch’s trough, had thought to do miracles by turning
for advice to that ancient nag; and, hardening himself against his own heart—
that modern heart of his, scarred by an outworn harshness—he had steeled
himself never to enjoy his child’s caress, in the dutiful hope of retaining parental
majesty.
“When he put me in high school, it was a hell. Already dulled by fear, held
in contempt by the other children whose high spirits I could not stand, scouted
by infamous pedants who made me the laughingstock of my classmates,
punished without letup and beaten by everyone, I ended by falling into a silent
disgust with life which made me seem a simpleton.
“This utter distress, this perpetual anguish—the usual lot of reflective
children in the penitentiaries of Education—was made worse for me by the fact
that I couldn’t conceive an earthly condition which would be less horrible. I felt
as though I had fallen—I knew not from what empyrean—into an endless
garbage heap in which human beings seemed to me like vermin. Such was, at
fourteen, and such remains today, my conception of human society!”***

He was eighteen and had one of those rustic faces in which an atavistic
boorishness had not yet had time to wage its last battle against an invading
intelligence, which soon rose up, ennobling everything, from the intimate valleys
of his heart.
From his long-dead mother he inherited the romantically ridiculous traits
of her Spanish, origin.***
This origin—scarcely belied by eyes of so ingenuous a blue that he always
seemed to be using them for the first time—was superabundantly attested by the
singular energy of all his other features, without exception. It was, however, the
contemplative energy of those lovers of heroic action who do not consider
commonplace action worth the spending of their energy.
Shaggy and dark, silent and sparing of gestures, loathing as their victim
small talk and catchwords, he carried at the tip of his tongue a catapult to hurl
erratic monosyllables, which would stop dead any conversation of fools. Lips
tight, nostrils quivering, eyebrows almost meeting and actually interlocking at
the slightest disturbance, he sometimes had the white and speechless rages of the
repressedly seditious—rages that would have given the colic to any tyrant who
could feel the potential dagger twisting in his guts. On such occasions the
cannibal at once emerged from the dreamer. His bleary eyes, of an almost
childlike tenderness—which alone were capable of tempering the habitual
harshness of his whole appearance—would then change color and became
black!…
Years of humiliation and torment little by little sifted over the fallow of
that face the fertilizing nightsoil of some unavoidable compromises. His already
bilious complexion took on the burning lividity of an unskillfully stoned
Christian of the first hour, who would have become a sexton in the catacombs.
He had the gift of tears, sign of predestination, the Mystics say. These tears
were the hidden joy, the secret and mysterious treasure of one of the most starkly
hare and most tragic lives of this century.
When he had swallowed humble pie of the dimensions of a divine baker’s
oven, which was so often his exclusive nourishment, he spilled about him in his
solitary room, with the caution of a miser, these liquid gems which he would not
have exchanged for the stanching consolations of a more substantial wealth.
For he had the strange trait of cherishing his sorrow—he, that incunabulum
of melancholy, who had fallen into his cradle as into an abyss, and whom his
astounded mother watched weeping, for whole days without end, on his knees—
in silence! While a mere child he had a lust for Suffering and a covetous desire
for a paradise of torments, in the manner of Saint Magdalen of Pazzi. This was
the outcome neither of training, nor of his surroundings, nor of any mental
lesion, as some oracular idiots undertook to explain. It was related to no
discernible operation of a dawning mind. It was the mysterious deeps of a soul
slightly less unconscious than another of its own abyss and naïvely enraptured
with an absolute of sensations or of feelings which might have corresponded to
the absolute of its own being. When Christianity came within his ken,
Marchenoir fell upon it as did the camels of Eliezer upon the nuptial watering
troughs of Mesopotamia.
He had for so long a time been dying of thirst! His unbelieving father had
not thought it his duty to stand in the way of that pretense at religious instruction
which shadowy likenesses of priests, stuffed with formulas, wring like soiled
seminary linen over young and uninterested brows.*** As no formula chopper
had thought of looking into his heart, the poor child had been able to retain none
of this ill-baked bread and like so many others, he had vomited it forth almost at
once along the verdant path of his fifteenth year, the year during which is to be
seen roaming about that great lion with a hog’s head which is Puberty.***
While idly warming his feet as an advance sentry, one night in 1870, he
had for the first time read through the New Testament, and he had the
immediate, thundering apperception of a divine Revelation.***
A double abyss opened up in that being, starting from that prodigious
moment. An abyss of desire and fury that nothing was ever again to fill. Here,
the essential Glory—never to be reached; there, the tides of human swinishness,
never to be ended. An infinite fall on both sides, the simultaneous spoiling of
Love and of Justice. Hell without counterpoise, nothing but hell!
Christianity gave him its word of honor regarding a blessed Eternity, but at
what price! He understood, now, that craving for torments throughout all his
childhood! Here was the foreboding of the frightful countenance of his Christ!…
Countenance of one crucified, and countenance of a judge on that impassive
brow belonging to Him labelled with the Tetragrammaton…
Wretches have been writhing and dying for two thousand years before this
inexorable enigma: the Promise of a Kingdom of God which must ever be asked
for and which never comes. “When these things begin to come to pass,” it is
said, “know that your redemption is at hand.” And how many hundreds of
millions of human beings have endured life and death without having seen
anything begin! Marchenoir pondered over this raising up of innumerable arms,
perpetually suppliant and perpetually unrequited, and he realized that here was
the vastest of all miracles. “For nineteen centuries,” he reflected, “has this been
going on, this suit without reply from a Father who reigns on earth and who
frees. Mankind must be terribly constant not yet to have grown weary, not to
have sat down in the cavern of absolute despair!”
He ended by deciding that men even a thousand years old would know
conditional despair.
He had felt Love go by, spiritual, absolute love. He too, like everyone else,
had poured his heart into that faithless sieve, the Our Father, and … he had been
saturated with perfect joy. So there indeed was something beneath that heap of
tombs, beneath that Maladetta of suffering hearts fallen to dust, at the bottom of
that abyss of the silence of God—there was some principle or other of
resurrection, of justice, of future triumph! By dint of loving faith, he made
himself a throbbing eternity by kneading a handful of time in his fingers,
fashioned for himself some hope out of the bitterest pessimism.
He convinced himself that we dealt with a Lord God voluntarily eunuch,
barren by decree, hound, nailed, and expiring in the adorable reality of His
Essence, even as He had been so, symbolically and visibly, in the bloody
adventure of His Hypostasis.
He had an intuition of a kind of divine impotence, provisionally agreed to
between Mercy and Justice, with an aim at some exquisite recovery of a
Substance squandered by Love.
A situation without precedent, calling forth a craven language of its own.
For many a century, Threefold Reason suspends its payments and it is up to
human Patience to help it with its own funds. Time alone is needed by the
solvent Master of Eternity, and time is fashioned out of the sorrows of men. That
is why the Saints and Doctors of the faith have always taught the necessity of
suffering for God.
Having divined these things, the ardent neophyte tore the thorn from his
limping foot of a Catholic who had come so late, and—hurling himself upon
Suffering—made out of it a sword which, after he had put out his own eyes, he
sank into his bowels.
More than ever he became a man disconsolate, but one of those sublimely
disconsolate men who hurl their hearts into the sky, as some shipwrecked person
might cast his entire fortune into the ocean so as not to sink altogether without at
least having caught a glimpse of land.
Moreover, he considered as quite close at hand the catastrophe of Man’s
age-old tragic farce. Certain amazing ideas that came to him on universal history
—and which he developed to their most extreme consequences—made him
conjecture, with an almost prophetic authority of exegesis, a forthcoming
fulfillment for the scriptural prophecies of doom.
The exaltation of the humble, the wiping away of tears, the blessedness of
the poor and of the accursed, the precedence in paradise of thieves, and the
queenly crowning of prostitutes: in a word, that so solemnly foretold advent of
the liberating Paraclete—all those things which prevent orphans and captives
from dying of horror: he did not believe it possible that we need await them
much longer, and he gave his reasons.
But only those dying of hunger were let into his secret; not because he
feared being considered ridiculous or mad—in that regard he had long since had
nothing more to gain or to lose—but because he was horrified at the intestinal
benevolence of the happy full-bellies who might have heard him.

[The Grande Chartreuse.]*** Marchenoir began to climb on foot the

uninhabited approaches to the Grande Chartreuse. When he had passed through
what is known as the Fourvoirie entrance, an imperceptible groove between two
monstrous stone masses, beyond which modern life seems abruptly cut short, a
kind of joyful peace overcame him.
***You need only cross the outer edge of this famous wilderness to feel
the sudden absence of the nineteenth century and to have, so far as this is
possible, the illusion of being in the twelfth. But your path must not be cluttered
with the rowdy caravans of Curiosity. Then, if it is not, you see the towering and
forbidding wilderness which God Himself, as the story goes, had pointed out to
His servant Bruno and his six companions so that their spiritual posterity might
sing, for a good eight hundred years, in the kingly peace of those heights, the.
Jubilation of the earth before the face of the Sovereign Lord. Jubilate Deo omnis
terra … Jubilate in conspectu Regis Domini! (Let all the earth rejoice before
God … Rejoice in the sight of the Lord our King!)
Never had Marchenoir so deeply relished the religious and calming beauty
of silence as he did in his climb to the Grande Chartreuse, between Saint-
Laurent-du-Pont and the monastery. The night had been very snowy, and the
entire landscape, clothed in white like a Carthusian, burst before his eyes
beneath the gray dullness of a low and heavy sky, seeming to rest its elbows
upon the mountain. Only the boiling freshet which tumbles through the bottom
of the wild gorge cut with its uproar the silence of slumbering nature. But—as
happens with a single voice in a very solitary place—this tumult from down
below, which, as it rose, melted into space, was swallowed by the encompassing
silence and made it seem even deeper and more solemn.
He leaned over, dreamily to gaze upon that madly leaping water, so
inappropriately called the Guiers-Mort. When in headlong flow, its color is like
the blue of steel; and then, when it gathers itself up, trembling in a shell of rocks,
only to burst forth more furiously, to plunge down more relentlessly, it is like
green watered silk, wavy with foam.
He took to thinking about the enormous stretch of time this torrent had
been in existence, flowing thus, for the glory of God, for thousands of years, far
less uselessly, in all likelihood, than live many men who surely do not possess its
beauty and whom it seems to flee, roaring off so as not to have to reflect their
image. He remembered that Saint Bernard, Saint Francis de Sales, and many
another after Saint Bruno had come to this place; that men poor or powerful,
escaped from the world, had passed by there, throughout half of Christianity’s
history, and that, like himself, they must have been beguiled by this perpetually
fleeting emblem of the things of time…
A meditation of such kind and in such a place has singular power over the
soul and is to be recommended to the bored and to the waverers of life.
Marchenoir, as wounded and as bleeding as any unfortunate man could be, felt
an infinite tenderness, the quiet of a happy death, such as he had never suspected
until that very moment. He bathed in the forgetfulness of his sufferings,
sufferings, alas, immortal and which a little later were once again to fasten
themselves upon him. The farther he climbed, the greater, as it broadened, grew
his peace, his whole being melting and dissolving in a nearly superhuman
bliss.***
Marchenoir was not visiting the Grande Chartreuse to satisfy his curiosity,
but as a sick man, and later on he would have found it highly difficult to give an
account of the hours of his stay, which lasted close to a month.
Quite simply he had resolved to plunge himself, as best he could, in this
silence, this contemplation, this silver twilight of prayer which heals anger and
heals sorrow. He knew beforehand how needful is solitude to men who wish
more or less to live the divine life. God is the great Solitary who speaks only to
the solitary, and who causes to share His power, His wisdom, His bliss, only
those who share in some fashion His own eternal solitude! Of course solitude
can be achieved anywhere, even amid the coursing hound packs of the world,
but what souls does this assume, and what an exile for such souls! Now
Marchenoir had a foothold in the land of these exiled souls: the Carthusian
family of Saint Bruno, the most perfect of all monastic conceptions, the great
school of the imitators of God’s solitude!

The man in despair spent part of his nights in the chapel, in the guest
gallery. The Carthusian night office, which he followed with understanding,
somewhat calmed the transports of his soul. This famous Office, at the whole of
which few visitors have the fortitude to assist, and which sometimes lasts for
more than three hours, never seemed long enough to him.
During its course, he seemed to take up anew the thread of a kind of
superior life which his horrible existence of those days appeared to have
interrupted for an undetermined period. Otherwise, why and how did there come
to him those inner shudderings, those raptures, those flights of the soul, those
burning tears, every time that a flash of beauty came upon him from any point in
ideal space or perceptible space? After all, there must be something true in the
eternal Platonic harping upon our earthly exile. This idea endlessly kept coming
to him: of a horrible prison in which he somehow had been shut up for some
unknown crime, and the literary clumsiness of so down-at-heel an image in no
way lessened its obsessive power. He let this idle fancy float about on the waves
of praise arising toward him from the choir like a tide of resignation. He strove
to unite his own sorrow-laden soul to the joyful souls of these perpetual singers
of hymns.
Contemplation is the final end of the human soul, but it is very specially
and above all the end of the solitary life. This word contemplation, which has
been debased like so many other things during this century, no longer has much
meaning outside the cloister. For who, unless it be a monk, has read or would
want to read the profound treatise on contemplation by Denys the Carthusian,
called the Ecstatic Doctor?
This word, which has a kinship of the most intimate sort with the name of
God, has suffered the weird fate of falling into the mouths of pantheists such as,
for instance, Victor Hugo—and our minds are confronted with a strange
spectacle when we behold a poet kneeling before a pinch of excrement, which
his intemperate lyricism orders him to adore and serve so that, by such means, he
may win eternal life!
At an infinite distance from such contemplatives of biological scum as the
one just named, who have an idea of God about equal to the sensation of some
fantastic centipede crawling over the flabby pulp of their brains, there exist
indeed in the Church men whose state is to be contemplatives; such are the
religious who make profession of aiming, in a more exclusive fashion and
through more special means, at contemplation. This does not mean that, within
these communities, all are lifted up to contemplation. They can all be, as it may
equally well happen that none is. But they all aim at it with fervor, and delegate
to this sole object their entire lives.
Marchenoir told himself that such people do the greatest thing in the world
and that the law of silence, among religious devoted to the contemplative life, is
superabundantly justified by their unheard-of vocation as plenipotentiaries for
the entire spirituality of the world.
“At a certain height,” Ernest Hello says, concerning Ruysbroeck the
Admirable, of whom he was the translator, “the contemplative can no longer say
what he sees, not because his object fails speech, but because speech fails his
object, and silence of the contemplative becomes the substantial shadow of the
things he does not say … Speech, for them,” this great writer adds, “is a journey
they make out of charity to the dwelling of other men. But silence is their
homeland.”
At the time of the Reformation a large number of charter-houses were
sacked or suppressed, and many religious suffered martyrdom of the sort the
Calvinists and other artists at torture were expert at administering in that century
of rebirth, of so wonderful an esthetic growth.
“Why do you remain silent in the midst of torture, why don’t you answer
us?” said the soldiers of the savage Chareyre who, for several days, had been
subjecting the venerable Father Dom Laurent, vicar of the Bonnefoy
charterhouse, to horrible pain.
“Because silence is one of the principal Rules of my order,” the martyr
replied.
Torture was less anguishing than speech for this contemplative whose
homeland was silence and who did not even need to remember obedience!
Night has singular privileges. It opens lairs and hearts, it unleashes the
ferocious instincts and the low passions, at the same time as it expands souls in
love with the eternal Beauty. It is during the night that the heavens can tell the
story of God’s glory, and it was also during the night that the Christmas angels
heralded the most astounding of His works. Deus dedit carmina in node (God
sang in the night). Do not these words of Job testify in their own way to the
mysterious symphony of nocturnal praise woven around the Holy Book’s
Beloved, who is so black and so beautiful, of whom night itself is a symbol,
according to certain interpreters.
But not to praise or to contemplate alone do the Carthusians watch and
sing. They also do so to intercede and to make satisfaction, in the light of the
immense guilt of the human race and in sharing the sufferings of Him who took
all upon Himself. “Jesus Christ,” said Pascal, “will be in his death throes till the
end of the world; we must not sleep during that time.”
These words of the poor Jansenist are sublime. They came back to the
mind of our gatherer of his own entrails, all by himself in his remote and icy
gallery, as he listened to the singing of those men of prayer, distraught with love
and begging mercy for the universe. He reflected that at that very moment, on all
the points of the globe saturated with the Blood of Christ, innumerable beings
made in the likeness of the Most High God were being slaughtered or oppressed;
that crimes of the flesh and crimes of thought, terrifying by their heinousness
and their number, at that very minute constituted a ten thousand leagues’ night
watch around this hearthstone of supplication, under the very same starry dome
of this long winter’s night…
The Holy Spirit tells how the seven Maccabee Children “exhorted one
another to die manfully. Saying: The Lord God will look upon the truth and will
take pleasure in us, as Moses declared in the profession of the canticle: And in
his servants he will take pleasure.”
These Carthusians, dead to the world in order to be more faithful servants,
watch and sing with the Church so that they too may console the Lord God. The
Lord God is sorrowful even unto death, because His friends have abandoned
Him, and because it is necessary that He die Himself and revivify the icy hearts
of those unfaithful ones. He, the Master of Wrath and the Master of Pardon, the
Resurrection of all the living and the eldest Brother of all the dead, He Whom
Isaiah calls the Admirable, the Strong God, the Father of the age to come and the
Prince of peace—He suffers his agony, in the dead of night, in a garden planted
with olive trees which now no longer have need to yield their fruit, since the
Light of the world is about to be quenched!
The distress of this God without consolation is so terrible a thing that the
Angels, who are called the columns of the heavens, would fall in numberless
clusters to earth were the traitor to delay a little longer in his coming. Strength of
martyrs is one of the names of this divine Dying One, and—if there be no more
men who command their own flesh and crucify their wills—where then is His
reign, of what age will He be the Father, of what peace will He be the Prince and
how could the Consoler come? All these terrible names, all this majesty which
filled to overflowing the prophets and their prophecies, all this rushes down
headlong upon Him, in order to crush Him. Human Sorrow and Fear, holding
each other in loving embrace, make their entrance into God’s domain, and the
ancient threat of Sweat is at last fulfilled on the face of the new Adam, from the
very start of this feast of torments, wherein He begins by getting drunk on the
best wine, following the chief steward’s maxim at the marriage of Cana.
The angel descended from heaven can probably “comfort” Him, but it is up
to His earthly servants alone to console Him. That is why the solitary children of
Saint Bruno want to know nothing except Christ in His agony, and why their life
is a perpetual prayer in common with the universal Church. Such is the price of
consoling the Lord, and the Strength of martyrs would perhaps fail entirely were
it not for the heroism of these tireless watchers!
Marchenoir sought to pray with them and to collect his poor soul. The
victorious supernatural was fully unfurled in his sorrowful heart, open to all the
breezes. The eyes of his faith made vivid to him the terrible things that
theologians and mystic chroniclers have explained or told, when they spoke of
the relationship between the religious soul and God in prayer.
A desert Father of old, named Marcellus, having arisen one night to sing
psalms according to his custom, heard a noise like that of a trumpet sounding a
charge. While he was wondering where this noise could come from in so solitary
a place, where there were no warriors, the Devil appeared before him and told
him that this trumpet was the signal notifying the demons to prepare for battle
against the servants of God; that if he did not wish to expose himself to danger,
he ought to return to bed; that, if he did not, he had better expect some very
violent onset.
Marchenoir thought he heard the vast din of that charge. He saw each
monk as a war tower defended by the angels against all the demons whom the
prayer of God’s servants is in the act of ousting. By generously giving up
worldly life, each of them brings into the depths of the monastery an immense
baggage train of supernatural concerns of which, through his vocation, he
becomes in effect the accountant before God and the steward against unjust
extortionists. Concerns for edifying one’s neighbor, concerns for glory to God,
concerns for the confounding of the Enemy of men. All this on a scale no less
vast than the Redemption itself, reaching from the beginning to the end of time!
Our freedom and the world’s equilibrium are mutually dependent, and that
is what we must understand if we are not to be astounded at the profound
mystery of Reversibility, which is the philosophic name of the great dogma of
the Communion of Saints. Every man who begets a free act projects his
personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that
penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns,
crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act,
he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are
mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying
of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real
pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the
ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms
prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind.
The whole of Christian philosophy lies in the unutterable importance of the
free act and in the notion of an enveloping and indestructible mutual
dependence. If God, in some eternal second of His power, willed to do what He
has never done, annihilate even one man alone, it is altogether likely that
creation would thereupon crumble into dust.
But that which God cannot do, in the strict fullness of His justice, He being
voluntarily bound by His own mercy, weak men, by virtue of their freedom and
within the limits of an equitable atonement can accomplish for their brethren. To
die to the world, to die to themselves, to die, as it were, to the terrible God by
annihilating themselves before Him in the fearful solar radiance of His justice—
that is what Christians can do when our ancient earthly vehicle creaks within the
appalled heavens and almost no longer has the strength to endure sinners. Then
what the breath of mercy sweeps away like dust is the horrible creation which is
not of God, but of man alone, is man’s vast betrayal, is the evil fruit of his
freedom, is a whole rainbow of hellish colors spread over the dazzling abyss of
the divine Beauty.
Lost in the half-darkness of this chapel drowned in prayer, grieving
Marchenoir, laid waste by worldly love, saw passing before him the apocalypse
of the great struggle for eternal life. The world of souls stirred in his sight like
Homer’s Ocean of noises without number. All the waves clamored toward
heaven or hurled themselves back in foam on the reefs, mountains of water
rolled one over the other, in a tumult and chaos not to be expressed in our
sorrowful human tongue. Men dead, men dying, the wounded of earth or the
wounded of heaven, those distraught with joy and those distraught with sorrow,
filed by in endless bands, raising their millions of arms. And alone this peaceful
vessel, where knelt the untroubled consciences of a few elect, sailed along to the
sound of singing in a deep calm one could take to be eternal.
“O holy peace of the living God,” said Marchenoir, “enter into me, quell
this tempest and walk upon all these waters!”
More than ever, alas! he would have sought to be able to throw himself
into this life of ecstasy, which was forbidden him by all the bloody mire in his
heart.
“I do not think,” he wrote to Leverdier, toward the end of the first week,
“that among all our abortive impressions of art or literature can any be found as
powerful by half over our soul’s inwardness. Examining the Grande Chartreuse
from cellar to attic is a very simple matter, assuredly something very well able to
furnish the memory with a few recollections and even to fortify the Christian
sense with a few virile notions about the letter and the spirit of the Gospel; but
you cannot know it in the flower of its mystery if you have not seen the night
office. There resides the real perfume which transfigures this severe retreat, so
dreary an abode in the eyes of the hacks of religion. I have no fear of cutting
down on sleep. Such a sight is for me the most refreshing rest there is. When you
have seen it, you realize that you knew nothing of monastic life. You are even
astonished at having so little known Christianity, because you have until that
moment seen it only through the literary leafage of the tree of pride’s wisdom.
And the heart is seized in the Hand of the heavenly Father like an icicle thrust in
the midst of the furnace. Christianity’s eighteen centuries begin anew like some
unheard poem of which you had known nothing. Faith, Hope and Charity rain
down together like the three twisted bolts of old Pindar’s thunder, and, were it
only for an instant, a single minute in the span of a life as scattered as is the
blood of a flayed man, at random, it is enough to make one remember and to
make one never again forget that, on that night, it was God Himself who spoke.”

MARCHENOIR’S VOCATION

“It’s a mystery of sorrow that a man such as you could have been born in
the nineteenth century. You are of the stuff of Henry III’s Catholic League, of
the Martyrs. You have the soul of one of those ancient apologists of the Faith
who managed to catechize virgins and executioners while in the very jaws of the
wild beasts. Today, you are handed over to the toothless gums of cowards and
mediocrities, and I quite understand that this seems to you an intolerable
torment. You are over forty years old and you have not yet been able to
acclimatize yourself, or even to orient yourself, in modern society. That is
fearful…
“I neither accuse you nor judge you, my poor friend. I sorrow for you with
my whole soul. Do me justice. I do not reproach you for not having been able to
make a position for yourself. I am not one of those bourgeois the very mention of
whom makes you glower. I am a Carthusian, nothing more, and I believe the
best position is to do God’s will, whatever it may be. If it is your portion to write
good books, without solace or recompense, plunged in continual sufferings, your
circumstances are ready-made and fifty times more brilliant, it would seem to
me, than those of some prime minister who, tomorrow morning or tomorrow
evening, will be bodily kicked down a stairway of oblivion. Only I fear that that
gift of power, which would perhaps make of you a great man of action by means
of the sword or of the spoken word, were their use at your disposal, may in the
end turn against you and drive you to despair.”
“You are right, Father, and I myself am not unfearful,”’ replied
Marchenoir. “Hope is the only one of the three theological virtues against which
I can, in all frankness, accuse myself of having knowingly and gravely sinned.
There is within me an instinct of rebellion so fierce that nothing has been able to
tame it. Finally I gave up trying to drive out this ravening beast, and I make shift
not to be devoured by it. What more can I do? Every man at birth is supplied
with a monster. Some people make war upon him and others make love to him.
It would seem that I am very sturdy, as you just said, since I have been honored
with the continual company of the king of monsters: Despair. If God loves me,
let Him defend me when I no longer have the courage to defend myself. The
only comfort is that I can no longer be taken by surprise, for I have no faith in
happiness. Occasionally it is said that I am a superior man, and I do not deny it. I
should be a fool and a thankless wretch were I to disavow this bounty which I
have done nothing to deserve. Well, then, if happiness is almost unattainable for
the most ordinary of men, for the most easily satisfied of rational pachyderms,
how then could that very tuning-fork of sorrows, generally known as a man of
genius, ever aspire to it? Happiness, dear Father, is made for cattle … or for
saints. I have therefore given up all idea of it long since. But, for want of
happiness, I should at least like to have peace—that unattainable peace which
the Christmas angels, nonetheless, proclaimed on earth to men of good will!”
The priest hesitated a moment. Everything that the most burning priestly
charity could inspire in him he had already said to this disconsolate man. He had
tried everything in order to coagulate a little hope in that shattered vessel from
which the stimulant spilled the moment you poured it in. He could not accuse his
penitent of indocility or self-importance. He had begun by suspecting
Marchenoir of pride—that handiest of expedients for confessors and directors
devoid of insight or zeal!—but from the first day he had diffidently set this
suspicion aside, feeling it more apostolic to penetrate within hearts than to seal
them from the very start, implacably, with seminary formulas.
“Non-Love is one of the names of the Father of pride, and most certainly
during all his life he had known precious few people who could love as much as
poor Marchenoir! He felt he was confronted by an altogether unusual adversity,
and tears came to him at the thought that he had before him a man marching to
his death, whom nothing could save, a witness for Love and for Justice: the
pitiable burnt-offering of a society struck with madness which thought that
genius sullied it and that the nobility of one single soul constituted danger to the
whole kennel of its pastors.
“You ask for peace at the very moment when you are going to war,” said
the priest at last. “So be it. You think yourself called to protest all by yourself, in
the name of Justice, against the whole of contemporary society, with the
foregone certainty of being utterly vanquished, and regardless of what the
consequences may be for you—all this in contempt of your own safety and the
judgments of your fellow men, and with total indifference toward every ordinary
determinant of human behavior! You believe yourself not free to choose any
other road to death… God alone knows. It is easier to condemn you than to
understand you. The only thing in one’s power is to lift one’s arms toward
heaven in your behalf. But your ship is overladen… You are not alone, you have
taken upon you the soul of another. What will you make of her? Have you
allowed for the fearful impediment of a passion stronger than you are—a passion
I can clearly spell out in the least change in your countenance? And even if it is
given to you to win mastery over it, shall you not hesitate to drag your poor wife
into the unequal quarrels wherein I foresee all too clearly that you are going at
once to take part? …”
Marchenoir had become very pale, had seemed to waver and had sat down
with so poignant an expression of sorrow that Father Athanase was
overwhelmed by it. There followed a painful silence for a few moments, at the
end of which the miserable fellow began speaking in a voice so low that the
priest had to strain his ears to hear it.

“How would you have me answer you? What God wills will happen, and I
hope I shall praise His holy Will at the hour of my last agony. Were I wealthy, I
could arrange my life in such fashion that the dangers which terrify you on my
behalf would disappear almost entirely. I would write my books on my knees, in
some solitary spot where I would not even hear the cries or the curses of the
world. Such is not my case, unfortunately, and I have no idea whither the squalid
struggle to make my living will draw me…***
“I take leave of your monastery absolutely ignorant of what I shall do, but
with the most unshakable determination not to quit the truth without bearing
witness to it. It is written that the starved and those dying of thirst after justice
will be sated. I can hence hope without limit to drink my fill. Never shall I be
able to come to terms with or be consoled at what I see. I do not aspire to reform
an unreformable world, nor to procure an abortion upon Babylon. I am among
those who cry in the wilderness and devour the roots of the burning bush, when
the crows forget to bring them their food. Whether I am listened to or am not
listened to, whether I am applauded or am insulted, as long as no one kills me, I
shall be the trustee of Vengeance and the very obedient manservant of an alien
Fury who will command me to speak. It is not in my power to quit this office,
and I say so with the bitterest of grief. I suffer from an infinite violence, and the
fits of anger that come forth from me are but echoes, singularly weakened
echoes of a higher Imprecation I have the astounding misfortune to reverberate.
“Here is the reason, in all likelihood, why utter poverty was so bountifully
allotted to me. Wealth would have made me into one of those mobile and duly
bolstered carcasses whose odor men of the world savor in their drawing rooms,
and at whom women’s greedy vanity licks its chops. I would have feasted on the
poor, as the rest of them do, perhaps letting fall, after the manner of one popinjay
I know, a few whining words about pity. Fortunately, a thorny-handed
Providence watched over me and spared me from becoming a charming young
man by slashing me with its caresses…
“And so, let my appalling fate come to pass! Scorn, ridicule, slander,
universal abhorrence, what care I. Whatever sorrow may come to me will surely
not rend me more than the unaccountable death of my child.… You can make
me ravenous with hunger, poorer than poor, you will not stop me from snarling
under the goad of indignation!

“An obedient son of the Church, I am none the less in communion of

impatience with all the mutinous, all the disillusioned, all those who have cried
and not been heard, all the damned of the world. When I remember this
multitude, a hand grasps me by the hair and carries me off, beyond the relative
demands of a social order, into the absolute of a vision of injustice such as would
bring tears to the pride of the world’s philosophies. I have read de Bonald and
the other theoreticians of equilibrium. I know all the reasonable things that
virtuous people can say to each other to console themselves for the temporal
damnation of three quarters of humanity…
“Saint Paul did not console himself for it! Saint Paul who urged that we
await, while groaning with all creatures, the Adoption and the Redemption,
asserting that we were redeemed only ‘in hope,’ and that thus nothing had been
fulfilled. I, the newcomer, feel that a death agony of six thousand years perhaps
gives us the right to be impatient, as men have never been, and, since we must
lift up our hearts, the right to tear those despairing organs once and for all from
our bosoms in order to stone heaven with them! Such is the Sursum corda and
the Lamma sabacthani of all the abandoned in this ultimate century.
“When the incarnate Word bled and cried out for that unaccomplished
redemption, and when His Mother, the only creature ever truly to have given
birth, became, under the dying gaze of the divine Lamb, that fountain of tears
which made all the oceans overflow, inanimate creatures, the innocent witnesses
of that two-fold agony, retained therefrom forever its compassion and
trepidation. The Master’s last breath, borne by the winds, went to swell the
hidden treasure of storms, and the earth, permeated with those-tears and that
blood, began again to sprout, more sorrowfully than ever, symbols of
mortification and repentance. A curtain of darkness spread over the veil, already
so dark, of the primal curse. The thorns of Jesus Christ’s royal diadem
intertwined themselves around all human hearts and stuck fast for dozens of
centuries, like the prickles of a tearing hair shirt, to the sides of the terror-
stricken world!
“On that day was instituted the perfect penance for Adam’s children. Up to
that day the true Man had not suffered and torture had not received any divine
sanction. Besides, mankind was too young for the Cross. When the executioners
came down from Calvary, in their bloody snouts they brought back to all peoples
the great news that the human race had come of age. Sorrow crossed, with one
leap, the infinite abyss which separates Accident from Substance, and became
necessary.
“Then the promises of joy and triumph in which Scripture is steeped, and
which are written into the New Law under the summary heading of the
Beatitudes, swept over the generations, dashing through them like a whirlwind
of swords. To sum it all up in a phrase, mankind began to suffer in hope, and this
is what we call the Christian era!
“Shall we soon come to the end of this exodus? The people of God cannot
take another step, and will shortly expire in the desert. All great souls, whether
Christian or not, ardently beg for a conclusion to the story. Are we not at the end
of everything and is not the palpable confusion of modern times the symptom of
some immense supernatural disturbance which at last would set us free? The
age-old notions of aristocracy and sovereignty, which were the buttresses of the
world, today strew with their dust the filthy passageways of some hospital for
the blind, passageways fouled by the liquid excreta of putrefying royal Families.
By the board go respect, acceptance of one’s lot, obedience and ancient honor!
Everything that served as tabernacle for the intelligence has turned flabby, is
polluted, slandered, mutilated, forever cast aside and squandered. The
impervious deafness of the rich and the hunger of the poor—those are the only
treasures that have not been spilled into the gutter!… Ah! God’s word of honor,
His sacred promise ‘not to leave us as orphans’ and to return, that coming of the
renewing Spirit whereof we have received but the first fruits—I cry out for this
with all the violent voices within me, I lust for this with the concupiscence of
fire, I am famished for it, I thirst for it; I can no longer wait, and my heart,
however hard people may suppose it, in the end breaks when the evidence of
universal affliction bursts forth too powerfully over and above my own affliction
… O my Saving God, have mercy on me!”
The voice of the lamenter which, for several minutes, had been ringing out
like a clarion in this peaceful dwelling unused to such outcries, was quenched in
a shower of tears. Far more moved than he would have wished to appear, Father
Athanase placed his hand on Marchenoir’s head and, forcing him to kneel,
bestowed on him that potent priestly blessing which partakes of absolution and
of exorcism.
“Go, my dear child,” he then said, “and may God’s peace accompany you.
Perhaps you have been destined for some great thing. I do not know. You have
been cast so much outside the common paths that an extreme reserve naturally
imposes itself on me and paralyzes even the expression of my fears. The prayers
of the Carthusians are yours and will follow you even as though you were
headed for the gallows, believing, at the worst, that you are in danger of death.
And that is to say all that can he said. Go then in peace, dear sufferer, and
remember that, were all doors on earth to be closed against you with curses,
there exists one which stands wide open, on the threshold of which you always
find us with outstretched arms to receive you.”

THE LAMENTER

Marchenoir was censured for his filthy language. The canting prudishness
of Ernest Renan’s contemporaries had severely denounced him for the
excremental vehemence of his anathemas. But as far as he was concerned, here
was something to which he had to resign himself. He saw the modern world,
with all its institutions and all its ideas, in an ocean of mud. In his eyes it was an
Atlantis submerged in a cesspool. Nor could he possibly form any other picture.
For another thing, his standards as a writer demanded that his expression of a
given truth always be adequate to the vision in his mind. As a result, he
habitually found himself in the most compelling need of turning away from
contemporary life, or of repressing it in repulsive images, which the white heat
of feeling could make one applaud. The article he had given Beauvivier on the
scandal of pornographic advertising was, in this style of writing, an
extraordinary stunt. It was a Vesuvius of blazing filth.

[Marchenoir Speaks to Men of Letters.]*** The appearance of our monster

was not one precisely to inspire a sense of security. He had remained sitting, it is
true, and seemed very calm, but his eyes, widened at the center, echoed in their
black depths the general anger. One could guess that he felt more at ease at
seeing himself the target of all the brickbats flung at him, and that he delighted
in feeling his courage rise. He waited for the initial fury to die down of its own
accord, naturally, by the pure and simple utterance of the insult or denial each of
his opponents could have to bestow upon him.
When the moment seemed to him to have come, he arose, and this
extraordinary fellow began to speak, at first in so peculiarly sonorous and deep a
voice that he obtained complete silence.
“I should find it extremely easy, gentlemen, to pick up some object or
other—were it only M. Champignolle—and use it to give you all a thrashing.
Some of you who know me,” he insisted, looking at Dulaurier, whom his superb
insolence completely intimidated, “realize that I can do it, nor shall I try to
pretend that I’ve not been strongly tempted to, especially in the last few minutes.
Such exercise would cheer me and stimulate my digestion. But…what’s the use?
I shall simply leave, and thereafter you will be able to let your fraternal minds
commune in perfect peace. I am not of your kind and felt it from the moment I
came in. I am a sort of madman, dreaming of Beauty and an impossible justice.
Your dream is enjoyment, every one of you, and that’s why we can’t come
together.
“Only take care. Knavery is not an eternal refuge, and I see a huge pair of
jaws over your horizon. There is much suffering, I assure you, in the world you
foster. People have just about had enough of it, and you may perhaps reap some
cursed surprises.… God spare me from being tempted to go into details with you
about that sweat of prostitution which makes you stink! The force of events has
puffed you up with a power which no monarch before this century had ever
wielded, since you govern people’s minds and possess the secret of making poor
wretches who are sobbing for bread swallow stones.
“You have prostituted the Word by extolling a filthy exaltation of self.
Well! That very same appalling new-style caddishness you have set loose in the
world will throw you to the ground and will replace your shame-encrusted
backsides in lording it over a society forever stripped of all decency. Then, by a
mockery beyond any ever known, a mockery capable of bringing about the end
of time, you will in your turn become the starveling representatives of the Word
scorned by all men.*** Never will have been seen so enormous a dishonoring of
the human mind. Such will be your special punishment: to learn, at your own
cost, through so monstrous an irony, the infernal sufferings of those lovers of
Truth whom your justice of the damned condemns to naked despair, just as it
condemns truth itself. From now on my loveliest dream will be to see you
appear openly abominable, for you cannot in your consciences be any more so.
In the name of literature which disowns you with horror, you live entirely on
falsehood, stealing, servility and cowardice. You devour the innocence of the
weak and you seek refreshment by licking the putrid feet of the strong. All of
you put together could not supply what is needed for a single slave great-hearted
enough to wish to endure no more than his due share of degradation and inclined
to kick over the traces under too withering a lash. And so I hope shortly to see
you penniless and stripped naked, for no other atonement can exist suited to such
pigs’ souls as are yours.
“Likewise I hope that this will be the end of ends,” Marchenoir continued,
becoming more and more incensed, “since it is impossible to assume any
government of human excrement surpassing yours in pollution, without at the
same time supposing mankind’s ultimate apoplexy. On that day, perhaps, the
Lord God will repent Himself—as He did for Sodom—and will surely and at last
come down again from the depths of His heaven, into the suffocating miasma of
our planet, in order once and for all to burn up all the cesspools in which we live.
The exterminating angels will flee to the uttermost suns of the heavens to keep
from doing away with themselves through disgust at seeing our end, and the
horses of the Apocalypse, upon the appearance of our last ordure, will capsize in
space, neighing from terror of contaminating their pasterns in it!”
Having shouted out these last words, in a voice that sounded almost
superhuman, the hurler of curses went away shuddering, head high, eyes aflame.
His hearers probably understood it would not be advisable for anyone to get in
his way, or offer to present him with a handbook of good manners, for those
between whom he had to pass stepped aside with notable haste.
Half an hour later he said, as he slipped onto a bench in the café where
Leverdier was waiting for him: “Dear friend, my journalistic career is
squandered, but I don’t care! I didn’t pay too dearly for the rapture of spitting in
their teeth.”
 “I see very clearly*** the horrible sickness that afflicts this world
dispossessed of the Christian faith, and all other thoughts are alien to me,
whatever may be the words I use to express this thought, which I bear like a
knife within the sheath of my bosom. Here is a passion so real, so gripping, that I
shall end up by becoming unable to fix my attention on any other object
whatever.***
“You’ve been told, I suppose, that my violent writings offend charity. I
have only one thing to reply to those theologians of yours. It is that Justice and
Mercy are identical and consubstantial in their absolutes. Here is what neither
the sentimentalist nor the fanatic is willing to understand. A teaching that
proposes the Love of God as its supreme end above all needs to be virile, under
pain of avowing all the illusions of self-love or of carnal love. It is all too easy to
emasculate souls by teaching them nothing but the precept of loving one’s
brothers, to the hurt of all the other precepts which you seek to hide from them.
What one gets in this way is a flabby and sticky religion, more fearful in its
effects than even Nihilism itself.
“Now the Gospel contains terrible threats and terrible inferences. In a score
of places, Christ hurls anathemas, not on things, but on men whom He singles
out with frightening precision. Nonetheless does He give His life for all, but only
after having left us orders to speak ‘on the rooftops,’ as He spoke Himself. Here
is the one and only model, and Christians can do nothing better than to put His
examples into practice. What would you think of the charity of a man who
allowed his brothers to be poisoned for fear of ruining, by warning them, the
respectability of the poisoner? I myself say that in such a circumstance charity
consists in shouting aloud, and that true love must be unappeasable. But this
presumes a virility today so dead and gone that one can no longer even mention
its name without a criminal attack on modesty…
“I am not qualified to judge, people say, or to punish. Am I to infer from
this cheap sophism, the disingenuousness of which I well know, that I am not
even qualified to see and that it is forbidden me to raise an arm against an
incendiary who, filled with confidence in my brotherly inertia, is about to set off
before my very eyes a mine that will destroy an entire city? Had Christians not
listened so much to the teachings of their mortal enemies, they would know that
nothing is more just than mercy, because nothing is more merciful than justice,
and their thinking would become adjusted to these elementary notions.
“Christ declared ‘blessed’ those who hunger and thirst after justice, and the
world, which wants to enjoy itself but which detests Blessedness, has rejected
this affirmation. Who then will speak for the speechless, for the oppressed and
the weak, if those keep silent who were clothed with the Word? The writer who
loses sight of Justice is as cruel a despoiler of the poor as is the rich man to
whom God closes His Paradise. The one and the other squander their resources
and by the same token are accountable for those forsaking hope. I want none of
that crown of glowing coals for my head, and it is now a long time since I made
up my mind.***
“Cost what may, I shall keep virgin my witness by avoiding the crime of
leaving fallow any of the powers God has given me. Irony, abuse, challenges,
imprecations, damnings, curses, poetry of the mire or poetry of flames: I will
make use of everything which can make my anger into a force for attacks…
what means, otherwise, would remain to me not to sink into the lowest of human
estates? Only in one way can the judge fall beneath the criminal he is judging,
and that is by betraying his trust; every true writer is surely a judge.
“Some have said to me: ‘What’s the use? The world is in its death agony,
and nothing has any effect upon it.’ Perhaps. But even in the depths of the desert
one would all the same have to bear witness, were it only for the honor of Truth
and for the edification of the wild beasts, as in olden days the hermit anchorites
used to do. Then too, is it believable that such a wealth of fury should have been
granted me to no end? Certain sayings of the Holy Book are strange indeed…
Who knows, after all, whether the most active form of adoration is not a
blasphemy through love, which would be the prayer of the forsaken? … I shall
therefore live on my vocation till I die of it, in some orgy of wretchedness. I
shall be Marchenoir the contemner, the screamer, the despairing—joyful at
frothing with anger and content with giving displeasure, but hard to intimidate
and all too willing to crush the fingers that might try to gag him.”

1. This is the name of the main protagonist in Le Désespéré, a book of which Bloy
says: “The first and most fearful part of my life is told in Le Désespéré.” (R. M.)
2. Titles not by Bloy are in brackets. (R. M.)
 Art and the Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulcher

TAMERS OF WILD BEASTS AND HERDSMEN OF SWINE

O the highways of the Middle Ages,

lined with gallows and chapels!
~Paul Verlaine

Those who triumph are of two kinds: Fighters of Wild Beasts and
Swineherds.
The former are created to tame monsters, the latter to graze their hogs.
Between a war lord herding his wild animals to their forest pastures and a stock
market swindler shoving the crowds to their repasts of acorns, no room is found
for a third category of dominators. The history of mankind gives notice of no
other victorious breed.
The patient Martyrs of the Faith who trod upon the face of Antiquity and
about whom the rhetoric of centuries has composed so many sentimental
metaphors, were, basically, terrible conquerors, following close upon a Master
who had declared himself a bearer of fire and the sword, and who had hired them
as workers in the vineyard.
They stampeded onward, sprinkling the globe with their own blood, in
assault upon all peoples; and that Christianity—trampling everything in its path
—to which they gave birth can today say, as did the Caesar of Suetonius: “I am a
fighter of wild beasts who has grown tired of such empire!”
Christianity is indeed in its death agony at present, and seems utterly
devoid of strength, but were it to grovel after the fashion of mangy lions under
the hoofs of a million brutes, it would no less remain the eternal titular of
Majesty and Sovereignty among men.
Artists are fashioned in the likeness of that Gladiator against nations, and
they have been chosen to share his destiny. They have, like him, to be born
children of sorrow and be hailed while lying on a shield of filth. Then, when
their Herculean task is done, it is wholly necessary that they be stripped of all
their hire and in the end be trodden under the hoofs of herds on the march.

Come now! Surely art is a vital and a holy thing!

In the horrible journey “from the womb to the grave,” as it is conventional
to call this life, laden with wretchedness, mourning, lies, disappointments,
betrayals, stenches and catastrophes; in this desert of the world, both torrid and
icy, where the eye of a hungry toiler sees to strengthen his courage, nothing but a
multitude of crosses on which there hang dying, no longer the lions of Carthage,
but crucified asses and silly swine; in this endless withdrawal of all justice, of
every fulfillment of the divine realities; attracted by the aboriginal soil from
which his organs were kneaded; coveted, as a precious food, by all that sprouts
underground; beneath the soaring of enamel house eagles and the ravens of
funereal poetry, and with boundless anguish feeling his knees buckle at every
effort—what would you have a wretched human being become without that
gleam, that fragrance smelt from afar, of future Rejoicings?
We are beyond description lacking in everything. We die of homesickness
for Being. The Church, which should suckle within us the foreboding of the
Infinite, has for three hundred years lain in a death agony, ever since her breasts
were hacked off. There remains capable of reviving us only the she-wolf of Art,
were it not that men hurl stones at the last rash souls who still seek sustenance
from her brass dugs.
In vain are souls stripped of their heritage, in vain is man mutilated; after
all, his utter extinction would have to be decreed in order to drain away all the
leaven of the incompressible Ideal he bears in himself, and which not even the
most sacrilegious education can blot out. No level of degradation can be devised
which will prevail over nature.
As long as the pain-ridden race of Adam’s children shall continue on this
earth, there will be men hungry for the Beautiful and the Infinite, just as men
hunger for bread. Their number will be small: that is most likely. They will be
persecuted: that is wholly probable. Disconsolate wanderers of the great Dream,
they will roam like Cains over the face of the earth and will perhaps be forced to
make friends of the wild beasts so as not to remain without shelter. Hunted as are
incendiaries or well poisoners, abhorred by women with fleshly eyes who will
see them only as ragamuffins, screamed at by children and howled at by dogs,
frightful flotsam of the Joy of sixty centuries, tossed about by the waves of all
the filth in this last age, they will at last draw their final breath as comfortably as
it will be given them to do—in burrows so stinking that even the centipedes and
scarab beetles of death will not dare search out their corpses!
Yet despite everything they will continue to exist, in order to drive
executioners to despair; and, since nature is indestructible and inviolable, it
could very well happen that some day—through the agency of some astonishing
kiss from the sun or the influence of some unknown heavenly body—an
exceptionally large brood of these vagabonds, overflowing the earth, may
forever drown out in waters of rapture this aborted society of blackguardly
wiseacres who thought they had exterminated the aristocracy of our human
species!

This book of mine attempts a formal statement of the disputed claims of

Art—nothing else.
It would be silly to look for nothing more in these pages than those
personal attacks for which I have been so bitterly reproached, and which, in a
different setting, I had decided were appropriate.
At most a reader will here and there find a few curses, a few
epiphenomenal statements of loathing occasionally expressed in that guttersnipe
language which a man of taste abhors, but the use of which I cannot deny myself
when my gorge rises and I puke.
Then again, does there really exist a system of criticism, a sound criticism,
a sure register of works of art, resting on an authentic standard of the Beautiful?
I strongly doubt it.
The artist’s master faculty—the imagination—is naturally and passionately
anarchic. It pays no heed to orders dispatched or pre-arranged meeting places; it
lives upon its own substance, like a will-o’-the-wisp. Creation is its prey, the
angels are its victuallers and the universe is the camping ground of its choice.
The infinitude of space is its lookout, from whence to explore the whole expanse
of the centuries. It is the mother of Alpha and the younger sister of Omega, and
the symbolic snake is its girdle when it dons its high regalia in order to think
upon God alone, of whom it is the deep mirror.
Better than Jupiter the imagination gathers the clouds together, masses
them about itself according to its fancy, and, as its good pleasure dictates,
scatters them in a trice or makes them burst into a torrent of rain. The most
immovable and weighty masses leap and climb over everything the moment this
empress of the Dream nods in their direction.
The Imagination provides what human passions need and seasons them. It
perfumes dung heaps, disinfects fopperies, puts gold fillings into crocodiles’
teeth, once again makes at home within the most aged breasts the intoxication of
perfect love, discovers veins of marble in flesh ravaged by syphilis, bestows a
comet’s mane on the most repellent baldness, and gives vomit the fine flavor of
ambrosia.
Everything diabolic and everything divine lies within it, because it was
clothed with guardianship over Art, Art to which all things are needful, and
because it is forever, to its distraught wards, “the guardian Angel, the Muse and
the Madonna,” before whom Baudelaire, in a poem of a prophetic beauty, urged
us to kneel.
Is not any gauge laughable when applied to this whimsical devotee of the
Infinite, this bestrider of the Heavens? And those whom people call great critics
—when they are not schoolmasters forever missing the point—whatever could
they possibly be except men drunk with fancy, seeking their own beds in the
dwellings of others?
But there is a transcendental police job which I have resolved to do, if only
I have the strength. This is to expose the wicked in literature: those who steal
and those who grovel. For these two species threaten to devour everything.
The thieves are the pure plagiarists, and their crime is easily detected. They
snatch away the children of others and emasculate them in order to sell them
with profit to the gelders of boy sopranos.
The grovellers are the worshippers of success before no matter what altar.
And such are prostitutes and Iscariots.
“All Art that dreams of applause abdicates; it places its crown on the brow
of the mob.”
This wonderful reflection comes from Ernest Hello, one of the greatest of
modern writers; he too, alas, devoured by a thirst for deification, but one who
would have none of it at the price of so ignominious an abdication.
The deliberate degradation of the Word is undeniably one of the basest
outrages one can meditate. When a miserable spawner of serial fiction befouls
himself daily like some hideous baboon in his ground floor apartment, to the
delight of an abject public, that is his trade, and there isn’t even enough to him to
warrant contempt. But when a writer of talent, in order to increase his sales, to
get himself read by women and notaries, to promote himself in the hierarchy of
glory, lowers his mind to such garbage, and forces his pen to serve as a toothpick
for well-stuffed imbeciles whose dishes he hopes he may someday wipe up—we
then have a kind of treachery which must he exposed, if possible, with brass
bugles and trumpets, for here is Eternal Beauty degrading herself upon a pillory!
Mine is a twin trumpet, equipped with two mouthpieces; one for the Hue
and Cry, the other for the Hosanna. I have thought it needful to summon before
me the true and the false artists; the tamers of those savage spirits who obey
none but the deeply virile; and the assassins of virility, the herders of beasts
created for the slaughter house. The night is upon us, the terrible night during
which men shall no more labor, says the Gospel; but who knows whether books
such as this may not have the power somewhere to bring forth at last a dawn of
an intellectual sense of shame which might begin to cast its light upon the
heights and the depths?

[Art and the Church.] “During the last three or four centuries, Catholics
and non-Catholics of every possible stripe have done all they could to debase
man’s imagination. On this sole point, heretics and orthodox have been
continually unanimous.
“The order issued to the one and to the other by the Almighty of the Nether
Regions was to wipe out memory of the Fall. After which, under the pretext of
restoring man’s status, antiquity’s love of the Flesh was given a renaissance with
all the consequences thereof. Cathedrals crumbled into dust, holy nakedness
gave way to sensuous forms, and all rhythms were taken over by Lechery. The
stiff lines which the honesty of the Middle Ages had assigned to its non-fleshly
presentations of the Martyrs took on curves the moment they had been broken,
following that inexorable law of societies which a sublime childlikeness had for
an instant abrogated, and they became foliated ornaments on the altar of Pan.
That is, I think, the point at which we have totally arrived.
“What would have become of Christianity if even the most sacred images
were other than accidents of its substance? Our Lord Jesus Christ did not entrust
His Bark to magnificoes. The world was conquered by people who could not tell
their right hands from their left, and there have been peoples governed wisely by
Men of Vision who had never seen any of the earth’s squirming things. To speak
only of music, the richest of melodies counts for less than the silence preceding
the Custodiat animam meam of the Priest’s communion. What is needful above
all is to walk on the waters and resurrect the dead. All the rest, which is too
difficult, serves to amuse children and put them to sleep in the twilight.
“Still the Church, which has perfect knowledge of man, has permitted and
has wanted Images, in all ages, even to the point of placing upon her altars those
who gave their lives for this traditional bony structure of her cult, but with the
absolute reservation that supernatural veneration be referred strictly to the
unseen originals which these images represent. Thus speaks the Council of
Trent.
“Indeed, the contempt or horror of modern Christians for all the
manifestations of a superior art is beyond hearing, and even appears to be
another and a more devilish kind of iconoclasm. Instead of slashing paintings or
smashing painted statues, as was done under the Isaurians, we stifle souls of
light in the sentimental slime of an idiotic piety, which is the most monstrous
sullying of innocence…***
“Yet Art, I repeat, is foreign to the essence of the Church, useless to her
essential life, and those who practice it have not even the right to exist if they are
not her very humble servants. She owes them her most motherly protection,
since she sees in them the most sorrowful and frail of her children, but if they
grow, up big and handsome, all she can do is to exhibit them from afar to the
multitude, like wild beasts whom it is dangerous to come near.
“Today that same Church, of whom I am indeed obliged endlessly to speak
since she is the only breast from which mankind can take sustenance, has been
quit by all peoples, without exception. Those who have not expressly, officially
disowned her, consider her very aged and are getting ready, like filial sons, to
bury her with their own hands. Since, in practically every country still believing
itself under papal obedience, she is hedged about by a family council and an
army of nurses, what authority could she exercise over the wandering rabble of
the dreamers? One may meet a few rare and aristocratic individuals who are at
once artists and Christians—something which Wagner certainly was not—but
even here there cannot be a Christian Art.***
“Were a Christian art really to exist, you could say that a gate stands open
into lost Eden and that, as a result, original sin and the whole of Christianity are
no more than old wives’ tales. But as this art no more exists than does the divine
Illumination of our planet—for six thousand years barely lightened by the last
glowing embers of a Sun extinguished by our disobedient ancestors—it was
inevitable that artists or poets, eager to relight this torch, should draw away from
their old Mother who had nothing to offer them save the catacombs of Penance.”
 [The Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre.] “Out of everything you have said to
us, Marchenoir, I am able and willing to recall only one phrase which, I am
forced to admit, throws me into the deepest astonishment. ‘Am I an artist!’ you
cried a moment ago, with the look of a pirate threatened with being chained to
the bench of a slave galley.*** Will you allow me a question? If you are not an
artist, what then are you?”
“I am a Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre!” replied Marchenoir in his fine,
deep and clear voice which ordinarily set cocks’ combs and turkeys’ wattles
quivering. “I am that and nothing more. Life has no other object, and the folly of
the Crusades is what has most honored the human reason. Prior to scientific
cretinism, even children knew that the Savior’s Sepulchre is the Center of the
universe, the pivot and the heart of all worlds. The earth can revolve around the
sun as much as you wish. I grant you that, but on condition that this latter star,
which is not informed of our astronomic laws, quietly proceed to circle round
that imperceptible point, and that the billions of systems making up the wheel of
the Milky Way continue the movement. The inconceivable heavens have no
other task than to mark the position of an ancient stone whereon Jesus slept for
three days.
“Having been born, to my unspeakable grief, in a Spiritly century wherein
this rudimentary notion is totally forgotten, could I do better than to take up the
staff of ancient travelers who believed in the infallible fulfillment of God’s
Word?
“I am satisfied to believe with them that the Holy Place is once again to
become, at the appointed time, the episcopal and royal Seat of that Word which
will judge all words. Thus will be resolved that celebrated Disquiet which
politicians so sillily call the Eastern Question.
“So what do you want me to tell you? If Art is part of my baggage, so
much the worse for me! My only recourse is the expedient of placing at the
service of Truth what has been given me by the Father of Lies. A precarious and
dangerous device, for the business of Art is to fashion Gods!
“…We ought to be terribly sad,” added the strange prophet, as though
speaking to himself. “Behold the day dieth and the night cometh where no man
shall work. We are very old, and those who follow us are older yet. Our
feebleness is so deep-rooted that we do not even know we are idolaters.
“When Jesus will come, those among us who will still be ‘watching’ by the
light of a little lamp will no longer have the strength to turn toward His Face, so
attentively will they be questioning the Signs which cannot give Life. The Light
will have to strike them in the back, and they will have to be judged from
behind!…”

[There is No Christian Art.] Hello convinced himself, in the madness of his

zeal, that there could be a Christian art, without for a moment suspecting the
strife experience has taught us emerges from that phrase, and without hearing the
discordant shrieks at the same time issuing’ from these two incompatible words.
That cloud-gatherer never understood that the supposed effort of art toward
Christianity is that of a curve toward its symptote, and that it is that ancient wet
nurse of Faith, Reason in person, who has proved it.***
Art is aboriginally a parasite of the skin of the first Serpent. From this
origin it derives its immense pride and suggestive power. It suffices unto itself,
like a god, and the bejeweled crowns of princes, compared to the lightning
flashes of its headdress, look like rude circlets of iron. It is as rebellious to
worship as it is to obedience, and the will of no man bends it toward any altar. It
may consent from the overabundance of its splendor to give alms to temples or
palaces, when it finds some sort of advantage in doing so, but let no one ask of it
even a supererogatory wink of the eye.
The paganisms of old had more affinity with it and found it much more
flexible. Between them and it there existed, as it were, a mysterious solidarity of
law-breaking and blasphemy, with a view to beclouding the face of Jehovah and
blotting from the human spirit its primal illuminations. It was like an
intertwining of monsters in the awesome crypts of the giant temples of Serapis
or the blood-encrusted sanctuaries of hideous Asia.
In those olden times Art was prodigal of its most farfetched fancies, and its
implacable beauty served to multiply everywhere the terrors of idolatry. When
Christianity triumphed, this Benjamin of the sun fled, bellowing, into the desert
places.
And that was the end of it for centuries. A thousand years had to pass
before worshippers of the Cross, corseted in steel, trellised and plated with iron,
would bring back with them from Palestine or from Egypt that grim captive
fated by Providence eventually to break up Catholicism.
Then Cathedrals were built. The mountains were stripped off in layers so
that they might resound, as well as the forests, with the “groaning of the Holy
Spirit.” Stone and metal were violated for the sake of giving birth to heavenly or
infernal effigies such as men had never seen. Hymns so beautiful were sung that
our unbelieving generation still weeps on hearing them. A little later men began
to paint, and for three sublime centuries, Christians were able to convince
themselves that they at last had bent low before Jesus Christ the ancient
henchman of the awful gods.
The Renaissance in due time blew these illusions away. Art, tamed for a
while by the childlike fervor of the Middle Ages, reared up in all-powerful
rebellion as soon as it no longer felt the training harness of that innocence.
In the West there was no question of renewing Moloch’s or Astarte’s
bloody pranks, but souls were cast, never to emerge, into the burning ovens of
form and color and, from that moment a confirmed apostate, the former
competitor of the Most High proclaimed everywhere its eternal antagonism.
Today experience has sufficiently revealed this antinomy, and it needed the
stubborn innocence of Ernest Hello to hope that such an old rebel would submit.
Yet it seems to me that the extreme incompatibility of modern art with the
requirements of a practical Catholicism should in themselves have warned so
astute a metaphysician of the presence of some mystery. Did not this awaiter of
the reign of the Holy Spirit, this millennial man eagerly awaiting every miracle
and every divine fulfillment, did he not owe it to himself to conjecture that there
would be a renewal of all things, a renewal similar, for example, to
Transubstantiation?…
And since it has been proved that the most perfect souls and those most
capable of washing the bleeding Feet of Jesus Christ are the very ones who most
cringingly beg for the profane spikenard of art, could not this dreamer surmise
some wondrous celestial happening which would at last justify the anti-Christian
practices of Art, by canonizing its rebellion? A true prophet’s intuition might
possibly have been the reward for such boldness.
Only he would have had not to wallow, naked as Job, on the manure pile of
Catholic religious goods merchants. He would have had not to be the utter and
heart-rending Simple Simon of an apostolate of the Beautiful, comparable
enough to the scattering of a galleonful of pearls and diamonds under the
desecrating hooves of swine.

[Veblaine.] A man offers himself on the threshold of the eternal Church of

Christ—I do not say the greatest or the best man, but the unique man, absolutely,
him for whom everyone had grown weary of hoping or dreaming, a Christian
Poet.
 This pitiable starveling, not even possessed of so much as Job’s potsherd,
carries his dung upon his mind and slings his beggar’s pouch around his heart.
He kneels at the entrance to the old abode of Hope, to the ancient vessel of
Ecstasies, and, from the depths of his conscience, he calls on the scourged God
to be the witness of his holocaust.
He comes from remote sewers, bearing with him the unparalleled treasure
of the age’s stinks, nudities, abandonments, blasphemies and despairs, aware that
the faultless Spouse of the Redeemer has received the power to transfigure all
such things. He has chosen to be the mud of propitiation, and the sacrifice he
offers is first cousin to the fearful desolation he takes upon himself.
Sacrificing to Jesus riches, fame, even love, is the old game of the haloed
martyrs and confessors who are venerated in basilicas and whose stories are
written by teachers of virtue. But to sacrifice to the Dying One crowned with
thorns the joys of evil and the delightful slavery of vice! To renounce, for that
Lamb standing among lilies, the aromas of excrement!—such is the offering of
this pilgrim who has assigned himself the unlikely mission of representing
contemporary poetry at the foot of the Cross!
Unprecedented thank offering of a society gnawed by neuroses, and
betrothed to epilepsy! Extraordinary bounty of the poorest world that ever
existed! The generations balanced in body and mind whose greatness is
drummed into us did not do as much and were not obliged, in order to go toward
God, to straddle such abysses!
This battered, distressing fellow who—as he himself says in his preface to
Sagesse—is nothing more than a “skeptical and shallow” Verlaine if his poetry
is not our surrogate before God for the tutelage of our devils; this “heart
renaisant, pure and proud,” seems to pray, in his verses, to Jesus and Mary; this,
I believe, is, his real meaning:
“Spurned Lord, You who dwell invisible in your tabernacles, in the midst
of candlesticks and clericals, I most humbly beg you to give heed to my
embassy. I am an artist, a poet, and consequently an enemy of the norms decreed
by Your pastors. In their eyes I am wholly naked, purulent and loathsome. I do
not even have the honor of being accredited by the more or less notable fat necks
and scoundrels whose putrefaction I have meddlingly undertaken to display
before You in my own person.
“Nonetheless I have thought it expedient and wise to yield to that
impulsion which induced me to recruit You, O Chief of the elect, in the
cleansing of such blackguards.
 “The question is, do You accept the sacrificial offering of Poetry or do you
not? It happens that through the workings of some obscure law this
contemplative maiden, whom one might think to be moored to the tables of Your
altars, actually lives among those who do not know You or have contempt for
You; and the apostles constipated with virtue, who are so bunglingly shaped for
Your service, not only never bestir themselves to seek her, but diligently keep
her away from Your thresholds, favoring her occasionally with a curt
malediction.
“Will you really and truly have any part of her? I, sickly as I am, bring her
to You pinioned like a succubus, driving mad or corrupting men born blind. I
have conquered her and I have mastered her for You alone, having succeeded in
seizing her tools for bewitchment, her rhythms, her images, her philters, her
book of spells, and here she is, totally my slave, in the posture of adoration
which my will imposed on her.
“That is why I dare declare myself the emissary of an entire world. What I
offer You, Lord, is no less a trophy than the Chimaera worshipped by the proud
spirits who have withdrawn from You. It is their refuge, their Ivory Tower, their
Our-Lady-of-Sorrows-and-Recoverance. A handful, probably, will follow her
even into the Saving Wound in Your Side. And I, this conqueror, who have
abjured the delight of vilely possessing her outside Your Presence, I ask for
nothing less than the Jubilee of Your Grace as a reward for this fabulous
sacrifice!…”

Verlaine is a religious poet of so singular a sweetness that one might think

it eucharistic. It is not exactly the things he says which move us; they were said
long before him by every religious writer, with endless elucidations. It is not
even the papal authority of his verse or the matchless play of his meters; it is the
accent, the ineffable accent of his lover’s faith!
When you run through his writings while full of the turmoil of worldly
ideas, it is very nearly impossible to be struck by them. You may even chance to
scorn them as a trifling repetition of hoary prattle. But if the soul is balanced and
at rest, this poetry spills over it like a healing syrup or an opiate.
Then, from the depths of the seas of memory, suddenly there surge forth
the almost forgotten sweet charms of yesteryear; the chilly chiming of the bells
at dawn for those early morning masses at which the heart, as yet unsullied by
the foul influence of light, overflowed toward the quiet tabernacles in the
shadowy silence of the naves; the sudden flights of heavenly love, the burning
desires for martyrdom, the indescribable tendernesses and that rain of holy tears
which poured forth on a far-off day, gone beyond recall; and finally, the joy you
had at being poor and at feeling yourself in the hand of the Father of the poor,
like an icicle in the midst of a furnace—and you are wholly enfolded in a great
tremor of nostalgia.

When this “sweepings of the world” will look upon the Eyes of the Sole
Judge, the eternal Wisdom whom he has glorified may well say to him before his
accusers while they rage with fright:
“I was hungry, and you gave Me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me to
drink; I was a Stranger, and you took Me in…”
And the Tower of Ivory will sob with compassion before all Heaven!

[Admiration, the Sublime Form of Love.] “After all, it is possible I may

have expressed myself in a violent way—I am not known for my gentle voice—
but it would have been manful in M. D. to have taken the rebuke, viewing it as
coming from a man who is very much his senior, in the faith as well as in
teaching, and of whom he is an admirer. What is one to think of an admiration
which would extend only to the outer form of my thought, while rejecting my
thought itself? That would be to put me on the level of cheap phrase makers.
“You write me that a ‘blind admiration’ is not at all flattering. I could
answer you, with the pride of Hell and the impudence of a person damned, that
such is precisely the admiration for which I thirst. I have never desired any other,
and when I myself have happened to admire someone, I admired as generously
as I could, without glancing back, without reservation; drawing myself aside,
forgetting myself entirely, especially when I knew the one I admired was a poor
man wonderfully deprived of his wages, a captive in dark places.
“One always has leisure to build up trifling criticisms, but when, for the
first time, one gathers into one’s arms a pitiably forsaken man in whom one has
divined Greatness, the moment is as badly chosen as it possibly could be to tell
him he has scrofulous glands or a wen on his face.
“Admiration exists or it does not. If it exists, what else is it but a sublime
form of love? And love gives itself wholly, spontaneously, if it is truly Love,
that is, something other than the Nothing, spoken of by Saint Paul. Omnia
suffert, omnia credit, omnia sperat, omnia sustinet (it beareth all things,
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things).
“This is what Ernest Hello, he also greatly disregarded, deprived of his
recompense, called ‘intellectual Charity,’ something which people ever refused
him. The prudent and the cautious do not love and are incapable of admiration.
“These remarks, which are very general, are not in a precise and rigorous
sense intended for your friend, who may possess very high qualities of soul, but
who is certainly not humble, in the Christian and priestly sense of this word. His
reply to his superior is a bad one: ‘I have no reason whatever for obeying you,
but I obey you.’ Seriously, what would you think of one of your non-
commissioned officers who would give you such an answer? One has always
reason to obey, otherwise obedience would be absurd instead of reasonable; as
the Apostle has it: rationabile obsequium (reasonable obedience).
“His letter to me, a letter of a dozen lines to a writer he says he admires, is
merely the letter of a man who has been hurt. Frankly, what would you have me
say in reply? Life is short, and I would rather reread, for the two hundredth time,
the thirty-fourth chapter of Ezekiel.
“The offer you make me concerning a publication in the Pal style touches
me, and I beg you to thank your printer for me, but I have forsworn such
adventures. They were all right seven years ago. Today I must husband my
strength and reserve myself for my books. Above all I do not want to be a
pamphleteer forever. I shall perhaps be slain by want, but not, I dare to hope,
without having fulfilled my destiny as generously as it will have been given me
to do, striving to make known the Glory of God in works capable of lasting a
little longer than myself.”

[Hyperbole.] One sees this world’s evil accurately only by exaggerating it.
I have written this before, I don’t know where. In the Absolute there can be no
exaggeration, nor is there any in Art, which is the search for the Absolute. The
artist who considers only the object itself does not see it. The same is true for the
moralist, the philosopher, and even the historian. Perhaps above all the historian.
To say something worthwhile, as well as to give an impression of the Beautiful,
it is essential to seem to exaggerate, that is, to carry one’s scrutiny beyond the
object, and then one arrives at exactness itself devoid of exaggeration, something
which can be verified in the Prophets, who all were accused of exaggerating.
I felt this while writing The Soul of Napoleon. That great figure eluded me
whenever the images and expressions that came to me were insufficiently vast.
So well did I see that I must, no matter how, follow my soul, my own soul,
which kept pressing on beyond the historical figure, and in all directions, given
an orbit by my profound feeling of a divine presence surrounding this
incomparable man. Certainly I expect harsh criticism, but later, when enough
time has passed to supply a proper perspective, it will be understood that I have
exaggerated nothing, probably even that I have stopped short of what should
have been said.
Hyperbole is a microscope for discriminating between insects, and a
telescope for drawing nearer to the stars.

A perfectly true thought, expressed in very sound terms, can satisfy the
reason without giving any impression of the Beautiful; but in that case certainly
there is something false in its statement. It is essential that Truth be in Glory.
Splendor of style is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
 The Wisdom of the Bourgeois

AVARICE

T he evil of this world is of angelic origin and cannot be expressed in

any human language. Disobedience first, then Fratricide. That is the
whole story. But who can encompass it?***
The monster Avarice, taken by itself alone, baffles the reason. That
Apostle who was especially commissioned to teach the nations said that Avarice
is nothing less than Idolatry. The Holy Spirit who spoke through him left us on
the brink of an abyss which none can fathom. Avarice which kills the poor is as
unexplainable as Idolatry. Now Idolatry*** is the substitution of the Visible for
the Invisible, which is certainly the most monstrous, the most incomprehensible
of outrages.
Of course the avaricious man of our day, be he landlord, merchant,
industrialist, does not adore sacks of coins or bundles of banknotes in some little
chapel and upon some little altar. He does not kneel before these spoils of other
men, nor does he address prayers or canticles to them amidst odorous clouds of
incense. But he proclaims that money is the only good, and he yields it all his
soul. A cult sincere, without hypocrisy, never growing weary, never forsworn.
Whenever he says, in the debasement of his heart and his speech, that he loves
money for the delights it can purchase, he lies or he terribly deceives himself,
this very assertion being belied at the very moment he utters it by every one of
his acts, by the infinite toil and pains to which he gladly condemns himself in
order to acquire or conserve that money which is but the visible figure of the
Blood of Christ circulating throughout all His members.
Far from loving it for the material enjoyment from which he abstains, he
adores it in spirit and in truth, even as the Saints love the God who makes
penance a duty for them, and martyrdom a glory. He adores it in the stead of
those who do not adore it, he suffers in the stead of those who have no will to
suffer for money’s sake. The avaricious are mystics! Everything they do is with
a view to pleasing an invisible God whose visible and laboriously courted
likeness loads them with torture and shame.

I SHOULD LIKE TO SHOW THE HIDDEN THINGS OF LANGUAGE

“I received your big bag of coal the day before yesterday, on the Feast of
Sainte Geneviève of the Embers. So I warm myself as I write the second series
of my Lieux Communs, for which all my friends have asked and which, I like to
hope, will be a little more vehement than the first.
“Yes, you are right, one must need consolation himself to be able to
console others, and with depth do you say this. What thanks do we not owe God
who has vouchsafed us to suffer in order to understand that marvelous fact! You
suffered a crushed heart, on a certain day, and you know my life. Injustice is
certainly not pretty to look at, but what power its sad and cruel face can inspire,
in those who are able to look upon it without fear! The new book I have just
started, which will keep me busy all winter, will prove it to you.
“I too descend daily into underground and fearful passageways wherein the
countenances of devils appear before me. I descend into them so that people may
be able to say of me as of Dante, that I have seen Hell. I assure you that it takes
boldness and strong trust in God to make such explorations.
“Others have shown or have wanted to show what hides beneath men’s
customs, things hidden, so to speak, at ground level. But I should like to show
the hidden things of language, which are only to be uncovered at a frightening
depth… When I clamber back from these-deeps, my heart is shriveled and my
poor head is tight as a drum.”

RIEN N’EST ABSOLU1

(Nothing is absolute—There are no absolutes)

Most of the men of my generation have heard this all through their younger
days. Whenever, drunk with disgust, we sought a springboard from which to
escape, leaping and vomiting, the Bourgeois appeared before us, armed with this
thunderbolt.
So of necessity we had to return to the profitably Relative and to a discreet
filthiness.
 Almost all of us, true enough, by good fortune got used to it, becoming
wielders of the same thunderbolt in our own turn.
Yet are they aware, these bibbers of a foul nectar, that nothing is so bold as
countermanding the unalterable, and that to do so implies the obligation of being
oneself something like the Creator of a new earth and of new heavens?
On the face of it, if you swear up and down that “there are no absolutes,”
arithmetic, by the same token, becomes changeable at our bidding, and
uncertainty hangs over the most unquestioned axioms of the simplest geometry.
At once we are entitled to wonder whether it is better to slit or not slit one’s
father’s throat; better to possess twenty-five centimes or seventy-four million
francs; better to be kicked in the arse or to found a dynasty.
In a word, all identities go by the board.*** It would be rash to maintain
that a bedbug is wholly a bedbug, and must not aspire to having a coat of arms.
Under such circumstances, it must be agreed that the duty of reshaping the
world becomes imperative.

LE MIEUX EST L’ENNEMI DU BIEN

(The better is the enemy of the good)

Here, I admit, my stated purpose overwhelms me and I am furiously

tempted to come down from my high horse. Exegesis means, alas, explanation,
and here is a very monster of a sententious saying coming toward me along the
road to Thebes. Assuredly never was a harder riddle asked of Oedipus. All the
same, let’s have a look at it.
If the Better is the enemy of the Good, it necessarily follows that the Good
must be the enemy of the Better, for philosophical abstractions are relentless,
just as they know no humility. A man can answer hate with love, but an idea
never can, and the more excellent the idea, the more stubborn it is.
It is thus implicitly affirmed that the Good has a horror of the Better and
that a fierce hatred keeps them apart. It’s a matter of which will eat the other,
eternally. But in that case, what is the Good and what is the Better and what was
the origin of their conflict? What does this grammatical Manichaeism expect of
us?
Is it good, for instance, to be a dolt, and better to have genius? When one
says that God has done everything for the Best,2 must I understand that He did
nothing for the Good? In what metaphysical cave did this positive and this
comparative declare war on each other? It’s enough to drive you crazy.
 I take my head in both hands and bestrew myself with endearments: “Let’s
see! let’s try again, my dearest friend, my treasure, my sweet little rabbit! Let’s
be calm, perhaps we’ll find the thread again.” We have said, or have heard it
said, that the Better is the enemy of the Good, haven’t we? Now what is the
enemy of the Good unless it be the Bad? Therefore the Better and the Bad are
identical. Already a ray of light, it would seem…
Yes, but if the Better is indeed the Bad, we shall be forced to admit that the
Good, in its turn, is also the Bad, most incontestably, since all men admit that the
Good is better than the Bad which is the Better, and that consequently the Good
is better than the Better which would then be the worse!?
Confound it! Ariadne is letting go of me, and I hear the bellowings of the
ancient Minotaur.

PAUVRETE: N’EST PAS VICE

(Poverty is no crime)

An ironical statement. Would you kindly tell me, O kindly landlord, what
can be a vice or a crime unless it he poverty?
I believe I have often said it elsewhere: poverty is the one and only vice,
the only sin, the exclusive black mark, the unforgivable and very special betrayal
of trust. That’s the way you see it all right, you precious blackguards who judge
the world?
Let it be proclaimed once for all: poverty is so infamous that it is the last
excess of cynicism or the ultimate cry of a conscience in despair to acknowledge
it, and there is no punishment to expiate it.
So much is it the duty of man to be rich that the presence of a single poor
person cries unto Heaven, like Sodom’s abomination, and strips God Himself
naked, forcing Him to become flesh and scandalously to wander about the Earth,
clad only in the rags of His Prophecies.
Indigence is a wickedness, a frightful blasphemy the horror of which
cannot possibly he expressed, and which at one and the same time makes flinch
both the stars and the dictionary.
How the Gospel is misunderstood! When one reads that “it is easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven,” one must be blind not to see that those words actually
exclude none but the camel, since all the rich, without exception, are surely
sitting upon golden seats in Paradise, and since it is therefore utterly impossible
for them to enter a place where they are already, and have always been, firmly
entrenched. It’s the camels’ business to slip through needles before they slip
through Heaven’s gate and to work out their problem as best they can. There is
no need to bother about any other interpretation.
This Common Maxim more than any other bears witness to the false
modesty of the Bourgeois. It is a sheet which, in all sincerity and with the
seraphic smile of attendants in an operating room, he uses to veil the most
horrible cancer of mankind.

LES MALHONNÊTES GENS REDOUTENT LA LUMIERE3

(Disreputable people are afraid of light)

And what about respectable people! Does anyone think that light puts them
at their ease? Ah, if light still remained to be created, I don’t know what the
rogues would do, but I know well what the respectable would not do.
As it is, we see none too clearly on this our planet, where even the most
clear-sighted grope. Yet it would seem that even this is too much light, since
everybody hides himself. What would happen if Science, so greatly admired by
Zola and so worthy of the admiration of such a brain, came to bring out a new
ray which would light up the caverns of men’s hearts?
Is it not obvious that all business would at once become impracticable,
impossible? No more trade, no more industry, no more political deals, no more
medicine, no more pharmacy, no more cooking, no more lawsuits, no more
marriages, nor burials, nor wills, nor “good works” of any sort. And in the end,
no more love. Respectable people would cease to be born… There would remain
to busy themselves in the squirmings of humanity only those who “fear the
light” and who are called disreputable people. What strange disorder!
It is true that the latter would soon succumb in their turn, having
themselves, by the force of things, become respectable—in order to take the
place of those who had disappeared, and the two species making up the whole of
our genus would disappear, exterminated one after the other by light, just like
those fresh and brilliant colors which the sun devours, it is said, to break his fast.
Let us hope these misfortunes will not come to pass and that disreputable
people as well as the respectable, those who “fear” the light no less than those
who go only as far as finding it indiscreet, will continue to reinvigorate each
other under the blue vault of the sky, mutually abet each other in the poetic
setting of bailiffs, policemen and greenery. The universal harmony demands it.

IL FAUT MANGER POUR VIVRE

(You have to eat if you want to live)

“I’d like nothing better than to eat,” says a poor man; “although life is not
dear to me, all the same I have to have something to put between my teeth. All
the dogs eat and live. Those not so lucky as to be served by a master fill up all
the same on first-rate garbage which suffices their vital needs as dogs. I myself
can’t do that. I have the misfortune of belonging to the human race and of being
favored with a lofty countenance which must ever confront the stars. My nose is
not that of a dog, and carrion is like lead on my stomach…”
I have heard it said that there once used to be a Meat for the poor and that
the starving could resort to eating God in order to live eternally. In very olden
times people dragged themselves, weeping the tears of Paradise, from a
confessor’s chapel to a martyr’s crypt and from a miraculous sanctuary to a
basilica full of glory, over roads cluttered with pilgrims begging for the Body of
the Savior. That unique food sufficed for some, who were the Blessed, whose
bodily weakness had the power of curing all weaknesses and, sometimes, of
resurrecting the dead. All this is far away, terribly far away…
Today it is the Bourgeois who has taken the place of Jesus and even sows
would recoil from his body.

LES AFFAIRES SONT LES AFFAIRES

(Business is Business)

Of all Stock Phrases, handsome and austere as they usually are, I think that
here is the most awesome, the most august. It is the umbilicus of all Stock
Phrases, it is the age’s ultimate word. But one must understand it, and to do so is
not indiscriminately bestowed on all men. Poets, for instance, or artists
understand it ill. Those we archaically call heroes or even saints have not the
slightest understanding of it.
The business of salvation, spiritual business, business of honor, State
business, even the business of the citizen, are businesses which could be
something else, but they are not Business, which can be nothing but Business,
without subdivision or qualifier.
 To be in Business is to dwell in the Absolute. A man who is totally a
business man is a stylite who never comes down from his column. He must have
thoughts, feelings, eyes, ears, nose, taste, a sense of touch and a stomach only for
Business. The business man knows neither father nor mother, neither uncle nor
aunt, neither wife nor children, neither the beautiful nor the ugly, neither the
clean nor the dirty, neither hot nor cold, neither God nor devil. He is wildly
ignorant of letters, art, science, history, law. He must recognize and know only
Business.
“In Paris you have the Sainte Chapelle and the Louvre, true enough, but we
in Chicago kill eighty thousand hogs a day…!” The man who says that is in truth
a business man. Yet there is one who is even more of a business man, he who
sells this pig’s meat, and this seller in his turn is surpassed by the astute buyer
who therewith infects all the markets of Europe. It would be impossible to say
exactly what Business is. It is that mysterious divinity, something like an Isis of
the swinish, by whom all other divinities are supplanted. It would not be rending
the veil surrounding this mystery to mention, here or elsewhere, money,
gambling, ambition, etc.… Business is Business, just as God is God, that is to
say, over and above everything. Business is the Inexplicable, the Unprovable,
the Uncircumscribed, the point where it is enough to utter this Stock Phrase in
order to solve all questions, in order instantly to muzzle all reproof, anger,
complaints, entreaties, indignations and reproaches. When these seven syllables
have been uttered, everything has been said, everything has been answered, and
there is no hope for further Revelation.
In short, those who would penetrate this arcanum are summoned to a kind
of mystic disinterestedness, and the day is surely not far off when men will flee
all the vanities of the world and all its pleasures and will hide themselves in
solitary places to consecrate themselves wholly and exclusively to Business.

ETRE A CHEVAL SUR LES PRINCIPES

(To ride horseback on principles4)

This is a manner of horsemanship practiced exclusively by the Bourgeois.

It is the safest known. Indeed there is no record of such a rider ever having been
unhorsed. But then, how admirably trained are these principles! Mounts all the
more engaging as they cost nothing, and come forward on their own to meet
their Cossacks! The bicycle and the automobile are left far behind, for such
principles go even faster and run over people better, in a more satisfactory, more
irrecoverable fashion. They not merely crush the bodies of the weak and of
innocents lacking anyone to defend them. They also and especially crush their
souls.
The principles the Bourgeois ride are unmatchable, never-to-be-outridden
chargers of death, and they house them in the stables of their hearts.

TOUTES LES VÉRITÉS NE SONT PAS BONNES A DIRE

(Some truths are best not told)

There are other truths, in larger number, which are no better in the hearing.
Thus we must make a choice between the former and the latter, something which
supposes the discernment of angels, and of what angels!
A truth that would lay open to some misfortune either him who uttered it or
him who witnessed it would obviously not be a good truth to tell. One’s skin
comes before everything, each man to his own trade, the Bourgeois is no martyr.
But neither is he a confessor, a penitent hungering for humiliations, and of the
truths which embarrass him he thinks it better to remain unaware.
This is all very well, but now we come upon a strange thing. If at one and
the same time we suppress these truths which it is dangerous to tell and those
which are disagreeable to hear, what will he left? For seek as I may, I discover
no third category.
Let us say it without heating about the bush. No truth is good to tell, such
is the true meaning of the text. Perhaps, indeed, there is no such thing as Truth.
Pilate, who saw It face to face, was none too sure.

IL N’Y A QUE LA VÉRITÉ QUI OFFENSE

(It is the truth only which gives offense)

Was I not right? Not only are there truths which are not good to hear, but
the deep-dyed Bourgeois tells us that it is Truth only which gives him offense.
Falsehood does not offend him, will never offend him. It is by way of
being an uncle from whom he constantly hopes to inherit and for whom he
cannot overdo his solicitude. When Falsehood is made flesh, which is some day
to come to pass, it need only say: “Abandon all and follow me,” at once to carry
in its train not a dozen poor men, but millions of bourgeois, male and female,
who will follow it wherever it is pleased to go.
Up till now, Truth alone has taken on fleshly form. Ego Veritas qui locor
tecum (I am the truth who speak to thee), and you know how it was greeted! Ah!
people were not fooled for one minute: Crucifigatur! (Let It be crucified!) It is
the TRUTH only which gives offense.

L’HONNEUR DES FAMILLES

(The honor of the family)

In olden days, before it had been decreed that the meaning of words be
done away with, a family’s honor lay in yielding Saints or Heroes, or at least
useful servants of the public weal. This whether you were rich or poor, whether
you came of a distinguished lineage or whether you did not. If you did not, you
simply moved up the aristocratic ladder, in the normal course of events.
In our day family honor consists solely and exclusively in escaping the
clutches of the police.
Enlightened bourgeois sometimes concede, after asking for time to reflect
on the matter, that poverty can, in a very small number of cases which they take
good care not to specify, not constitute dishonor, but nothing would ever wipe
away the shame of a conviction in court, especially for the inhabitants of our
smaller cities and towns.
In vain have the Martyrs rested their bones on our altars for centuries; in
vain does the Church ring out their feasts and flood them with glory; the
Bourgeois, thoroughly dubious about them, looks upon them as clumsy fools
who let themselves be caught and who have a police record. Saint Laurence’s
niece would never be able to make any sort of match, and a great-grandnephew
of the Good Thief would never be given even a clerical post in some government
agency.
The disgust of the bourgeois with Christianity stems in large part from his
feelings about honor—this has not been sufficiently pointed out. He cannot come
to terms with a religion whose “founder,” after having undergone ignominious
punishment, arose from the dead in order eternally to augment the dishonor of
His family.

CHACUN POUR SOI ET LE BON DIEU POUR TOUS

(Every man for himself and the Good Lord for all—Every man for
 himself and the devil take the hindmost)

Madame Plutarque, owner of the old firm of Plutarque and Uncle, a

stationery and church goods store, makes her daily meditation in her parish
church, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. She is a most pious woman.
“Dear Son of the Almighty,” says she, with the help of one of those
manuals of devotion put out by the house of Mame or the house of Poussielgue,
which have no further need of praise. “O my most sweet Master who came into
this world to drive away sin, have mercy on those who live in such defilement
and groan at the shadow of death…. I must also ask You to send us a few more
people on our fiftieth anniversary. Then or never might we unload our old cotton
scapulars which are beginning to get moth-eaten, and You know we have a lot of
them left…
“Lamb without stain, You who offer Yourself for sinners with so much
love, have mercy on their condition and deliver them from the bondage to the
Devil through the merit of Your sacrifice…. I am very much afraid I ordered too
many of those porcelain holy water fonts. Some of our customers complain that
they’re too expensive. But it’s a profitable item which I can’t, after all, sell for
less. Otherwise I might just as well go out of business. Luckily they are
frequently broken and are always in demand. The big turnover makes up for a
few markdowns….
“Our sins, O Divine Savior, have armed Your executioners with the
instruments of Your torture… It’s true that business is business, and we couldn’t
make ends meet if we were to give merchandise away. Then there’s the dead
season in which you can’t even sell a catechism, a bottle of ink or a ream of
paper. If now and then, here and there, we let slip by a little novel that’s a bit
light, some trifling bit of filth, a tiny set of more or less questionable postcards,
Dear Lord, that’s up to those who buy them, isn’t it? Of course I only do this sort
of business, as You know, with well-dressed gentlemen of a certain age. What’s,
wrong with that? Ah! sweet Jesus, don’t ever go into business!…
“This mystery teaches us bodily mortification. It is to imitate the scourged
Savior that the saints have made use of bloody disciplines… Oh, the sale of
disciplines isn’t any too brisk either! If we manage to sell a few paltry Saint
Francis’ girdles, that’s the most we ever do. As for horsehair, it’s no longer
wanted, I can understand that. We had a few old hair shirts left which we used to
say belonged to the Cure d’Ars, as it’s the custom to do in our business. We had
such trouble getting rid of them that we have refused to stock any new ones.
 “I admit, O Jesus, that it was Your Death which destroyed sin in me. It is
Your Resurrection which has delivered me from the tomb of vices in which I had
slept so long the sleep of death…. Indeed, our firm is going to expand, in spite of
everything. The maker of suppositories no longer has any real business. Besides,
he’s a Dreyfus-man and we are helping him all we can to go bankrupt. He’ll
have asked for it. As for his daughter, who’s dying on account of her lungs, it’s a
good thing You are taking her. We tried to do something for her and little thanks
we got. Didn’t her father accuse us of killing her by making her stand all day in
the shop, as though we are answerable for our neighbor’s illnesses? Every man
for himself and the devil take the hindmost. When she was no longer able to
work, we threw her out, as was right and proper. You would have done as much,
would you not, my Redeemer? Now let people slander me all they will, I’ll be
able to carry my cross to the end, with the help of Your grace. The love of God
must suffice me in this valley of tears, and in the eternal bliss to come. Amen.”

ON FAIT CE QU’ON PEUT

(A man does what he can)

When a man has had children and has succeeded in making a name for
himself, he has done what he could, and I do not see what more God Himself
could ask. The famous Commandments of Sinai are nothing but an optional
stage setting. What I have just specified are the solid and sure achievements.
“One day,” says the Blessed Angela of Foligno, “I was deep in meditation
on the death of the Son of God… And then these words were said to me in my
soul: ‘It is no laughing matter that I have loved thee!’ I felt I had received a
mortal blow and I do not know why I did not die… Other words came to me
which increased my suffering: ‘It is no laughing matter that I have loved thee, it
is not a joke that I have made myself thy servant, it is not from afar that I have
touched thee!”’
At these last words, the Bourgeois, the true, the eternal Bourgeois, he who
was a murderer from the Beginning, jumps up, crying:
“You’ve touched me—You! You dare to say You’ve touched me, with
Your pierced Hands and Feet, and Your bloody Face, and Your bloody Sweat,
and the howls of Your Jewish multitude, and the supernatural sweat from Your
long Scourging! You’ve touched me! Oh, You have, You pitiful Man-God, You
pitiful Lord of days long gone! You haven’t even the power of a bright new
penny to catch my eye. You did not want to joke with Your Blessed one, and she
did not want to joke either. Well, with me, it’s the opposite. I am a gay man, a
happy fellow, and I no more need Your Tears than Your Blood. I was born for
Business and for a laugh, and I know nothing about penance or about ecstasies.
A man does what he can; we are not cattle.”
Post-scriptum: “I was hungry,” the Judge will say, “and you gave me not
to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me not to drink…” “All this is fine,” a
thousand pork butchers will reply, “but Lent hurts business like hell.”

IL FAUT SE METTRE À LA PORTÉE DE TOUT LE MONDE

(You must put yourself within the reach of all the world)

That is what is asked of me. People find me too much out of the ordinary. I
am equally beyond the reach of notaries, pious females, and makers of
suppositories. Elementary statements, axioms beyond dispute, even the most
attested truisms take on in my case an appearance of mystery offending against
common sense. I have therefore determined to put myself within the reach of all
the world. But I don’t know how. I am even obliged to admit that I don’t know
what those words mean. Am I to understand that you are within reach of all the
world when you are so placed that you are slapped or kicked from all directions,
a position, I must admit, very ill-assorted with my habits and my instincts? How
many times, on the contrary, and with what longing have I not desired, in the
same sense, that all the world be within my reach!
It is true that this desire was silly, since all the world is a meaningless
phrase, standing for something that cannot be clearly singled out. When
someone talks to me about people of the world, men or women of the world, I
think at once of that elegant and stupid crowd marked with the seal of the Prince
of devils, for whom Christ said He was not praying. Instantly I understand, and
even am tempted to run to the nearest cemetery once again to contemplate the
fearful wretchedness of those proud slabs which Ann-Catherine Emmerich saw
were overspread with darkness, and which sometimes sink down—I have
noticed it—below ground level, very shortly after the burial.
But there’s the infinite throng of other people, of all those who cannot be
said to be of the world, and yet who are implicitly designated every time you
say: all the world. And in this throng above all there are the poor. Here my
reason fails me, and I fail utterly to see how I could, at the same time, put myself
within reach of the blackened sepulchres and of the luminous living hosts!
To put myself within the reach of all the world—let’s consider it again!
Oh, my poor soul, is it possible? Answer me, since my understanding is silent.
You, my soul, were in church this morning, trying to unite yourself, to identify
yourself with Jesus who gave Himself to all men. Surely you prayed as well as
you could for the living and the dead. At the risk of making me sick at my
stomach, you even mercifully remembered, I suppose, those who, neither living
nor dead, continue to exist, no one knows why, in the midst of excrement, and
who are called the Bourgeois. Is that the way to put oneself within the reach of
all the world? On the contrary, it seems to me that at such a moment the world
was no longer tangible for you, my soul, and that you yourself had become
absolutely intangible to it…. You answer me nothing, even you, and I am left
impaled upon my question.
So here I am, unable to do what I am asked. I shall try nevertheless, being
used to impossible tasks. Who knows? Perhaps the world is not so extensive as it
seems. When a poor housewife rakes over the fire in her oven, she is amazed at
the quantity of ashes and at the small amount of fuel she has left for cooking her
meal and heating her house. It could be that after the cooking of my earlier
Exégèse, I may well find very little to put back in my oven, and that All the
World would he reduced to a few serviceable individuals. This thought gives me
fresh hope.

AVOIR DES CHARGES

(I have such heavy responsibilities)

A man has responsibilities when he has people to feed: his wife, children,
mother-in-law, superannuated relatives who live on and on forever and whom he
cannot send to the slaughterhouse without some slight loss of respectability. It’s
true the state supplies poor relief—which was not organized for dogs—but how
can a man resort to it when, at the same time, he has his responsibilities as a
magistrate, notary or stockbroker? In such circumstances you are indeed a
martyr and daily you tell heaven and earth about it.
Being rich is no help. Any least experience of life shows that the richer you
are, the heavier your responsibilities, since then you have less excuse to
complain about them; and you must be deaf or singularly unfeeling not to hear
the groans of the wealthy on this score, not to have your heart torn by them.
Yes, indeed; but luckily Achilles’s lance heals the wounds it makes. When
a man has several million francs coupled with such overwhelming
responsibilities as paying a food allowance of two francs a day to his aged
mother, he then has the precious asset of turning away those who ask for help: “I
have heavy responsibilities!” And thereby he affects truly Scottish economies—
the most heart-warming of all—and at the same time he anoints his conscience.

FAIRE LA CHARITÉ
(Giving to charity)
“Date eleemosynam, give alms.”

Translation for the use of pious bourgeois: give to charity. You have an
income of three hundred thousand francs, yon give a few pennies at the church
door, then you dash off in an automobile to devote your attention to vile or silly
doings. This is called giving to charity. Ah, some day God, who made man’s
tongue, will have terribly to avenge that outraged organ!
“Let him be caught in the net of his own eyes when he shall look upon
me,” said dazzling Judith as she went to cut off Holofernes’s head, “and do Thou
strike him by the charity of my lips.” “Charity covereth all crimes,” says
Solomon. “The Beloved brought me into the cellar of wine: he set in order
charity in me. Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples: because
I languish with love… Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the
floods drown it.” The sorrowful soul of the tortured Son of God sings thus in the
Canticle of Canticles.—”I have loved thee with an everlasting charity,” says the
Lord through the mouth of Jeremias, “and I have drawn thee to me in pity, virgin
of Israel.”
How many other sayings there are before you come to the Gospels wherein
Jesus speaks of “the cooling of the charity of a great number, when injustice
shall abound,” and curses the Pharisees who “transgress it with disdain”;
especially before you reach that dreadful chapter in Saint Paul which the Church
sings, on Quinquagesima Sunday, at the time she reminds her faithful that the
Son of Man is to be betrayed, made game of, abused, spat upon, scourged and
put to death; a chapter as frightening as would be the lowing of the stars, in
which Charity is depicted as a Person unable to die, seated before an unknown
door!… We see that She can suffer everything, believe everything, hope for
everything. We are warned that without Her all is vain, that without Her it would
avail us nothing to give away all our possessions, even our bodies at the stake. If
you are among the children of the Saints or even remotely related to the children
of the Saints, you read, weeping and sobbing, that it is nothing to speak all
languages, to be a prophet, to be acquainted with all mysteries and to possess all
knowledge; that with all this, one is absolutely nothing without Her; that Charity
is patient, benign, in no way envious or malicious, having no vanity, no
ambition, not even seeking what belongs to her, equally a stranger to anger and
to every thought of evil; in a word, that Charity is God Himself! …
Such are the heights we have reached when suddenly we learn that the
midwife, the wholesale wine merchant, the piano tuner, the photographer’s wife,
the station master’s lady-friend, give to charity. Surely this is bewildering and
stupefying. No longer are you sure whether you are at Patmos or at Lesbos,
whether you are fitted for the life of a soldier or for that of a police drudge,
whether you are sane or mad, whether you are sitting in the midst of some
joyous feast or are buried alive at the bottom of your grave, in a coffin firmly
nailed up by scrupulous undertaker’s helpers.
You reflect and assure yourself in a daze that since the High Mass of
Golgotha there have been Christians in infinite number, millions of Martyrs who
joyfully accepted the worst torments, Confessors, Hermits, Virgins, who
renounced all that the world can offer, who gave all that can be given, in order to
die of love, absolutely stripped of every thing, and who did not even feel they
had done enough to be thought charitable.
It would seem all this is nothing compared to the heroism of a Landlord
who ostentatiously gives ten centimes each Sunday to the beggar at the entrance
to the church, after having pondered, all during the service, whether he should
once and for all dispossess the poor families who cannot pay their rent.
A wise old man with whom I was taking counsel once said these profound
words to me, which I recommend to thinkers: “The Saints give Alms, the
Bourgeois alone give to Charity.”

IL VAUT MIEUX FAIRE ENVIE QUE PITIÉ

(It is better to arouse envy than pity)

Let us seek light in this fashion. The word “better,” magis, is so full of
light! Melius est magis. “It is better,” says Tobias, “to give alms than to lay up
treasures.” But obviously that is not what we are looking for. “It is better,” says
David, “to be abject in the house of God than to live in the tabernacles of
sinners.” We have not yet got there. Let us continue to leaf through the Holy
Book. “Men loved darkness rather than the light,” Christ said to Nicodemus. Ah,
I think we are getting close this time. A little further on, Christ says again that
there are some who “loved the glory of men rather than the glory of God.” There
is no use seeking any further; we have hit it precisely. Phrasemakers have rather
often spoken of the darkness of envy, and, contrariwise, people have tried to
make imbeciles believe that pity, in contrast, has something radiant about it. Yet
it is natural to prefer human glory, which brings in money and makes pretty
women run after you, to the glory of God, which brings you, as has often been
observed, nothing but utter poverty and humiliation. Our choice is certain. We
shall allow others to envy us all they want in their darkness, and we shall keep
luminous pity for ourselves, wisely considering it better to hold than to seek, and
that, since we are impermanent beings of uncertain duration, it is important that
we afford ourselves immediately all possible consolations, even were the poor to
burst with envy thereat.
The Miserere of the dead is poetic tomfoolery. Devotees of the liturgy are
fond of imagining that death does not exist, that there is another very changed
life in which the rich who had a very good time can require pity when their
carcasses have been borne to the cemetery. Well, as for us, we believe in a true,
integral death, without resurrection or purgatory. We shall summon it with all
our strength when we are no longer capable of enjoyment, and we shall want it
eternal.

FAIRE UN BOUT DE TOILETTE

(To spruce oneself up a bit)

The executioner appears on the scene with a pair of scissors to cut his
client’s hair. “Come, dear friend,” says he affectionately, “we’re going to spruce
you up a bit.” “No kidding!” the condemned man replies. The conversation
usually does not go much further.
When I hear a bourgeois announce he is going to spruce up a bit
preparatory to a round of worldly pleasures, I think of that scene, of that
condemned person, perhaps himself less criminal, who also is sprucing up a bit
in preparation for his journey into the next world, and I very clearly see Death
standing behind my bourgeois. I grant that he will return with his head on his
shoulders, but if it is like his heart it will be a death’s head, and the other
bourgeois with their death’s heads will salute in him a man of the world who is
like unto them—all the while forgetting the municipal regulations which require
the closing of cemeteries at the fall of day.

AVOIR UN COEUR D’OR

 (To have a heart of gold)

What a privilege! No more throbbings of the heart, no more emotions, no

more foolish love, no more ill-considered enthusiasms. One is at peace like the
swineherd and happy like his swine. One no longer gnaws one’s heart, one’s
heart no longer bleeds. Cessation of all ridiculous phenomena. One doesn’t have
a heart of brass, a heart of stone, much less a lion’s heart, but a handsome
shining organ, cone-shaped and hollow, all gold, and perfectly unfeeling. Here is
the inestimable privilege of the true Bourgeois. The greatest tribute one can pay
him is to say that he has a heart of gold. Landlords, process-servers, usurers
nearly always have a heart of gold and how obviously so! If you try to ruffle
them, move them, or bestir them in any way whatsoever, you are wasting your
time. A heart of gold will put a bit of leaden ballast into your head, lead into
your legs, and you will look as black as graphite.
But the trouble is that a heart of gold is a gift of nature. It is not found at
the jewelers’, who usually sell only plate, and who thus deceive so many naïve
young couples, making ready unpleasant surprises for them at the pawnshop. If
unkind nature has given you only an ordinary heart, you can still fall back on
marrying a young woman with a heart of gold and a very unfeathered nest.
Starting the very next morning you will be aware of your happiness. Such is my
advice to you.

LA RELIGION EST SI CONSOLANTE!

(Religion is so consoling)

This assertion is usually uttered or murmured by persons who have no need

of consolation. It implies that you have just enough religion not to resemble
those publicans who sorrowfully fast from one end of the year to the other, while
you all the while polish off exquisite meals in great peace of conscience. You
owe nothing to people who are dying of destitution, since they have religion to
console them. It is altogether up to them to eat their crusts with delight, or even
to rejoice in eating nothing whatever. Hollow stomachs make excellent drums
wherewith to drill poverty-stricken wretches for their conquest of Paradise. So
much the worse for them if they do not understand their own happiness.
A friend of mine paid a visit to the pastor of one of the richest parishes in
Paris. Glistening carriages stood before the door. He had to wait until the parade
of grand ladies and grand gentlemen had passed through. At last my pedestrian
friend was ushered in. “Father, this must be quite a change from M.,” he said,
naming a very poor parish which the priest knew well. “Indeed,” the priest
replied, “it is more consoling!” I underline these words which might otherwise
not be sufficiently noticed. They seem like nothing, yet they contain the whole
history of our dear religious France at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This worthy priest is not afraid of saying that he needed consolations. The sight
of the poor distressed his priestly soul. He was not comfortable among those
who suffer, and he ought rather to have been entrusted with a flock he was able
to shepherd. For the rich are consoling in that they themselves have an
occasional desire to be consoled.
To be strictly accurate, one would have to say that they need it even more
than the poor, having much more refined souls, as our Paul Bourget has so
delicately observed, he himself having been endowed with a soul so refined that
it seems to have but a single one of the three dimensions required for
geometrically delimiting crude and palpable things. Here is something admirably
sensed by ladies’ pastors. The priests console the women and the women console
the priests. Religion then becomes a bazaar of reciprocal consolations, a genteel
bazaar where are continually exchanged words of consolation, such as those
uttered by the Angel of the prophet Zacharias, but whereto the coarse souls of
the destitute cannot be admitted.
Without harking back to the time of the Martyrs, whose history is not at all
consoling, one may read, in books overstepping the proprieties, that there exist
adages long before the founding of the Jesuits, during which much less was said
about consolation. Consolation was postponed until the coming of the Paraclete,
a coming regarded as distant, and while awaiting this Third Reign of God on
earth, men thought they must suffer at the foot of the Cross, in the Blood of the
Father of the poor. This they thought resolutely, absolutely, and devotion had
nothing sentimental about it. The “exalted dignity of the poor,” whereof Bossuet
spoke much later, were not empty words addressed to wigs and headdresses, but
a tangible, undisputed truth, to such an extent that it was an almost
commonplace occurrence to see rich people and sometimes most exalted lords
making themselves poor in order to partake of it. It is true that at that time
people feared the Gospel, and that they have since grown bolder. “Woe to you,
ye rich, for ye have your consolation!” Just try to frighten someone today with
those Words of Jesus Christ!
But I see that our priest of a moment ago has led me too far astray. The
modern need for consolation is felt no less by the poor than by the rich, and that
is what Bourget would not be able to understand. Nor should I either, even
though my position is somewhat remote from that of the illustrious psychologist.
“I want to love, but I do not want to suffer,” the idiotic Alfred de Musset
idiotically makes one of his heroines say. That is the universal feeling of our
pious men and women, rich or poor. Coming from the poor, such a thing takes
your breath away.
To have the Suffering and Ignominy obtainable within hand’s reach and
not to want them! In other words, to have the means of building a spiritual
cathedral more magnificent and higher than all the famous basilicas, yet to prefer
to the first stone of this structure a honeyed little sentence whispered in shadow!
God perhaps does not exist, but religion is so consoling! Ah! What a worthy
religion is that of male and female pharisees, rotten at heart, who are consoled by
the Bloody Sweat of the Son of God.

DEVOIR A DIEU ET AD DIABLE

(One’s duty to God and to the Devil)

It would seem to be exactly the same thing. You owe God, the ascetic
teachers say, the sacrifice of your will, your affections, your tastes, your very
life; and the devil asks for an identical sacrifice. The only difference, which
might be thought essential and which, on the contrary, is a confirmation of the
identity between the two, is that God requires you to renounce the devil, and that
the devil, for his part, wholly wants you to renounce God.
How are we to satisfy the one and the other? It is idle to say that this is
impossible. The Bourgeois who has religious feelings sees very clearly the
absolute necessity of serving two masters at the same time in order to achieve
success in his business, which naturally comes before everything else. Besides,
he is aware within himself, at all times, of the two men in continual opposition,
of whom the Book speaks, and each of these two must necessarily have his
appropriate employment. An obscure bookkeeping comes in at this point. “Have
we done enough today to please God without displeasing the devil, and vice
versa; have we not been disagreeable to God by making too many concessions to
His adversary?” Who can flatter himself with having the required steady hand
for the management of such scales?
Who? you ask. Why, the Bourgeois, of course, the Bourgeois with his
ledgers of credit and debit. The great art at which they excel consists in subtly
and alternately shifting God and the Devil from one column to the other in such
a way as not to make enemies out of them and, at the same time, to swindle them
profitably one after the other. This is a highly skilled balancing act which
requires experience, quickness, and a strong stomach.
It will perhaps be objected that this is neither here nor there, that those who
use this Common Expression mean stupidly to say that one owes something to
everyone. I shall answer as I have several times before by saying that the words
of the Bourgeois, having about them something prophetic, go much farther than
his thought, which usually goes nowhere, and that what I have just written is
truly what he in reality says.

A LA GUERRE COMME À LA GUERRE

(In war you must take the consequences of war—We must take
things as they come)

I was awakened by someone weeping in the darkness. It was certainly past

midnight. The two horns of the waning moon were moving forward above my
head, at the very bottom of the black dome, and the stars, so brilliant in the early
morning, still twinkled chilly on the fringes of the Milky Way.
At first I felt nothing but very acute discomfiture. Tenderness is not easy
when one is half frozen, when one has eaten nothing for a long time, and
blasphemy was not far from my lips when, in the midst of the tears, I heard—
never to forget it—this middle verse of the magnificat: Et misericordia ejus a
progenie in progenies timentibus eum (and His mercy is from generation unto
generation, to them that fear Him).
This, in the black night and the great polar silence, was so strange that I
thought I was hearing something not of this earth.
We were lying in the neighborhood of dead men, and we were not quite
sure ourselves of still being among the living. We had had to fight the evening
before, at that very spot, and some of us, the luckiest, perhaps, had gone for their
suppers into the next world. Three or four groaning men had been taken away by
litter bearers who looked like shadows, and the survivors of our poor company
had stretched themselves out on the ground with empty stomachs while waiting
for the battle predicted for the following morning. Others beside myself, before
closing their eyes, had doubtless wondered what might indeed be the true name
of the sleep they were about to take. Some among them never awoke….
Timentibus eum… These two last words were uttered thrice, at regular
intervals, as by a fantastic clock with an articulate chime seeking to strike three,
but growing weaker each time. Then silence…. People sometimes speak of a
cold sweat when wishing to express the physical sensation of the heart’s great
anguish….
It was my duty to get up, to go to the dying comrade whose last thought
was for Her who was brought forth before the hills. I succeeded, but not without
difficulty. Timentibus eum. May they receive His mercy who fear God…. Where
are they, those people? And where was he, the one who spoke such words before
dying? I espied him at last. He was a most fearless little seminarian who did not
want the Prussian heretics to become the masters of France. He had received,
without complaint, a very serious wound, and there was nothing more to be
done. “A la guerre comme à la guerre…. We must take things as they come,” he
murmured as he saw me, and then he died.
When I hear a bourgeois on vacation make that wretched statement
regarding some discomfort, or some dainty he cannot obtain, I am forced to
resist the temptation of strangling him on the spot.

UNE VIE ÉDIFIANTE

(An edifying life)

Such is the life of Miss Purge, whom everyone can find, every day and at
all hours, in the Church of the Holy Innocents. You never tire of admiring this
Christian woman, so feared by the parish clergy, who outwardly resembles an
examination of conscience, of your conscience, O you lukewarm believer! Of an
age very accurately place-able between thirty-five and sixty years, as is proper
for those careful virgins who, since they always have oil in their lamps, do not
need to dash in the middle of the night to the grocer’s, she is recognized even by
strangers, who feel sure they have seen her, somewhere or other, during their
earliest youth.
Her clothes bring to mind the impregnable walls of Babylon on which the
Assyrian cavalry could maneuver at its ease. The sight alone of this fortress of
virtue discourages experienced captains and makes the rashest of foot soldiers
draw back.
As for her face, or rather the expression on her face, which is as shifting as
a kaleidoscope, it betrays such a conflict between surliness and compunction, so
furious a mixture of swooning piety and acrimony, of syrup and vinegar, of
benedictine and crude oil, that it is impossible to define it with any precision. A
snapshot of this unaccountable person would give to imaginative souls the
feeling of a confused display at some city bazaar in which all the items would be
extravagantly dear, and before which costermongers, even with the police hot on
their heels, would stop thunderstruck.
Her ostler’s voice, for use whenever some female stranger has taken her
seat in church, assumes the clear tones of a reed organ or the languishing
sonorities of a viol d’amore when she says her rosary or the litanies. He who has
not heard this has nothing heard.
Miss Purge has private means and owns a house inhabited by unhappy
working people who must envy the lot of African savages. She it was who, in
evicting a family of poor wretches who pled for a little more time about as
effectively as if they had begged it of a mountain peak, gave them this
classically succinct answer: “After all, landlords must eat!”
The parish church also belongs to her, as the proving ground belongs to the
artillery man. The pastor and his curates tremble under her, knowing only too
well that nothing could function without this charitable beetle who heads every
good work. When she takes up the collection, which happens very often, a more
than ordinary hardihood would be required to get off scot free. She has a way of
obstinately shoving her alms basket at you and shaking it in your face which
allows of no evasion.
Belonging to the diocese of Versailles, she has even organized a physical
culture society, the funds of which she manages, and which the Bishop came to
her parish to bless. People swear she has a trapeze in her home, and that she does
handsprings and dumbbell exercises between church services.
She was favored by her father, a former university professor who was
made more acceptable by a good death and to whom we owe a translation of
Catullus in acrostic verse, with the fair name of Lesbia, which sounds her off
admirably. Her whole life is as transparent as crystal and is even open to the
light of day. It would be sheer folly to expect to find any adventures in it. She
had none but herself to blame if she did not marry one of the numberless he-
goats allured by her ducats, but Providence which watches over its sheep did not
permit it, and her place is in the Common of Virgins, who lacked only an
acceptable offer, or else martyrdom.
A secular priest who started out as an Assumptionist, a great lover of fried
fish and a man haunted by concupiscence of the eyes, is in the process of writing
her story, which he will probably entitle An Edifying Life, to be published with
the Imprimatur of the Ordinary and the approbation of several pontiffs. These
few deeply felt lines will be available to him as a preface.
 QUI DONNE AUX PAUVRES PRÊTE A DIEU
(He who gives to the poor lends to God)

Are you serious? Here is a most dangerous situation. He who says lender
says creditor. The creditor’s mortal enemy is the debtor. The deduction is
appalling. By giving to the poor you expose yourself to God’s enmity, since you
are lending to Him. Therefore you must never give to the poor, if you wish to
retain God’s friendship. You must keep from giving alms as you would avoid a
viper or a basilisk. That is self-evident. But as the contrary of a proposition must
necessarily entail contrary consequences, it can readily be seen that the surest
way to make a friend out of God is to despoil the poor as much as you can. By
acting thus, you are certain of having God on your side and of having yourself
admired by the right people. Q.E.D.

JE NE CRACHE PAS SUR L’ARGENT

(I don’t spit at money)

Is it then more difficult to spit at money than to spit at the Face of the Son
of God? One would think so. The ecstatics have seen streaming down that Face
the horrible spittle of the rabble of Jerusalem. The worshippers of money have
never seen spittle on a five-franc piece. If such a coin fell into garbage, they
would piously retrieve it and respectfully clean it. Perhaps they would anoint it
with a few kisses.
I’ve read that a great nobleman of the XVIIIth century had such richly
furnished rooms in his castle that people did not see how they could spit
anywhere except in the owner’s face. This is what is happening to the Word
incarnate. He has made the universe so beautiful that there is nothing left but His
Sorrowful Face to be spat upon. So why should anyone make any bones about
it? Everything around us is of inestimable value. Even manure makes the
potatoes grow, and they are worth money and are profitable in a far different
way from the Redemption, for the fattening of swine. Could our choice be in
doubt for a single instant?
People spin yarns to the effect that in times long past there lived strange
men who professed to scorn riches, considering them to be mud, and who rid
themselves of them as one does of vermin. It is asserted that a few such still
exist. What can I say? All you can do is to spit upon them in the same way as on
the One whose disciples they call themselves and whose imitators they claim to
be. They can then, to their hearts’ content, pride themselves on their rags and
dream of their Paradise.

METTRE UN PEU L’ARGENT BE CÔTÉ

(Setting aside a little money—A penny saved is a penny earned)

This Trite Phrase resembles a church where everyone would go to pray,

whether young or old, good or bad. An infallible place of pilgrimage, where the
granting of one’s request would be inevitable as death. He who sets a little
money aside is like a man who has a burial place built for himself in a dry spot
safe from worms. A precaution against the poor tenants of damp houses, who are
ever disposed to gnaw the improvident. Each little sum saved is thus like a
particle of the substance that has been entrusted to him, and of which he will,
one day, have to give account. By setting a little money aside, you make ready
for your future and you give to the poor an example infinitely more precious
than all almsgiving.
Believe me, even if you should be very rich, you must always lay a little
money aside. If you meet some poor wretch, someone dying of hunger whom the
gift of a few coins would save, it is possible, the heart of man being frail, that
yon might feel moved. Take care, this is the moment of trial, this is the hour of
fearful temptation. Be generous and refuse with vigor. Remember that the first of
all your duties is to put money aside, and that the shade of Benjamin Franklin is
watching you.
I remember the paragon of a bourgeois, of the Indre or the Creuse, who
was, I think, in a property tax collector’s office; he had the glory of turning up
his toes without ever having given a penny to anyone, and each day he had set a
little money aside. This heroic man fathered three sons. It was his wish that the
first be named Voltaire, the second Rousseau, and the third Franklin, which last,
after his father’s death, painted the town red in a way to knock your eye out. One
no longer runs into fellows of this sort.

ON NE CONNAIT PAS LA COULEUR DE SON ARGENT

(You never see the color of his money)

Anyone about whom this is said is at the lowest level of meanness. If it

were merely said that you never saw his money, it would be far less serious. But
the color of his money—think of it!
It is known that money has no smell. The most fastidious persons, those
whose sense of smell is of the utmost acuteness, proclaim it. But we insist that
money have a color and we wish to see that color. Can you conceive of anything
more beautiful than a five-franc piece in the hand of a Negro? And where is the
bourgeois capable of scorning the thirty beautiful pieces of silver in the dirty
hand of Iscariot? That engaging traitor, so ready with kisses, for which men have
been so hard on him, could at least say he saw the color of the money given him
by the princes of the priests, not being one of those featherbrains who gets taken
in.
I see from time to time coins that are tinted with red, having been handled
by a butcher or a murderer, and the sight of that money makes me wonder. As I
think about the probable origin of that sign of wealth, I tell myself that that is
indeed its true color, the color which it should, which it must have, the color that
was doubtless taken on by Judas’s pieces of silver, after which he ceased to
recognize them and returned them at once to the egregious scoundrels who had
given them to him. These, not recognizing the pieces themselves, did not want to
return to the treasury of the Temple money so strange in its color. Everyone
knows they used it to buy the field of blood, a generic name which I imagine can
be applied to all bourgeois holdings ever since the Scourging and Crucifixion of
Jesus Christ.

JOINDRE LES DEUX BOUTS

(Making ends meet)

This is the old symbol of the serpent biting his tail, the symbol of the
Infinite at all times and in all lands. Yet the Infinite is not the preoccupation of
the bourgeois. But in this case he withholds his contempt for it, the Stock Phrase
of Making Ends Meet appearing to him as an opportunity to manifest his
wisdom, to show himself off as having superhuman qualities. Need I say that we
are here dealing with money, as always? You will see how simple it is.
A man possesses a certain fortune, a hundred thousand francs or a hundred
million, if you prefer. As the Capital must never be touched, he has to manage
from year’s end to year’s end with the income alone, which is presumably
sufficiently elastic. Here is a real stunt of which very few men are capable.
Suggest it to a man of imagination, a dreamer, a lover of pomp, a man of charity.
The boldest of them will admit to you that they cannot be any too sure. A few
who are not terrified by blasphemy will go so far as to tell you that wealth ought
to be spread about like manure, and that the taboo against touching one’s
Capital, which is ever to continue producing, like God, and never to be
consumed, is an abomination.
If the bourgeois, amply occupied in spinning the silver distaff of his
business year, had time to waste, he would most calmly retort that this God
whom people are enough to oppose to Capital is but a poor God if He inspires
His worshippers with such sentiments; that he, an honorable and capitalistic
bourgeois, is not afraid to challenge this supposed Almighty, to dispose of Him
with ease and dispatch.
And at once, for no visible reason turned into a furious and foaming
howler, he will scream: “I make ends meet, I hold onto both ends, my silver tail
is in my silver mouth, and your God is crucified by my Capital. I am a
respectable man and religion can go to hell.”
You will think, then, of the cemetery that lies at the end of that lovely
avenue bordered with fir trees which begins where stands the padded cell.

1. The following twenty-seven extracts are drawn from the two series of Exégèse des
Lieux Communs, the object and intent of which have just been respectively
characterized. Lieux Communs has no precise equivalent in English. It is sometimes
translated stock phrases, but stock or ready answers, or even sententious sayings
might come a trifle closer to the mark. The title of each excerpt is the
“commonplace” Bloy proceeds to annotate. Unfortunately many of these have no
English equivalents. They are therefore given in French with either a literal
translation, or the English expression nearest to them in connotation, or both.
(Translator’s Note.)
2. Bloy plays on the similarity between the French comparative mieux and superlative
le mieux. (Translator’s Note.)
3. Honnête and malhonnête do not have the same forthright connotations as honest
and dishonest, especially when they are used, as is here the case, preceding rather
than following the nouns they modify. (Translator’s Note.)
4. The idiomatic English of this would be: “To be a stickler for principles,” but for
Bloy’s commentary to have any sense, the French form of this locution must be
retained. (Translator’s Note.)
 The Poor Man

POVERTY

[Ego sum Pauper.] “The poor you have always with you.” Ever since these
abysmal Words were uttered, no man has ever been able to say what Poverty is.
The Saints who espoused her from love and begat many children of her
assert that she is infinitely lovable. Those who will have naught of such a
companion sometimes die from terror or from despair at her kiss, and the mass
of men pass “from the womb to the grave” without knowing what to think of this
monster.
When God is questioned, He replies that He is the Poor Man: Ego sum
pauper. When He is not questioned, He displays His magnificence.
Creation seems to be a flower of infinite Poverty; and the ultimate
masterpiece of Him who is called the Almighty was to have Himself crucified
like a thief, in absolute Ignominy.
The Angels are silent and the trembling Devils tear out their tongues so as
not to speak. Alone the idiots of this last century have undertaken to elucidate
the mystery. While waiting for the abyss to swallow them, Poverty moves
quietly about with her mask and her sieve.
How well do the words of Saint John’s Gospel apply to her! “She was the
true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world. She was in the
world, and the world was made through her, and the world knew her not. She
came unto her own, and her own received her not.”
Her own! Yes, surely. Does not mankind belong to Poverty? There is no
beast so naked as man, and it ought to be a commonplace that the rich are poor
men gone wrong.
When the chaos of this tumbling world has been, unraveled, when the stars
will seek for their bread and only the most despised filth will be allowed to
reflect the Splendor; when we shall know that nothing was in its place and that
our rational species lived on nothing but enigmas and illusions, it could easily
happen that a wretch’s torments might reveal a millionaire’s misery of soul,
which spiritually corresponds to his rags, on the mysterious assessment books of
our universal Solidarity.
“I don’t give a damn about the poor!” says the bigwig.
“Very well, my pretty boy,” says Poverty from behind her veil, “why don’t
you come home with me? I have a good fire, and a good bed.…” And she leads
him to bed in a channel house.
Ah, indeed! It would be enough to disgust one with being immortal if there
were no surprises, even before what we are agreed to call death, and if the mess
prepared for the dogs of this or that duchess, and then vomited by them, were not
one day to be the only hope of her own eternally hungering entrails!
“I am your father Abraham, O Lazarus, my dear dead child, my little child
whom I rock within my Bosom against the blessed Resurrection. You see, don’t
you, that great Chaos which stretches between us and the cruel rich man. It is the
unbridgeable abyss of misunderstandings, illusions, invincible ignorance. No
one knows his own true name, no one knows his own real face. All faces and all
hearts are clouded over, as is the forehead of the parricide, under the inscrutable
fabric of the devices of Penance. We do not know for whom we are suffering
and we do not know why we are blissful. The merciless man whose crumbs you
envied and who now implores you for one drop of Water from your fingertip
could not discern his destitution save in the light of the flames of his torment;
but it was needful that I lift you from the hands of the Angels in order that your
wealth, your own wealth, be revealed to you in the eternal mirror of that face of
fire. The lasting bliss on which that damned soul had counted will indeed not
cease, nor will your wretchedness come to an end. But now, Order having been
re-established, the two of you have changed places. For between you two there is
an affinity so hidden, so perfectly unknown, that only the Holy Spirit, visitor of
the bones of the dead, had the power thus to blazon it forth in your endlessly
standing face to face!…”
The rich have a horror of Poverty because they have a dim foreboding of
the expiatory interchange implied by her presence. She appalls them as does the
sour face of a creditor who knows no forgiveness. It seems to them, and not
without reason, that the fearful wretchedness they hide deep within them might
very well at a single stroke burst its golden fetters and its wrappings of iniquity
and come running all in tears before Her who was the chosen Companion of the
Son of God!
 At the same time, an instinct come from Down Below warns them against
contagion. These abominable wretches guess that Poverty is the very Face of
Christ, that buffeted Face which puts to flight the Prince of the world, and that,
in her presence, one cannot devour the hearts of poor wretches to the strains of
flutes and hautboys. They feel that her neighborhood is dangerous, that lamps
smoke at her approach, that torches take on the aspect of funeral tapers, and that
all pleasures languish … Such is the contagion of the divine sorrows.
To use a commonplace phrase of disconcerting depth, the poor bring ill
luck, in the same sense as the King of the poor declared He had come to “bring a
sword.” A prompt and surely frightful tribulation is heaped upon any seeker after
pleasure whose garment a poor man has touched, and who has looked that poor
man in the eye.
That is why the world is so cluttered with walls, starting from the Biblical
Tower which was to knock against the Heavens—a Tower so famous that the
Lord “came down” to see it close by—and which doubtless was built in order
eternally to keep aloof from the naked and homeless Angels who already were
wandering over the earth.

[The Crime of Being Poor.] The Salic law was never written down,
because it was the vital, essential law of the French monarchy, and any attempt
at putting it in writing would have set bounds to it. The Absolute cannot be
transcribed.
For this same reason the Crime of being poor is clearly mentioned in no
code, in no collection of penal jurisprudence. At the very most it is classed
among the simple offenses within the scope of police courts and likened to
vagrancy, which itself is but an outcome of poverty.
But this silence constitutes a peremptory decree on the part of the universal
terror which refuses to specify its object.
Beyond all arguments, poverty is the most enormous of crimes, the one and
only crime which no circumstance could extenuate in the eyes of an equitable
judge. So heinous is this crime that treason or incest, parricide or sacrilege, seem
little in comparison, and entreat society’s compassion.
Moreover, mankind has never made any mistake about it, and the infallible
instinct of all peoples, in whatever part of the globe, has visited with one
identical censure the knights titular of the rag and the hollow belly.
Since no set penalty could be decreed against a kind of felony which
trembling lawmakers would not consent to define, people heaped upon the Poor
Man all the degradations or afflictions their universal vindictiveness could
devise. To make sure of not missing the mark, these punishments piled upon his
head were multitudinous, it being impossible to make a choice between them
without running the danger of defining the crime.
The poor were formally condemned neither to the stake nor to quartering,
neither to the strappado nor to being flayed alive, neither to empalement nor
even to the guillotine. No legal provision has ever specified that they should be
hanged, castrated, their nails torn off, their eyes put out, that molten lead be
poured down their throats, that they should be exposed, smeared with molasses,
to the sun during the dog days, or merely be drawn, stripped of their skins,
through a field of freshly mown lucerne…. None of these charming tortures was
ever literally applied to them, in view of the fact that there was no explicit law.
However, that tormenting genius who named himself the Power of Society
has succeeded in harvesting for them, in a matchless sheaf of sovereign
tribulations, all this scattered flora of criminal penalties. Serenely, tacitly, the
Poor have been excommunicated from life and turned into people damned.
Every man of the world—whether he knows it or not—bears in himself an
absolute contempt for Poverty, and such is the deep secret of honor which is the
cornerstone of oligarchies.
To receive at one’s table a thief, a murderer or a second-rate actor, is a
thing seemingly reasonable and commendable—providing they are prospering at
their trades. It is even indicated that a certain virginity of soul is retrieved by
contact with poisoners of children—the moment they are glutted with gold.***
But the opprobrium brought on by destitution is absolutely beyond words,
because it is basically the only defilement and the only sin. It is a guilt so
measureless that the Lord God chose it as His own when He became man in
order to take everything upon Himself.
He wanted pre-eminently to be called Poor man and the God of the poor.
This voracious Savior—homo devorator et potator (a man who devours and
drinks), as the Jews described Him—who came only to get drunk on and gorge
Himself with torture, judiciously chose Poverty to be His publican.
Consequently honorable people have condemned with a common voice the
scandal of such an orgy and have prohibited in every age any association with
this tavern keeper by divine appointment.
For nearly two thousand years the Church has extolled poverty. Countless
saints have espoused her so that they might resemble Jesus Christ, and that lousy
outcast poverty has not risen one millionth of a notch in the esteem of decent and
well brought up persons.
Indeed the truth is that voluntary poverty is still a luxury, and consequently
is not true poverty, which every man abhors. Certainly one can become poor, but
on condition that the will have nothing to do with it. Saint Francis of Assisi was
a lover and not a poor man. He was in need of nothing, since he possessed his
God and lived, through his ecstasy, outside the world of senses. He bathed in the
gold of his shining rags.
True poverty is involuntary, and its essence is that it can never be desired.
Christianity wrought the greatest of miracles by helping men to bear poverty
through the promise of subsequent rewards. If there are no rewards, then let
everything go to the devil! It is absurd to expect anything better from our nature.

[Blind Alley in the Petit-Montrouge.] In their married life Leopold and

Clotilde knew those desperate shifts which make one shudder and weep, the sale
one by one of loved objects with which they thought they never could part, the
changing of certain habits which seem cemented to the very mainspring of one’s
capacity for emotion, the gradual suppression, so painful to bear, of all
protections for that intimate and hidden life which the poor never achieve. And
especially, they had to move. That was by far the hardest.
Their pretty hive, peaceful and bright, close to the Luxembourg Gardens,
was for Leopold and Clotilde the one and only spot, the privileged place, the sole
address they would have given for happiness. They had furnished it with their
feelings of love, their hopes, their dreams, their prayers. Even the sad memories
had not been discarded. Diminished thread by thread by a blessing come so late,
their sorrows of yore were there intertwined with new joys, like dream figures
that a tapestry, its colors faded out, might have caused to float about the walls.
And then their child had been born there. He had lived there eleven
months, during which their troubles had begun again, and this embodiment of
mercy stared at them from every corner.
At the time they quit this abode, our unfortunates believed themselves to
have been exiled from the divine peace. An uprooting all the more cruel because
the new quarters to which necessity transported them seemed to them sinister.
When they had looked at it under the tepid sun of a late-autumn day, they had
considered it livable; but the cold rain and black sky of the day they moved
transformed it for their terrified eyes into a kind of damp, dark and poisonous
hovel which filled them with horror.
 It was a tiny house at the end of a blind alley in the Petit-Montrouge. They
had rented it in hatred of small apartments, hoping thus to escape the abominable
intimacies of tenement houses. Three or four other shanties of the same sort,
inhabited by none knew what leaden-hearted and ill-starred workers, a few
meters away protruded their hypochondriac fronts, daubed over with a
misleading whitewash and separated one from the other by the dusty vegetation
of some shabby cemetery stinking from the proximity of a freight terminal or
tallow candle factory.
A kind of little bourgeois community, with pretensions to gardens, such as
you find in out-of-the-way areas where homicidal landlords set horticultural
snares for people sentenced to death.
And now they were greeted at the very threshold with everything to make
them shudder. Dismayed and shivering with the cold, Clotilde at once rolled up
her little Lazare in a mass of covers and shawls, thinking only of protecting him
from the freezing and peculiar dampness, and waited, with an anguish she had
never before known, for the movers to finish.
Alas! they were never to finish, in this sense that until the last moment of
her life, the poor woman was to retain her present impression of the sad and
cheap disorder of those first few hours.

Misfortune is a specter that crouches in damp places. The two exiles from
Joy felt as though floating in a limbo of stickiness and twilight. The fiercest fire
did not succeed in drying the walls, which were colder inside than out, as in
dungeons or in graves, and on which there rotted a horrible wallpaper.
From a hateful little cellar, certainly never chosen as a shelter by the noble
temper of any wine, there seemed to rise, at the beginning of night, black things,
ants of darkness, which poured out along the cracks and joints of a crazed and
crannied parquet floor.
The evidence of monstrous filth cried to high heaven. That house,
deceptively laundered with a few pails of water when visitors were expected,
was actually shiny from top to bottom with none knew what dread deposits
which it would have taken endless scraping to clean off. The Gorgon of vomit
squatted in the kitchen, which only a conflagration might have been able to
purify. From the very outset a stove had to be set up in another room. At the end
of the garden, and what a garden! there steadfastly persisted a heap of appalling
refuse which the landlord had promised to have removed, and which was never
to disappear.
Then, all of a sudden, the abomination. An indefinable odor, midway
between the musty stench of an underground passage stocked with carrion and
the stifling alkalinity of an open sewer, came surreptitiously to assault the
mucous membranes of the despairing tenants.
This smell did not specifically emerge from the toilets, which in any case
were almost beyond being put to any use, or from any other determinate point. It
crawled about through the confined space of the house and unrolled like a ribbon
of smoke describing circles, ovals, spirals, zigzags. It undulated around the
furniture, rose to the ceiling, flowed down again along the doors, escaped into
the stairway, prowled from one room to another, leaving everywhere a sort of
steam of putrefaction and excrement.
Sometimes it seemed to disappear. Then you met it again in the garden, in
that garden fit for the banks of the Cocytus, enclosed by a prison wall calculated
to arouse an obsession for escape even in some bandy-legged dervish who had
taken on the job of rendering the corpses of plague-stricken camels.
What life was like for these shipwrecked people during the first few days,
only the angel charged with the scourging of Souls could say.
Stench is a precursor who runs along ahead of cruel Specters when such
are permitted to re-emerge from the bottom of the abyss, and it brings with it a
cold fear. Certain circumstances too frightful not to be real, and in any case
promptly followed by what a blast of horror! did not allow first Clotilde and then
her husband to doubt that they had fallen, for the supernatural tempering of their
courage, into one of those accursed spots which no tax roll designates as such,
where the Enemy of men takes his pleasure and over which he takes his stance
astride.
Little Lazare seeming indisposed since the dismal confusion of moving
day, his mother slept alone, close by him, in a ground floor room which they had
found a little less sinister than the others. Leopold would carefully close all
means of egress and go up to his fetid cell on the floor above.
As early as the second night Clotilde was torn from sleep by blows of
extreme violence upon the outer door, as if some evildoer were trying to break
in. The child was sleeping, and the father, whose even and resonant breathing
she thought she could hear from afar, did not seem to have been disturbed. The
din had hence been intended for herself alone. Frozen with terror and not daring
to move, she called upon the pious souls of the dead who are said to be powerful
in dispersing dark spirits. She did not speak of it the next day, but she retained,
from that first visitation of Terror, a heavy anxiety, a dread as of the catacombs,
whereby her heart was shriveled.
Similar warnings were given her on the nights following. She heard a
panic voice howling death. Mysterious knocks of impatience and anger made the
walls ring, and even the rails of her bed. Bewildered, disheveled, she had the
feeling that a claw was in her hair, but she feared to share this foretaste of agony
with her unhappy husband; she had one of the parish priests come to bless the
house.

[The Death of Little Lazare.] “Pax huic domini et omnibus habitantibus in

ea… (Peace on this house and on all those who dwell in it…) Lord, Thou shalt
lave me with hyssop and I shall be clean; Thou shalt cleanse me and I shall be
whiter than snow… Hear us, Holy Lord, Father. Almighty, Eternal God, and
vouchsafe to send from Thy Heavens Thy holy angel that he may keep, warm on
his bosom, protect, visit and defend those who dwell in this habitation. Through
Christ Our Lord.”
The night that followed this blessing was peaceful, but the one after that—
O most dutiful Jesus who didst rise from death and the grave, what an appalling
night!
An inhuman cry, the croak of a soul tortured by demons, made the poor
woman sit bolt upright, her eyes widened, her teeth chattering, her members
disjointed by her trembling, and her heart thrust, like the clapper of an alarm
hell, against the sides of that body which had borne a child of God. She rushed
over to her son’s crib. The little innocent still lay asleep, and the pale rays of the
night-light showed him to be so wan that at once she looked to make sure he was
still breathing.
Then she was struck by the realization that for a week he had been sleeping
too much, that he had been sleeping almost continually and that he always had
cold feet. Holding back an outburst of tears, she lifted him very gently in her
arms and took him over near the fire.
What time could it have been? She never found out. Vast silence fell upon
everything, one of those silences that render audible the confused coursing of the
arteries’ tiny streams…
The child whimpered. His mother having vainly tried to make him drink,
he began to struggle, seemed suddenly altogether distracted, threw out his pretty
little arms against the Invisible, as do the powerful when dying, and began the
rattle of his death agony.
Clotilde, overwhelmed with terror, but not yet realizing that it was the end,
put the head of her dear sufferer on her shoulder, in a position which more than
once had soothed him, and walked about for a long time in tears, begging him
not to leave her, calling to her aid the Virgin Martyrs whose entrails lions or
crocodiles devoured for the amusement of the populace.
She dearly desired her husband’s presence, but she did not dare raise her
voice, and the stairs were so hard to climb in the darkness, especially with such a
burden! At last, the little creature fell from her neck to her bosom, arid she
understood.
“Leopold! our child is dying!” she cried out in a fearful voice. Leopold
said afterwards that this outcry had hit him in his sleep as a block of marble
might strike a diver at the bottom of a rocky abyss. Shooting downstairs like a
bullet, he had time only to receive the last shudder of that budding life, the last
unseeing glance of those charming eyes whose clear blueness became crackled,
enameled with a milky film which quenched them….
Confronted by the death of a small child, Art and Poetry are truly like the
deepest wretchedness. A few dreamers, who seemed themselves to be as great as
all the world’s utmost misery, did what they could. But mothers’ laments and,
even more, the silent surge in fathers’ breasts have a power far different from
words or colors, so much does man’s sorrow belong to the invisible world.
It is not exactly death’s touch which gives man such suffering, since this
punishment has been so sanctified by Him who called Himself the Life. It is all
the bygone joy that rears up and snarls like a tiger, that unleashes itself like a
hurricane. More precisely, it is the magnificent and grievous memory of the sight
of God, for all peoples are idolatrous, as You hear so often said, O Lord! Your
sad images can adore only what they think they see, so long is it since they have
seen you, and their children are for them the Paradise of Delight.
Yet there is no sorrow other than that which is told in Your Book. In capito
Libri scriptum est de me (in the beginning of the Book I am written about). Seek
as we will, not a single sorrow shall we find outside the circle of fire of the
revolving Sword which guards the lost Garden. Every affliction of body or soul
is an evil of exile, and the devastating compassion bestowed upon little tiny
coffins is surely that which most compellingly recalls the famous Banishment
for which mankind, stripped of innocence, has never been able to console itself.

They dressed him with their own hands for the ultimate Cradle which the
Word of God gently rocks amid the constellations. Then they sat down facing
each other, waiting for the day to break. For two or three hours they experienced
that helpful swooning away of thought and feeling which is the first stage in any
boundless sorrow.
One sole word was uttered, the word Blessing, which fell from the lips of
the mother and which Leopold understood very well. “These are they who have
not defiled their clothes… These follow the spotless Lamb whithersoever he
goeth,” says the Liturgy. Christians have the comfort of knowing that above all
there are little ones in the Kingdom, and that the voice of the Innocent who are
dead “makes the earth to resound…” However much they might suffer from now
on, however much they might gropingly seek their own souls along the worst
paths there are under heaven, they were sure nonetheless that something of
themselves was shining in blessed glory beyond the worlds.

THE BLOOD OF THE POOR MAN

[Money.] The Blood of the Poor Man is money. People have been living by
it and dying of it for centuries. It eloquently sums up all suffering. It is Glory, it
is Power. It is Justice and Injustice. It is Torture and Delight. It is to be loathed
and to be adored, the glaring and streaming symbol of Christ the Savior, in quo
omnia constant (in Whom all things stand).
The blood of the rich man is a fetid pus, exuding from the ulcers of Cain.
The rich man is a poor man who has failed, a vile-smelling ragamuffin of whom
the stars are afraid.
Revelation teaches us that God alone is poor and that His Only Son is the
only beggar.*** His Blood is that of the Poor Man by whom men are “bought at
great price.” His precious Blood, infinitely red and pure, which can pay for
everything!
It was altogether necessary, then, that money should represent it: the
money that one gives, that one lends, that one sells, that one earns or steals; the
money that kills and gives life like the Word, the money which is worshipped,
the eucharistic money which one drinks and which one eats. The traveling
stipend of roving curiosity and the viaticum of death. Every aspect of money is
an aspect of the Son of God sweating the Blood by which He took all things
upon Himself.
 [The Cross of Utter Destitution.] To a land that is dark and covered with
the mist of death: A land of misery and darkness, where the shadow, of death,
and no order, but everlasting horror dwelleth. —Job

Poverty binds men together, Destitution isolates them, because poverty is

from Christ and destitution from the Holy Spirit.
Poverty is Relative—want of the superfluous. Destitution is Absolute—
want of the necessary.
Poverty is crucified, Destitution is the Cross itself. Jesus bearing the Cross,
here is Poverty bearing Destitution. Christ on the cross, here is Poverty bleeding
over Destitution.
Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can
understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they
cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of
stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music,
at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them.
They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant
to see hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat.
Fashionable priests, keep well away from them Jesus Christ’s bed of love,
the cross of utter misery, infinitely grievous, planted in the midst of a burying
place for criminals, among excrement and stenches, the true Cross,*** the cross
of absolute renunciation, the cross of eternal abandonment and denial for all of
those, whoever they be, who want none of it; the cross of wholly wearying fast,
of total sacrifice of the senses, of mourning for anything which can console; the
cross of the stake, of boiling oil, of molten lead, stoning, drowning, of flaying
alive, of quartering, of being hacked to bits, of being devoured by wild beasts,
the cross of all the torments devised by the bastard sons of devils…. The base
and black Cross, in the midst of a desert of fear vast as the world; no longer
shining as in children’s pictures, but overwhelmed under a dark sky not even
brightened by lightning, the terrifying Cross of Dereliction of the Son of God,
the Cross of utter Misery and Destitution!
If only these accursed rich were content with wanting none of the Cross!
But they argue it is not for them, priding themselves on their money, which is
the Most Precious Blood of Christ, in order to set in their places the flock of
poor people whom they have bled and driven to despair!
And they dare speak of charity, utter the word Charity, which is the very
Name of the Third divine Person! A prostitution of words enough to make the
Devil fearful!***
God has tolerated all this until this very night, which might well be the
“Great Night” “as the nurslings of Anarchy put it. Nonetheless there is still
daylight. It is but three o’clock, the hour of the Immolation of the Poor Man. The
slaves in mines and factories are still at work. Millions of arms are painfully
laboring over the whole earth for the enjoyment of a few men, and these millions
of souls, smothered by the anguish of their labor, continue not to know that there
is a God to bless those who crush them: the God of lechery and of fashion,
whose “yoke is sweet and whose burden is so light” on oppressors.

[God’s Indignation.] The Indignation of God can find no place of shelter.

She is a wildly disheveled girl famished with hunger, and all doors are shut to
her, a true daughter of the desert whom no one knows. The lions amid which she
was brought forth are dead, having been killed in their treachery by famine and
vermin. She has wrung her hands before every threshold, begging to be taken in,
but she has found nobody to have pity on the Indignation of God.
She is beautiful, nonetheless, but unseduce-able and tireless, and she
causes such fear that the earth trembles when she passes by. The Indignation of
God is clothed in rags and has almost nothing to hide her nakedness. Her eyes
are dark gulfs and her mouth no longer utters a word. Whenever she meets a
priest, she grows paler and more silent, for priests condemn her, finding that she
is ill-kempt, intemperate and little charitable: She knows so well henceforward
everything is in vain. Occasionally she has taken little children into her arms,
offering them to the world, but the world has thrown those innocents onto the
dung heap, telling her:
“You are too free to please me! I’ve got laws, gendarmes, process servers,
landlords! You’ll have to get your whore’s license and meet your rent on the day
it is due.”
“My day is near and I shall pay my rent on the dot,” replied God’s
Indignation.

[The Desire of the Poor.] What must some day be so terrible an indictment
of the rich is the Desire of the poor. Here is a millionaire who, beyond his needs,
clings to or spends in a minute what for fifty or sixty years has been the object of
the desperate prayers of a poor man. In France alone there are hundreds of
thousands of such people—let alone our needing millions of them. Every man
who possesses over and above what is indispensable to his material and spiritual
life is a millionaire, and consequently is a debtor to those who possess nothing.
No one has a right to superfluity except the Incarnate Son of God. He was
privileged above all that can be said or imagined, to the point that His privilege
could only be known through revelation. “The number of lashes received by the
Savior, from the feet to the head,” said the renowned prophetess of Agreda, “was
5,115”! A few have set the figure even higher. Now the terrible Roman
scourging, as it was practiced in Judea, was forbidden to exceed above 39
—quadragenas una minus. Such was the exorbitant Desire of the King of the
poor, his superfluity! We know nothing of the number of times Christ was cuffed
in the face and punched and spat upon, but we may presume it to have been in
proportion.
What man desires is man himself, and the desire of the Man-God was
naturally to give satisfaction for all men, whatever the price of the miracle might
be. From this point of view the desire of the rich man should at least be what is
needful to him from the sufferings of the poor, and that of the poor man what is
needful to him from the full-to-overflowing consolations weighing down the
rich.
Does there exist a single priest who would dare preach on this text: “Vae
vobis divitibus quia habetis consolationem vestram!” (Woe to you, ye rich, who
already have your consolation!) It is too serious, too evangelical, too
uncharitable. The rich do not expect the poor to have consolations or pleasures.
The idea that some pauper might have bought himself tobacco or taken a cup of
coffee is unbearable to them. They are right, without knowing it, since the poor
are suffering in their behalf. But they keep their consolation for themselves, their
appalling consolation, and what an agony they will undergo when, with each
particle of their murderous riches demanding to be expiated by unspeakable
atonements, they will see coming toward them that mountain of torments!
Consolationem vestram—your consolation. What an inverted desolation is
implied by this indelible word, and on the obverse, what desire! The desire for
some bread, for a little of that good wine which gladdens the heart, the desire for
flowers and the air of the fields, for all that God has created for men, without
distinction; the desire at least for rest after toil, when the angelus sounds of an
evening. “My children, my wife are going to die, sentenced by thousands of my
brothers who could save them merely by giving to them the scraps eaten by one
of their dogs. I myself am at the end of my rope, and I might just as well not
possess a precious soul, a soul of glory which the heavens would not nil, but
which the avarice of the first-born of the Devil has made blind, deaf and dumb.
And yet they have not been able to kill the desire that tortures me!”…

[The Glass of Water.] Man stands so close to God that the word poor is an
expression of tenderness. When one’s heart is bursting with compassion or love,
when one can hardly hold back one’s tears, that is the word which comes to the
lips.
Lazarus*** is not only the Gospels’ emblem of the Beggar whom God
loves as opposed to the greedy and sensual Rich Man whom He has cursed. He
is that beggar’s prototype. This Lazarus is the son of God Himself, he is Jesus
Christ “in Abraham’s bosom” where he is “taken up by the Angels.” He lies at
the door of the world, covered with sores. He would much like to take his fill of
the crumbs that fall from the table where that rich man makes revel of his
Substance, and yet no one hands him a single crumb. He does well if he is not
eaten by the carrion dogs.
You might think that this rich man and this poor man cannot be farther
apart. But for both comes death which parts them in a very different way, as it
parts the body from the soul, and the great “Chaos” steps forward, that and the
mysterious and unbridgeable abyss which no man has been able to imagine—
Death itself, forever incomprehensible. The rich man, now, in the midst of the
frightful torments inversely foreshadowed by the delights of his table, entreats
the glorious beggar, not even daring to ask him for all the cold water contained
in the “cup” of the Gospel, but only for a drop of that same water on the tip of
his finger, to cool his tongue, and he counts on Abraham’s intercession to obtain
it. He could not have chosen a worse mediator. Abraham mentions the obstacle
presented by the abyss. “And that abyss is your own refusal. Lazarus asked you
for no more when you were rejoicing in his sufferings. Your inexorable
consolation has become his, and there is nothing more to be done about it.”
The Gospel’s cup of water! It has been turned into a commonplace, as have
been so many other Sayings.*** It is the glass filled with tears of compassion,
the humble word from a heart that trembles with love and can give only that, the
gesture of a little child who, raised by his mother above the disgusting crowd
along the way to the guillotine, sends a kiss to the poor queen going to her death.
Ah! anything from anyone, were it from a beast, when one is overwhelmed with
sorrow! Wretches well know that there is nothing more precious.
“I have need of powerful help and what you give is very feeble, but I know
that it is all you can do, and however little it is, you offer me it in the diamond
chalice which is your heart. ‘You shall have your reward,’ the Master has said,
and I tell you that I shall be drunk with this water throughout Life eternal. A
glass of water is of such great price that, even if it is given by someone who
could do better, it still has a value beyond calculation.
“You wish to make a prince of me, next week, and I admit the idea
delighted me. A crown would suit me to perfection; but in the meantime couldn’t
you give me a fifty centime piece which, right now, would fulfill my every
wish? Over there on that counter is a bottle of wine from which I am parted by
the vast abyss of the Parable. It would cost you less than that glass of water, less
than that drop of water on the finger of Lazarus, who had suffered his whole life
long to have the right to refuse it. But you do not give me that drop, the desire
for which exasperates my ancient torments, because your belly is stuffed,
because you have known neither hunger nor thirst, and here we are, dear sir, on
either side of Chaos!”
The sweatshop system! It is hard to believe these infamous words could
have been written even in English.*** Yes, even in English, it is unbelievable.
But what sweat? Good Lord! It is impossible, after such a word, not to think of
Gethsemane, not to think of Moses who wanted all Egypt to stream with blood
in order to prefigure the Death Throes of the Son of God. Did He who took upon
himself all imaginable sorrows and all unimaginable sorrows then sweat blood
after this fashion? The Bloody Sweat as a system! Jesus’s Bloody Sweat
intended to be the silent partner of famines and massacres!…It might be thought
that men have gone mad for having leaned over the edge of this gulf…
The most incomprehensible thing in the world is the patience of the poor,
dark and miraculous impress of the Patience of God dwelling in His palaces of
light. When suffering has gone too far, it would seem simple enough to brain or
disembowel the wild beast. Such things have happened. Indeed they are frequent
in history. But always such uprisings were convulsive and short-lived
movements. At once after their onslaught, the Bloody Sweat of Jesus silently
started again in the night, under the quiet olive trees of the Garden, with the
disciples ever sleeping. He must go on with this Agony on behalf of so many
wretches, for so great a number of defenseless beings, men, women, and
especially children!
For here is the horror of horrors: child labor, the utter misery of little ones
exploited by an industry yielding riches. And this in all countries. Jesus had said:
“Suffer them to come unto me.” The rich say: “Send them to the factory, to the
workshop, into places that are the darkest and deadliest of all our hells. The
efforts of their weak arms will add something to our wealth.”
One sees such poor children, whom one could knock over with a breath,
put in more than thirty hours’ work a week, and these workers, O avenging God!
are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. In order that no one may say
religion is forgotten, the little girls’ workshops, beyond Dante’s ken, are often
managed by nuns, consecrated virgins, as dry as the Devil’s vine shoots, and
who know all the effective ways to get results…. The young woman of the world
herself perhaps is also unaware—as Dante did not know—of what her clothing
and fine underwear have cost. Why should anyone tell her about the deadly
exhaustion, the never-sated hunger of the wretched little girls all too delighted to
kill themselves for her beauty? Whir would undertake to make this pretty beast
understand the bitterness of the swallowed tears and the perpetual shrinking of
those little hearts? But because these nothingnesses are infinitely greater than
she and because after all there is a justice, one may be sure that she will not
always be unaware of them. And when she finds out!… The Evangelist Saint
Luke heard Jesus Christ’s Bloody Sweat falling upon the ground, drop by drop.
That noise so slight, unable to awake the sleeping disciples, must have been
heard by the most distant constellations and singularly have altered their
wanderings. What are we to think of the sound, slighter still and much less
listened to, of the countless steps of those poor little ones going to their task of
sorrow and wretchedness demanded of them by the damned, but all the same
without knowing it and without others knowing it, moving thus toward their
elder brother in the Garden of the Agony, who calls them and awaits them within
His bloodied arms? Sinite pueros venire ad me. Talium est enim regnum Dei
(Suffer the little children to come unto me. For such is the kingdom of God).

[The Spouse of the Son of God.] Were it in the wilderness, he who speaks
lovingly of poverty ought to be able to raise up multitudes to hear him, as did the
Breath of the Lord who gave life again to the barren and dusty bones of Ezekiel.
For Poverty is nothing less than the Spouse of the Son of God, and when her
golden wedding takes place, the barefoot and the starvelings will come running
from the ends of the earth, to witness it.
You know this, O Jewish Queen, Mother of the Most Poor God whom the
bourgeois of Bethlehem would not receive, and who gave birth, on the straw of
animals, to your adorable Child.***
I therefore commit to you this book written by a poor man to the glory of
Poverty. If bitterness be in it, you will mingle therein your Sweetness, and if
there be anger, you will abate it with your Sadness. But do not forget it, I am a
contemporary of your Appearance on the Mountain of Tears. I was put, then,
under your Feet. By this token, your Indignation and your Seven Swords belong
to me. The bronze chains seen on your Shoulders you left me as you were
leaving, and for sixty-three years now I have been dragging them about the
world. It is their noise which harasses cowards and sleepers. If it yet he possible,
make of them a thunderbolt which will once and for all awaken them for
Penance or for Terror—O Morning Star of the poor, who “will laugh on the Last
Day!”

Feast of the Annunciation

March 25, 1909
 The Hurler of Curses

THE CURSES OF FURY

The Lament of the Sword. The first time the Spirit of Sabaoth spoke about
me, it was to keep men from forgetting that I had been seen all aflame on the
threshold of the lost Eden.
I was, in that day long past, a fiery sword in the fiery hand of the Cherubim
who by my means kept watch over the path to the “tree of life.”
Under God’s fearful Irony, the Human Family was fleeing through the
thorns of an unknown world, from thenceforward sown with curses, wherein
huge animals—already hostile—watched this Family make a mess of things.
Ah! mankind then consisted of sad Gods, most singularly bereft. Mankind
was dying of youth, and their inexperience of suffering matched, in these two
Beings who were to give birth to all, the inexpressible wearinesses of mankind’s
ultimate days to come.
It is likely that they did not dream much during the twilights of that exile.
In vain were the mountains and rivers of the era before the Flood of prodigious
size, and in sheer waste did the level places display their bombastic greenery.
The sun had forever become pale; and the vast sadness of Pride stooped
over all Creation. The memory of Paradise was too keen, and too keen was the
memory of me.
One day at last, long after the first Murder, committed I never knew how, it
happened that a fearsome youth sprung from the Man with the bloody hand,
forged some brightly shining thing that resembled me.
The Garden of Delights having existed only to the extent that man coveted
the Heavens, and the Cherubim growing tired of preserving a symbol no longer
threatened by the homesickness of any exile, I received permission to give
bodily form to my glittering image and thus to travel through all the valleys of
Death, as witness to the Chastisement and as divine reminder of the Ecstasies.
 At once I became War, and my fearful Name everywhere became the sign
of Majesty.
I appeared as the sublime instrument of Providential blood-letting and, in
my wonderful unawareness as the Elect of Fate, I espoused through the centuries
every human feeling capable of speeding Fate on.
Anger, Love, Enthusiasm, Greed, Fanaticism and Insanity I served in so
perfect a fashion that the history books have been afraid to tell the whole story.
During six thousand years I have made myself drunk, at all points of the
globe, on massacres and throat-slitting.
It was not my task to be just or to have pity. It sufficed that I be
inexpressibly holy through my Vocation, and that I blind the eyes of mortals
with so many tears that the proudest among them was thus induced to grope
humbly in the direction of Heaven.
I have killed old men who were like palaces of Suffering, I have cut off the
breasts of women who were like light, and I have run little children through who
looked at me with the eyes of moribund lions.
Daily I have galloped on the pale Horse along the avenue of cypresses
which stretches “from the womb to the grave,” and I have made a fountain of
blood out of every son of man within my reach.
If I did not smite Jesus, it is because I was too noble for Him. I was too
august for Him to accept the kind of death I give.
Such a death was fitting for His Apostles and His Martyrs, for His Virgins
and for their executioners, who perished in their turn. I was not what was needed
for that Lamb of Ignominy.

Surely I have the right to be proud, for I was passionately adored. Because
I was the messenger or the acolyte of the Most High Lord, even in the apparent
iniquity of my ways, it was well understood that I was accomplishing a divine
task, and there came a day when Western heroism endowed me with exactly that
sacred form possessed by the instrument of torture which had been preferred to
me for the Redemption.
The world then was in ecstasy over my beauty. Christian lads dreamt of
me, I was given the last kiss of dying monarchy, conquerors latticed in steel
knelt with their eyes on me and whole continents were made to run with blood at
the prayer I had inspired.
When enthusiasm for the Cross died away, I condescended to become the
badge of what men called Honor, and, in this lowered state, I still appeared
sufficiently magnificent for the whole of Europe one day to throw itself at the
feet of a single Master who had placed me in the monstrance of his heart.
Most certainly he did not pray, this Emperor of Death, but all the same I
strewed about him the ecumenical prayer of Sacrifice and Devotion—the
dreadful red prayer that bellows forth in the slaughterhouses of nations.
Ah! it was not so splendid as the past! but who will say how beautiful it
was? I know something about it, I, the Sword, of whom it is written that I shall
devour everything at the end of ends!
In the meanwhile I am humiliated by unspeakable pollutions. After so
many thousand years of idolatry, it took no less than nineteen centuries of
Christianity for men at last to succeed in prostituting me. But today this has been
accomplished beyond remedy, and that is why I, the impassive Killer, despair!
Ah! there’s no doubt I have often been seen passing into strange hands, the
hands of oppressors, the hands of executioners or the hands of highwaymen. I
have even been seen in the sacrilegious hands of cowards, from whence I fled
the moment they heard the rolling of thunder.
It is not known how much I weigh in the iniquitous scales of the victorious,
nor is it known how light I make myself in the clenched fist of adulterers or
parricides.
For my kingdom is exclusively of this world, my dominion extends over
the vast empire of the Fall, and every kind of expiation belongs to me. Shallow-
sighted people can thus, in a strict sense, reproach me for everything, since I am
at once the Crime and its Punishment.
But so disgusting is what goes on in this pip-squeak of a century, even
disavowed by the riff-raff of the Abyss, that I know not in what the Exterminator
will have one day to quench me, in order to cleanse me of the monstrous uses to
which I have been put.
I have become the last resort and the prophetic slut of quarrelsome pimps
or of bought journalists, so dripping with pus they would have appalled
Sodom!***

And it is I, the most ancient Glaive of the Martyrs and of the Chieftains of
War, who am used for this loathsome business!
But let them beware, these fellows who slinkingly curry the favor of the
jade of popular acclaim.
I devour whoever touches me, and I shall appeal from myself to myself in
order to punish those who profane me!
 My laments are mysterious and full of terror. The first of them transfixed
the heavens and drowned out the earth; the second made flow for two thousand
years torrents of human blood; but with the third, which has now come, I am
about again to take on my ancient shape. I shall once more become the fiery
Sword, and men will know at last, to burst thereat in terror, what is that turning
about which is mentioned in the Scriptures!1

[The Century of Carrion.] Beati mortui (blessed are the dead) was said at
Patmos by a Voice crying from heaven. The selfsame Holy Spirit who asserts the
Blessedness of the Dead would also that we pray for them, and this is enjoined in
the awe-inspiring Liturgy.
Is there, for a human being, anything as momentous as being dead? Does
there exist a state more lovable, more enviable, more desirable, more exquisite,
more spiritual, more divine, more fearsome, than the state of a man who is dead,
a man truly dead, who is lowered into .the earth and has already appeared before
God to be judged? There is an end, then, to trivial contingencies, worldly
obligations and the wisdom of fools.
The only thing to know is whether one has died in the Lord. One is
swallowed up in the Absolute. One is absolutely happy or absolutely unhappy,
and one knows it absolutely.
What is there in common between such a state of being, in which all is
great, and the miserable sickliness of modern dodges aimed at making oneself
kin with that which is not?

Ah! how much better the name carrion suits the passengers of the
nineteenth century! And how this stinking century is their suitable vessel! Do
you remember that frightful image invented by Edgar Poe, those victims of
shipwreck meeting in the middle of the ocean a boat which might serve as their
salvation, but the crew of which was wasting away, making its vessel sow the
plague wherever it went? No one says whether they died in the Lord, those
wretches. We know nothing about it; we even abjure making any conjectures.
The putrescent of the nineteenth century, who will asphyxiate, in their
wake, the twentieth, unless Fire intervenes, are less anonymous than those of our
frenzied poet. All of us have known only too well those travelers of horror, and
never shall we come to an end of telling their story.
But what’s the use? For a long time now I haven’t had the heart for it, and I
wonder what help so discouraged a scourer as myself will be able to offer you.
Some twenty years ago I thought it was possible, I dare not say to purify, but at
least to scrape the dung off a few things. Today I am seeking, with bitterness of
heart, some poor creature made in God’s likeness who was as thoroughly
mistaken as I. There’s too much shit, even for two people, even for two hundred
thousand.***

I return to this word carrion, which is of uncertain elegance and of

questionable politeness, and which is only very seldom used in Catholic drawing
rooms, but which is the sole one to express my thought. Will anyone tell me
what other word I can use adequately to define and emblazon the abomination
that confronts us?
The small number of living souls to whom the Blood of Christ is still of
some worth finds itself confronting an inconceivable multitude, up until our
times beyond imagining. It is “the infinite company of people who stand before
the throne, in the presence of the Lamb, clothed in white robes and hearing
palms in their hands.” These people are the contemporary Catholics.
Endlessly they parade over the meadow that lies right in front of heaven.
Then, suddenly, you notice that birds fall from the sky, flowers wilt, that
everything dies in their wake, in short that they leave behind them a path of
putrefaction, and if you touch them it seems as if you were impregnated forever,
as was Philoctetes. It is the procession of the carrion. Again I ask, what other
word is there?
This horror belongs to the nineteenth century. In other times people
bravely apostatized. They artlessly and resolutely became renegades. They
received the Body of Christ, then, without boggling, went out and sold it, just as
they might have gone to the aid of a poor man. In a word, all this was done
gracefully, and people were Judases without further ceremony. Today it is
another matter; but, before I go on, I beg of you and of those who may chance to
read me, that you be so kind as to help me with your prayers.

For twenty years I have ceaselessly said it. Never has there been anything
as hateful, as completely abominable as our Catholic world of today—at least in
France and Belgium—and I refrain from asking myself what could more
irresistibly call down the Fire of Heaven.
If there is one thing well known and beyond explaining, it is that God
suffers all things. Granted. Without speaking of the Bloody Sweat or of any
other Mystery of that Passion which in my childhood I was sure I witnessed
when an old female relative who was putting me to sleep on her knees would say
to me: “If you’re not a good boy, the Jews will spit in your face”; without calling
to mind any other object of the Fear that took place at Gethsemane, let us not
forget the prodigious Mockery, the unforgivable and unmatchable Blasphemy
which the foul Apostle enshrined at the outset of the divine Torments: Osculetur
me osculo oris sui (let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth).
In this connection, be it asked in passing, when indeed will come the
interpreter, a commentator the like of which has never been seen, through whom
we shall finally learn that the Canticle of Canticles is simply a recounting, before
the event, of the story of the Passion, anterior by thirty generations to the four
Gospels?
So, once again, God suffers all things—except one thing alone. Non
patietur vos tentari supra id quod potestis (God does not suffer you to be
tempted above your strength). Everything else, but not that. Well, you would
think we had reached this point, and long since. It is most disturbing.
I assert in the name of the very small group of individuals who love God
and are resolved to die for Him whenever it may be needful, that the sight of
present-day Catholics is a temptation above our powers.
As for my own powers, I admit they have greatly diminished. Here am I,
almost fifty-four years old, and for at least thirty of these I have been seeing
Catholics doing vile things. I am willing that these swine should be my brothers
or. at least, my first cousins, since I am like them a Catholic and must obey the
same shepherd, who is surely a prodigal son; but how can I withstand starting up
in wrath, withstand uttering fearful cries?…

I live, or to put it more accurately, I painfully and miraculously subsist

here in Denmark, with no means of flight, among incurable Protestants whom no
light has visited for some three hundred years, ever since their nation in a body
and, without one second’s hesitation, rose at the bidding of a foul monk, in order
to disown Jesus Christ. The decay of the reason among these poor beings is one
of the most fearsome prodigies of Justice. As for their ignorance, it is beyond
anything you can imagine. They have reached the state where they are unable to
shape a general idea, and they live exclusively on ancient sententious sayings
which they bequeath to their children as fresh discoveries. Darkness shrouding
vaults of burial.
But the Catholics! Creatures grown up, brought up in the Light! Constantly
acquainted of their fearsome state as privileged ones; incapable, whatever they
may do, of encountering error, so much has the society in which they live—
however ruined it may be—been able to preserve divine unity! Minds similar to
the goblets of God’s guests into which is poured nothing but the strong wine of
unmixed Doctrine!… These beings, I say, wilfully going down into dark Places,
lower than the heretics and the infidels, wearing the garments of the Wedding
feast, only lovingly to embrace appalling idols!
Cowardice, Greed, Imbecility, Cruelty. Not to love, not to give, not to see,
not to understand, and, as much as one can, to cause suffering! The exact
opposite of Nolite con-formari huic saeculo (do not conform to this world).
Contempt for this precept is beyond doubt the most disastrous and thorough
achievement the human will has brought to pass since Christianity was first
preached.***

I know of nothing so disgusting as to speak of these wretches who make

the Sufferings of the Redeemer seem small, so much do they themselves seem
capable of outdoing the hangman of Jerusalem.***

Would you now like us to talk about their poor, their poor alone, among
whom I have the honor to belong?
I once saw in Paris a fine pack of dogs belonging to some false apostle,
who had succeeded in selling his Master for much more than thirty pieces of
silver. I’ve already spoken of it—I don’t remember where. I must have,
mentioned the immense and profound feeling of revolt, the impulse of infinite
hatred produced within me by the sight of those sixty or eighty hounds which
every day ate the bread of sixty or eighty poor people.
In those distant days I was quite young, but already thoroughly acquainted
with the pangs of hunger, and I very well recall that I vainly tried to imagine the
patience of the poor afflicted with such challenges, and that I went home
gnashing my teeth.
Ah! well do I know that wealth is the most fearful of anathemas, that the
accursed who cling to it, to the prejudice of the suffering members of Jesus
Christ, are promised incomprehensible torments, and that in store for them lies
the Abode of Howling and Dismay.
Yes, surely, this unquestionable assurance in the Gospels is refreshing to
those who suffer in this world. But whenever, reflecting on the reversibility of
afflictions, one recalls for instance that a little child must necessarily be tortured
with hunger in a frigid room so that some stunning Christian beauty need not go
without the delight of a perfect meal before a comfortable fire, oh! then, how
long our waiting seems! And how well I understand the justice of men in
despair!
I have at times thought that that pack of hounds whose memory pursues me
was one of those painful refrains lingering ever in the background of life’s
dreams, and I have told myself that this ferocious troop existed in a sense—and
much more specifically than one might think—to hunt the Poor.

Appalling obsession! Do you hear that concert, in that palace of revels, that
music, those instruments of joy and love which make men believe their paradise
is not lost! Well, for me here is always the sounding of the well away, the signal
that sets off the hunt. Will it pick up my scent, today? Will it pick up my
brother’s? And what defenses have we against it?
And yet those excruciating people, whose gaiety is heard by the poor man
sweating in his anguish, are Catholics, all the same, Christians like him, are they
not? Thereupon, all that bears God’s mark on earth, the roadside crosses, the
sacred effigies of old, the spire of some lowly church on the horizon, the dead
asleep in the cemetery with their hands joined in their graves, even the beasts,
astounded at men’s wickedness, and seeming to want to drown Cain in the quiet
lakes of their eyes—everything intercedes for the Poor, and everything
intercedes in vain. The Saints, the Angels can do nothing; the Virgin herself is
rebuffed; and the huntsman pursues his prey without having perceived the Savior
dripping blood, who was hastening toward him, offering him His Body!…***

I am dissatisfied with this limping parable which inadequately suggests

what I think and especially what I feel.
But what of it? From the absolute where I am situate it is impossible for
me to see the rich man—and above all the rich Catholic—as anything other than
the persecutor and devourer of the poor man. Thus the Holy Spirit speaks of him,
and to precisely the same picture leads that most debased science that goes by
the name of political economy.
It is beyond the reason’s bearing that one man should be born glutted with
riches while another should be born in the bottom of a manure pit. The Word of
God came in a stable, hated of the World, as children know, nor will all the
sophisms of all the devils change a tittle of this mystery that the joy of the rich
man has for its Substance the Suffering of the poor man. If you do not
understand this, you are a fool for time and for eternity.—A fool for all eternity!
Ah! were only the rich of today genuine pagans, open idolaters! There
would be nothing to say. Their first duty would obviously be to crush the weak,
and that of the weak would be to snuff them out, in their turn, whenever
opportunity offered. But they insist on being Catholics anyway, and Catholics in
such fashion! They aspire to hide their idols even in the divine Wounds!…
And you would want me not to call them carrion!

The Fire at the “Charity Bazaar,” May 5, 1897. There has been a fire at
the Charity Bazaar, A great number of handsome ladies were reduced to ashes,
last evening, within less than half an hour. Non pro mundo rogo (I do not pray
for the world), said the Lord. Coppée got off a wonderful bit of nonsense: “They
had gathered together to do good,” he wrote. Naturally everyone puts the blame
on God.
May 8. The excitement about the fire continues. Think of it! Such rich
people, in all their glad rags and with their carriages waiting at the entrance!
Their everlastingly useless carriages! All that for the love of the poor. Yes, all
that. When one is rich, it means one loves the poor. Beautiful clothes are the
reward for the love one bears poverty. And here’s something to make you give
up hope for the Gospel. The papal Nuncio had come to bless La Truie qui file2 a
moment before the fire. He had scarcely got outside when the thing started…
Judex tremebundus ante januam (the trembling judge before the door).

May 9. To my friend Andre R.

For the exasperation of Fools. You asked me for “a few words” about the
recent catastrophe. I accede all the more willingly in that I suffer from not being
able to shout aloud what I think.
I hope, my dear André, not to scandalize you when I tell you that on
reading the first news of this fearsome event I had the clear and delicious feeling
of an immense weight lifted from my heart. The small number of victims it is
true, set limits to my joy.
At last, I said to myself all the same, at last! At Last! Here then is a
beginning of justice.
That word Bazaar coupled with the word Charity! The terrible and burning
Name of God reduced to the state of a modifier of that disgusting term!!!
And then in this bazaar were to be found signboards borrowed from
taverns, whorehouses, A la Truie qui file being one, with priests and nuns
hovering about in this high-toned spot for pinching arses, and enticing poor
innocent creatures into it!
And the papal Nuncio coming to bless all that! Ah! my friend, what a
pamphlet for a man to write! The Incendiary of the Charity Bazaar.
So long as the papal Nuncio had not given his blessing to their formal
attire, the dainty and voluptuous carcasses which those full dress clothes covered
could not take on the black and terrible aspect of their souls. Until that moment
there was not the least danger.
But the blessing, the unspeakably sacrilegious Blessing of him who
represents the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and by consequence Jesus Christ Himself,
went where it always goes, that is, to Fire, which is the roaring and wandering
abode of the Holy Spirit.
Then, upon the instant, Fire was unleashed, and everything fell back into
its proper order.
Te autem faciente eleemosynam, nesciat sinistra tua quid facial dextera
tua: Ut sit eleemosyna tua in abscondito (And when thou dost alms, let not thy
left hand know what thy right hand doth. That thy alms may be in secret)…
(Matt. 6:3, 4).
“You didn’t give a damn about those Words, did you, my lovely Lady, and
you wanted the exact opposite? Well, then, here is what happened. It chanced
that there was a poor man who was very hungry, to whom none gave anything
and who was the hungriest of all the poor. That poor man was Fire. But Our
Lord Jesus Christ took pity on him, He sent him His blessing by means of the
servant of His Vicar, and thereupon you gave him the bountiful and altogether
manifest alms of your highly-flavored guts. As for your right hand and your left
hand, don’t worry. The saying will be fulfilled to the point, where even your
proud and silken-liveried flunkeys will not succeed in distinguishing the one
from the other, and to do so, we shall have to await the Resurrection of the
Dead.”
Cum facts eleemosynam, noli tuba canere ante te, sicut hypocritae faciunt
in synagogis, et in vicis, ut hanorificentur ab hominibus. Amen dico vobis,
receperunt mercedem suam. (Therefore when thou dost an almsdeed, sound not
a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets,
that they may be honored by men: Amen I say to you, they have received their
reward) (Matt. 6:2).
“Not to the likes of you do those Words apply, do they, Marchioness?
Everyone knows the Gospel was written for the rabble, and you would have
given quite a reception to One who would have dared advise you to sell in
abscondito your ‘trumpets’ and your furbelows for the relief of the unfortunate!
But all the same you will receive ‘your reward,’ and tomorrow morning, O
Viscountess, you will be scooped up in a shovel, with your jewels and your
molten gold, from among the trash…”
What drives you mad, bewilders you and makes you despair is by no
means the catastrophe itself, which is really of small moment compared, let us
say, to the Armenian catastrophe, at which not a one in all this high society
dreamed of shedding a tear.
No, it is the truly monstrous spectacle of universal hypocrisy. It is to see all
those who hold a pen lying brazenly to others and to themselves. And last but
not least, it is the boundless and quiet contempt of all, with barely a single
exception, for what God says and what God does.
The special character and the circumstances of this event, its lightning,
almost unbelievable swiftness, which made all succor impossible and which has
few parallels since the Fire from Heaven; the uniform appearance of the bodies
on which the Symbol of Charity hurled itself with a kind of divine rage, as
though it were avenging some betrayal of trust beyond our naming—all that,
nonetheless, was obvious enough.
All that bore the thoroughly undeniable mark of a chastisement, all the
more certainly so in that the innocent were struck down together with the guilty,
which is the Biblical impress of the Five Fingers of the Divine Hand.
This so natural thought: “God strikes, therefore He strikes with justice,”
came to the mind of no one, or if it did, it was at once cast aside with horror.
Ah! if the victims had only been a crowd of miners, dirty-handed folk,
people would perhaps have seen more clearly, their eyes being far less choked
with tears. But, duchesses or bankers’ wives who “had gathered to do good,” as
that generous dotard Francois Coppée expressly said, think of it, dear Madame!
By virtue of its plenary authority the newspaper La Croix has canonized
the victims. Calling to mind Jeanne d’Arc (!!!) whose anniversary comes at
about this date, Father Bailly, the delightful eunuch of our best drawing rooms,
spoke of that “funeral pyre on which the lilies of purity were mingled with the
roses of charity.”
My guess is that the chaste lilies and the tender roses would dearly have
wanted to clear out, even at the price of any kind of prostitution or cruelty, and I
have been given to understand that the more vigorous among these flowers did
not scorn to knock down any weaker ones who stood in their way.
“Each one for herself, Madame!… Those words were heard. Perhaps it was
that Sow who was making herself scarce.
To get back to La Croix, doesn’t it seem to you, André, that this sort of
blasphemy, this diabolical sentimentality summons a fresh catastrophe, as
certain substances attract lightning? One does not make playthings out of sacred
formularies, and it is frightening to see thus degraded the name of Charity,
which is the very Name of the Third Divine Person.
That, dear friend, is everything that I can say to you about that fire. I thank
you for having thus given me an opportunity to let off a little steam. I needed it.
Expect, moreover, and prepare yourself for catastrophes far different,
beside which that of the infamous Bazaar will seem mild. The century’s end is
near, and I know that the world is threatened as never before. I must have told
you this already, since I say it to whoever will hear it, but at this moment I say it
to you with even more forcefulness, and I beg you to bear it in mind.
Erit enim tunc tribulatio magna, qualis non fuit ab initio mundi usque
modo, neque fiet… Orate (For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath
not been seen from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be…
Pray) (Matt. 24:21).
In the meantime… my best to you.

I AM AWAITING THE COSSACKS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT3

[The Prophet is a Voice to Call Down Justice.] Only as the result of such
knowledge as a bath attendant’s’or an underwear clerk’s does anyone believe
that a prophet is necessarily, exclusively, a seer of things to come.
The Prophet is above all a Voice to call down Justice.
If one is absolutely determined, with or without irony, to bestow this
magnificent name upon such a hurler of curses as I am, one must at once accept
the consequence,
drawn from the very nature of things, that my shouts will have the power
to accelerate devastation. In this sense shall I be a prophet, as much as it is
possible to be one without divine inspiration, precisely as a man of prayer is a
worker of miracles.

[Something Seems To Be Brewing.] What do you think of present-day

happenings, and what is your impression about the growing cowardice of our
Catholics? Wouldn’t you say something seems to be brewing at last, rather to be
precipitating itself, something I predicted much over twenty years ago, gave
notice of so furiously? Not so long ago you believed that you had tested me; you
adjudged me a poor prophet, as though a deviation of a few months or a few
dozen months invalidated the exactness of a prediction dealing with so
prodigious an upheaval. We’ll see. I merely take this opportunity to beg you to
be on the watch. Present-day events are certainly hideous, but their tendency has
nothing commonplace about it. What is willed absolutely and everywhere is the
end of the Church, which cannot end. But indeed it is a theological truth that
should there remain but one single Catholic, the Church would live in him,
together with all her mysteries, all her miracles, all her power, all her fecundity.
… I therefore think, once again, that we are at the prologue of an unspeakable
Drama, the like of which has not been seen for twenty centuries; I invite you to a
certain amount of recollection.

[Cultivation Through Abject Want.] “The weather is a dog that bites none
but the poor,” said a wretch whose experience thereof is beyond dispute. I think
that dog sometimes also bites the rich, since some of them are mad, but this
happens seldom, and the bite, as a rule, must be harmless.
I myself am bitten ferociously almost every day, even during leap
years.*** In vain do I know that God protects and feeds me each day: my faith is
so weak that I fear death from abject want.
And yet such destitution is from the Holy Spirit, that is, from the living
God. I remember having written that somewhere. Destitution cannot, therefore,
give me death. But continual anguish can. Here it is over forty years that I’ve
been seeking solely the Kingdom of God and His Justice, in fulfilment of the
Precept. The promised increase has not been refused me, in the sense that I have
been able without bitterness or envy to consider the fowl of the sky and even the
lilies of the field, for which the heavenly Father Himself procures clothing and
food.
Yet because I am a privileged creature of sorrow, it was needful that
anguish should come hand in hand with every favor, either coming a little
before, because the favor keeps me waiting, or else immediately after, because it
insures only the morrow.
The Gospel tells me that the birds whose confidence I must imitate have no
barns, and now it happens that, to my daily confusion and torment, I am
obsessed with barns, as though I could be forgotten by miraculous Providence!
Here is a sorrow I must bear with many other sorrows.
It is true I am thus put in an exceptionally good position to scrutinize
everyone’s paradoxical anguish in these terrible days.
The third winter of Germany’s William4 is about to start. The infamous
undertaking of that scoundrel has destroyed the grain barns of the poor. How tell
that multitude that it is blessed, because the kingdom of the heavens belongs to
it? How make it understand that those who weep will be comforted, and that
those who suffer for justice’s sake will one day dwell in Paradise?
The multitude would at least, as a starter, have to accept the idea of
punishment, the necessity of expiation, and that seems to be out of the question.
Pastors busy pasturing themselves will have absolutely nothing to do with this
theme of penance, which would condemn them before it condemned their flocks.
And yet we cannot assume the despair of so great a people which has
received so many promises and to which the Virgin of Compassion has paid
visits three times in twenty-five years. France’s only recourse, then, would seem
to be cultivation through abject want, a very long experience of which has made
me know its powerful effects.
A man of genius wrote that slavery, before the Christian era, had been a
whole inner Christianity for the Gentile world. In the same sense, might one not
say that complete destitution, the sort of destitution which crushes the hearts and
makes men like wounded battle horses, is—in our lack of a living faith—the
supreme specific of the Holy Spirit to super-naturalize our fallen Christianity?

November 24, 1907. Léon Bloy, for what do you hope? I hope for that
which it is reasonable to hope, namely, that God will resurrect France which is
the kingdom of His Mother and of which He has need, but only after a horrible
death she can no longer avoid.

It cannot be contested that God no longer exists, at least not in Europe. He

perhaps still exists a little in the deserts of Asia or among the idolatrous islanders
of Polynesia. Even the Tartars and the Man-Eaters and the African savages adore
or think they adore Someone.
Ah! their cult indeed doesn’t go very far; their liturgy is rather
rudimentary. Yet these poor people nonetheless have something which seems a
cut above Sulpician theology. Those most lost in darkness assume a Living God,
a God who requires everything and for whom it is a duty to die.
The aborigines of the Civilization ironically called Christian celebrate, on
the contrary, a God who “is not too demanding.” They have a Credo that
resembles a signboard for teaching children how to read, they have sacraments
for servants, including the sacrament of Holy Orders, and they have preachers
for ladies. They have crucifixes, medals, pictures, rosaries to keep business
going. But the reality of all that is as absent among them as is faith in the heart
of a pumpkin.
I have heard the story of a poor gypsy woman who one day heard tell of
the living God. She knew absolutely nothing, not even any tongue other than the
dialect of her tribe. But she had been able to grasp those two words. At once she
left everything, took her little child in her arms and began to go about the world
like a mad woman, asking everywhere for the living God.
She asked the trees for Him, the brooks, the animals grazing in their
pastures, the priests and levites she met on the way, obtaining from the latter no
other answer than smiles of pity. Sometimes she asked the thunder for Him,
raising her innocent child over her head, thus repeating the gesture of Saint
Louis when he adjured the storm.
No one understood her, least of all the learned. Only a few poor people,
who thought her mad, threw her a scrap of bread from afar and took flight. In the
end she must have run across some austere old fogy who surely would have
advised her not to search any longer; unless perchance she was locked up, on the
orders of some wise bigwig, in a lunatic asylum; for I was not told what became
of her.
This extraordinary creature seems to me to be a symbol of the human soul
hungering after the principle of its life and wandering without respite in our
godless societies. She can perfectly well see that what people offer her through
weariness or contempt cannot be what she is seeking, that what people propose
to her is a frightful mockery, and her despair may very well resemble the ravings
of a lunatic. Practices without love, dead acts in whited sepulchres—how do you
expect a pilgrim of the Absolute to come to terms with these? And where do you
want him to take his heart, if he doesn’t find the stable of a newly born God
wherein to hang such a thank offering?
In all ages it has been possible to witness that terrible drama at which the
genius of Aeschylus guessed three thousand years ago. Very great saints,
moreover, were brought forth in the peerless anguish of the sieve through which
all souls must be sifted.
But today, on the threshold of the Apocalypse to which we have now
come, on the ultimate brink of an abyss the depth of which is unknown to us—
when we are no longer even dealing with the revolting mediocrity of the
Christian world, but merely trying to find out, as was the poor gypsy woman,
whether we can count on a living God—it drives one mad to think that no one
knows anything about it, and that no one, except a few sorrowful beings already
marked out for death, want to hear speak of it.***
But when will God make Himself manifest at last, the living God, the
divine God of the Manger and of Calvary, the God of the poor soldiers who are
dying in torment, and whom no one seeks any longer?

1. These pages were written in condemnation of the duels by which the men of letters
and journalists flayed in Le Désespéré settled their “affairs of honor,” and in which
Léon Bloy always refused to participate. (R. M.)
2. Sign posted over one of the booths at the Bazaar (see below). It may signify either a
sow which bilk and coos, spins, or makes herself scarce. (Translator’s Note.)
3. See above, p. 59. (R. M.)
4. William II, German emperor. (R. M.)
 Modern Christians

[Then His Lord Called Him.] A priest had just entered the pulpit. It was not
the regular pastor, a virtuous chap not given to indiscretion or to outbursts, who,
when once questioned by Leopold regarding the religious opinions of his parish,
answered: “Oh, Sir, in these parts there are only people of very modest
means”…and who had not so much as paid one single visit to console these new
sheep of his when they were going through the pangs of their sorrow and loss.
No, it was not he. This was a humble and timid curate, the one who had
administered the last sacraments to Clotilde. She looked at him with great
gentleness and prepared to listen. Who could tell but that this “useless servant”
might afford her exactly the help she needed?
And besides, what an opportunity he had to speak to the poor, to people
who were suffering! That Sunday was the twenty-first after Pentecost. The
Gospel of the Two Debtors bad just been read.
“The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king who would take an account of
his servants.
“And when he had begun to take the account, one was brought to him that
owed him ten thousand talents.
“And as he had not wherewith to pay it, his lord commanded that he should
be sold, and his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made.
“But that servant falling down besought him, saying: Have patience with
me and I will pay thee all.
“And the lord of that servant, being moved with pity, let him go and
forgave him the debt.
“But when that servant was gone out, he found one of his fellow servants
that owed him an hundred pence: and laying hold of him, he throttled him,
saying: Pay what thou owest.
“And his fellow servant, falling down, besought him, saying: Have
patience with me and I will pay thee all.
 “And he would not: but went and cast him into prison till he paid the debt.
“Now his fellow servants, seeing what was done, were very much grieved:
and they came and told their lord all that was done.
“Then his lord called him and said to him: Thou wicked servant, I forgave
thee all the debt, because thou besoughtest me:
“Shouldst not thou then have had compassion also on thy fellow servant,
even as I had compassion on thee?
“And his lord being angry, delivered him to the torturers until he paid all
the debt.”
What a text on which to elaborate, upon the eve of the day when landlords
demand that those poor devils their tenants pay up in full for the October
quarter! All whose debts had been forgiven, all who had been released from the
fear of bondage, indeed all the landlords of the district were there, and it would
not perhaps have been wholly impossible to dent the conscience of a few of
them. But the curate, himself a poor devil whose standing orders were to go easy
on people with full stomachs, stopped abruptly when he came to “throttled” and
interpreted the Parable, however clear, however little evasive, by the infinitely
elastic precept of forgiving offenses, thus drowning in the priestly confectionary
of Saint-Sulpice the indiscreet and disagreeable lesson of the Son of God.
At which a cloud fell over Clotilde, who went to sleep. Now, it was
another priest who was speaking:
“There is the Gospel, my brethren, and here are your hearts. At least I dare
presume you have brought them with you. I am willing to be convinced that you
have not left them forgotten deep in your cash drawers or your counting-houses,
and that I am not speaking to mere bodies. May I then ask those hearts of yours
whether they have understood any part of the parable that has just been read?
“Absolutely none, am I not right? I suspected as much. Probably most of
you had all you could do calculating the money you would or could receive
tomorrow from your tenants, money which will in all likelihood be paid to you
with inward curses.
“At that moment when it is told how the servant exonerated by his master
throttles the unfortunate wretch who in turn owes him a trifling sum, the fingers
of some of you men and women must have contracted themselves instinctively,
unwittingly, even here, before the tabernacle of the Father of the poor. And when
he sends him to prison, unwilling to pay heed to his entreaties, oh! then you were
certainly unanimous in exclaiming from your very bowels that this was well
done, and that it is truly vexing that such a prison no longer exists.
 “There, it seems to me, is the entire fruit of this Sunday teaching to which
only your Guardian Angels have listened, trembling. Your Angels, alas! your
grave and invisible Angels who are with you in this house and who will
tomorrow still be with you, when your debtors bring you the bread of their
children, or beg you in vain for patience. These poor people also will be escorted
by their Guardians, and inexpressible conversations will take place while you
overwhelm these unfortunates with your displeasure or your even more cruel
satisfaction.
“The rest of the parable isn’t meant for you, is it? The possibility of the
Lord’s throttling you in His turn is a priestly invention. You owe nothing to
anyone, your accounts are in order, your fortunes, small or large, were earned in
a most honorable manner. That’s well understood, and all laws are armed in your
favor, even God’s Law.
“You have no idols in your homes, that is to say, you don’t burn incense
before wooden or stone images while adoring them. You don’t blaspheme. The
Name of the Lord is so far from your thoughts that it would not even enter your
heads to ‘take it in vain.’ On Sundays you do God the overwhelming favor of
appearing in His Church. It’s more the thing to do than anything else would be,
it sets a good example for the servants, and after all it makes no difference one
way or another. You honor your fathers and mothers in the sense that you don’t,
from sunrise to sunset, bespatter their faces with gobs of filth. You do not kill
either with the sword or with poison. That would be displeasing to mankind and
might serve to scare your customers away. And finally, you don’t go in for too
scandalous debauchery, you don’t tell lies as big as mountains, you don’t rob
along the highways, where you can so easily be waylaid yourselves, nor do you
rob banks, which are always so admirably guarded. So much for God’s
Commandments.
“It’s just about useless recalling those of the Church. When one is ‘in
business,’ as you put it, one has other things to do than to consult the
ecclesiastical calendar, and it is universally recognized that ‘God doesn’t ask so
much as all that.’ This is one of your most cherished maxims. Thus you are past
reproach, your souls are clean and you have nothing to fear.…
“…God, my brethren, is full of terror when it pleases Him to be so. There
are here present persons who believe themselves to have superior souls, who
often frequent the sacraments, and who weigh down their brothers with a burden
heavier than death. The question is to know whether these persons will be hurled
at the feet of their Judge before they have awakened from their appalling
slumber….
“The irreligious think they are heroic in resisting the Almighty. These
proud fellows, some few of whom are not inaccessible to pity, would weep from
shame if they could see the infinite weakness, wretchedness, distress of the One
they defy and abuse. For God, who made Himself poor when He made Himself
Man, is in a sense always crucified, always forsaken, always expiring in torment.
But what is one to think of those who never knew pity, who are incapable of
shedding tears, and who do not believe themselves irreligious? And what is one
to think of those who dream of eternal life, in their shirt-sleeves and slippers,
sitting in the inglenook of hell’s fire?
“… I have spoken to you about the poor tenants with whom this parish is
amply stocked and who are already trembling at the thought of the sufferings
you can make them endure tomorrow. Have I spoken to a single truly Christian
soul? I dare not believe it.
“Ah! Why can I not shout within you! Sound the alarm in the depths of
your fleshly hearts! Give you a salutary anxiety, the holy fear of finding your
Redeemer among your victims? I am Jesus whom thou persecutest! was said to
Saint Paul, steaming with rage against the Christians, who were then like the
tenants of the City of the Devil, chased about from pillar to post, with fire and
sword close on their heels, until they paid with every drop of their blood for the
permanent dwelling place Heaven. 1 am Jesus whom thou persecutest!
“We know this Master has often concealed Himself among the destitute,
and when we are causing a man full of utter want to suffer, we do not know
which of the Savior’s members we may be rending. We have learned from that
same Saint Paul that something is always lacking to the sufferings of Jesus
Christ, and that this something must be fulfilled in the living members of His
Body.
“‘What time is it, Father?’ God’s poor children say to Him, throughout all
the centuries, for we watch ‘without knowing the day nor the hour.’ When shall
we cease suffering? What time is it on the clock of your interminable Passion?
What time is it?…
“‘It’s time to pay your rent, or else to get out and die in the street, among
the offspring of dogs!” answers the Landlord….
“Ah, Lord! I am a very bad priest. You have entrusted me with this
slumbering flock and I know not how to waken it. So abominable is this flock,
so stinking, so utterly frightful in its sleep!
“And here I am falling to sleep myself by virtue of seeing this flock
sleeping. I am falling asleep as I speak to it, I fall asleep praying for it, I fall
asleep by the bedside of the dying and by the biers of the dead! I fall asleep,
Lord, as I consecrate the Bread and the Wine of the dread Sacrifice! I fall asleep
at Baptism, I fall asleep at Penance, I fall asleep at Extreme Unction, I fall asleep
during the sacrament of Marriage! When I unite, for Your eternity, two of Your
images numbed with sleep, I am myself so drowsy that I bless them as if from
the depths of a dream, and barely do I keep from slumping down at the foot of
Your altar!…”
Clotilde awoke at the moment when the humble priest was coming down
from the pulpit. Their eyes met, and as Clotilde’s face was bathed in tears, he
must have thought it was his homily that had set them flowing. He was probably
right, for this prophetess had sunk into a slumber so deep that she might very
well have heard the true words which he had dared utter only in his heart.

[Worldly Priests.] The sum total of fifty worldly priests would not even
amount to as much as one Judas, a Judas who returns the money and hangs
himself from despair. Frankly, such priests are appalling. Through them it is that
the rich are confirmed in their wealth, as ice is solidified by sulfuric acid.
It is the worldly priest who says to the rich man: “The poor you will have
always with you,” abusing, in order to damn him a little further, the very words
of Jesus Christ. It is needful that the poor exist, and if there be not enough of
them, more must be made. “Happy are the poor,” is another frequent comment.
By multiplying them you will be multiplying the number of happy people. And
since an example gives strength to the precept, it is suitable that such apostles be
rich themselves or become rich through mastery over or subservience to
millionaires.
Jesus is on the altar, in His tabernacle. Let Him stay there. The rest of us,
His ministers, attend to our business, which is to get hold of money by every
means compatible or incompatible with the dignity of our cassocks. The poor
must be resigned. God tempers to them the wind as he does to the shorn Iamb.
And the rich must be resigned too. Each man his own burden. It would be unjust
and unreasonable to require the rich to take on the burden of the poor, the while
crushing the poor with the burden of the rich.
If you have millions, my dearly beloved brother, it is a trust which divine
wisdom has placed in your care. You must keep it intact for your children, make
it bear fruit as much as you can by judicious investments, which heaven will not
fail to bless, provided you carefully keep yourself from the rash enthusiasms of a
misdirected charity. Five yields another five. A hundred per cent, as in the
parable of the talents. That is virtue’s exchange rate. What’s more, we shall be
very happy to guide you, since the only tips we have are far from being those on
our pencils. If, through lack of faith, the business deals we advise should turn out
badly for you, at least you will have the consolation of knowing that those same
deals are never without their reward for those among us who know how to take
the cream off the milk.
Wealth is pleasing to the Lord, and that’s why he piled Solomon high with
it. The Vae divitibus (Woe to the rich) that a few paltry Anarchists claim to set
up against us is a visible error of transcription, very likely introduced by one or
another of those stupid and verminous monks who for so long dishonored the
Church. Things urgently needed to be put back in their place, and the clergy is
taking care of it diligently. Out-of-doors with the poor, or at least very nearly
out-of-doors, to that drafty vestibule where they will be well jostled. No purpose
is served by their seeing the altar. The more seemly parishioners see it for them.
That’s quite enough.***
The worldly priest is infinitely serviceable to the rich. With him about,
there is no way in which they can be bored, even for a minute. Salvation,
whatever you may do, is certain. All that is needful is to aim your intentions in
the right direction.*** A poor man, if he is Christian in his practices—a thing
difficult to concede—has the obligation of fasting punctually on designated
days, and even every day of the year, without respite. The rich Christian is a hero
and even a martyr if he replaces truffled turkey with plain boiled chicken or
brook trout in Lent, and the worldly cleric gladly shares his self-mortification.
And how many other services he renders! But who can supply every particular?
The essential thing, before God and before men, above all before men, is to draw
a sharp line, and our friends the worldly priests can draw it with a finger as
glowing and no less inexorable than that of Moses writing the Ten
Commandments on the Two Tablets of stone.
It remains to be known whether these law-givers “speak with God face to
face, as a friend speaks with a friend.” There is reason to fear, and I have the
temerity to say it, that this is not an open question. Indeed, there is very good
reason to fear. Worship riches as much as you want, there remains all the same a
stubborn prejudice which obstinately militates in favor of poverty. It is as though
the most modest lance which pierced Jesus had pierced all hearts. And the
wound has remained open for twenty centuries. Numberless are the woeful,
women, old people, little children; there are the living and the dead. All these
bleed, this whole throng spurts blood and water from the midst of the Cross of
their wretchedness, in the Orient, in the Occident, under every sky, under all
torturers, under every calamity, amidst the storms of man and the storms of
nature—and for how long: Such is the poverty, the boundless poverty of the
world, the total and universal poverty of Jesus Christ: Surely this must have its
worth and its reparation!
There are also priests who are not worldly, priests who are poor—”poor
priests,” as the world likes to call them—who do not know what it is not to be
poor men, having never seen anything but Christ crucified. For such there are
neither rich nor poor; there are only the Wind, in infinite number, and a tiny
flock of the clear-sighted, of whom they are the lowly shepherds. They are
herded close together, like the Hebrews at Goshen, alone in the light amidst the
tangible darkness of old Egypt. When they stretch out their arms in prayer, the
tips of their fingers touch the darkness.

[Amenities.] The damned in the abyss of their torments have no other

refreshment than the spectacle of the devils’ hideous faces. The friends of Jesus
see all around them the modern Christians, and thus it is that they are able to
picture hell.

[Reason and Faith.] All Satan’s dupes are forthwith doomed to stupidity.
The philosopher Blanc de Saint-Bonnet has written a book, unfortunately
inadequate, entitled with a kind of genius: On the Weakening of the Reason.
Every Christian capable of profundity will agree that it is indeed impossible to
lose the Faith without, up to a certain point, losing the Reason which is the
faculty whereby we know God. A man who opposes Reason to Faith is as stupid
as a horseman who would withhold food from his mount. Now you know that
this is the present intellectual level not only of non-believers but of most
Catholics. I should he grateful to you if you will tell me how I could manage not
to despise all this.
I do not claim “forcibly to impose my own way of seeing things,” as you
put it. I only want to bear testimony to the truth. This I want with my whole
heart, as did the martyrs at the point of torture. As for adroitness, I want none of
it. I replace it with confidence in God.
 [Writing for Non-Believers.] To a young priest: I have rarely obtained the
approval of Catholics and still less of priests who choose to see in me a very
dangerous spirit, because I think in the Absolute and because I call myself
independent. They need followings and flocks; solitaries to them are suspect.
There are two causes for the ostracism of my writings in the Catholic world: the
astounding unintelligence of modern Christians and their deep aversion to the
Beautiful. This last has something Satanic about it. As between a page written
with splendor and another page expressing the same idea in the dullest terms,
their choice is never in doubt: they instinctively turn toward the platitudinous.
You have had a thousand opportunities to see this, and you will see it more and
more, for the level falls lower every day.
In consequence I have long since chosen to write above all for non-
believers, and not in vain, since I have had the joy of bringing several of them
into the Church. The perfectly hideous injustice of those who ought to be my
brothers I endure as well as I can, with the help of God, knowing His help to be
invincible, but not without suffering and bitterness of heart. So when a Catholic,
a priest, comes to me as you are doing, it seems to me that Our scourged Lord
kisses me upon the lips and I feel a delicious consolation.

[Sermons.] Full of good will, I wanted to pay full attention to a homily.

The preacher, who after all is not dean of the cathedral, started to talk about “the
business of salvation,” a phrase that smells of the sacristy and of trade, to which
he seemed to cling. I fell asleep. Had he spoken of Sanctity, I should have been
awakened as is a horse by the trumpet.

Taceat mulier… (Let a woman remain silent…) I have just undergone a

terrible sermon against Materialism or Naturalism as opposed to supernatural
Revelation. All the philosophic platitudes of the seminary paraded before the
Blessed Sacrament, motionless in the tabernacle. I, alas! had come to the church
like “a beggar full of prayers.” That gulf of empty words swallowed them up,
and my soul slipped into the uneasy slumber that dull prattle induces. In the very
face of the Enemy, such, then, is the concern of preachers, for how many long
years brought up and carefully tended in scorn of the warnings of La Salette—on
the eve of a frightful day of reckoning!
What systematic deformation of the faith, or what lack of it, must we
assume to account for such ministers, and so great a number of them, having
come to the point where they no longer know that man’s stock in trade is Faith
and Obedience, and that consequently he needs Apostles and not lecturers,
Witnesses and not demonstrators. The day has gone for proving that God exists.
The hour strikes when one must give one’s life for Jesus Christ.

[Cardinal Richard Has No Need of Prayers.] It is reported that Cardinal

Richard, who was buried yesterday, left an income of one hundred thousand
francs to his nephews. His successor calls him a saint, probably because of the
truly sacerdotal effect of dazzlement which this wealth kindles within him.
Msgr. Amette, the present archbishop of Paris, but above all the archbishop of
present-day Paris, has issued a pastoral letter in which he gives it as his opinion
(worthy of respect as much as it is sincere) that the deceased has no need of
prayers! During the two days that the body of this saint was exposed, I am
assured that forty thousand persons touched it with various objects, perhaps in
the hope of seeing them changed into gold. But I have not heard tell of any
miracle.

[Fireside Prelates.] Msgr. Bolo, protonotary apostolic, gives lectures to

society women. “He is the most distinguished among our fireside prelates,” says
the Journal des Débats, “and one thinks of some rough country priest, poor,
living on little, going through mountain paths to visit the sick, and leading to the
Lord, amidst icy rocks, sheep that smell of wool grease.” Msgr. Bolo belongs to
a different school and makes me think of one of our bishops, he too of the
fireside brand, who, with his feet up before a good fire and smoking a fat cigar
after a copious meal, would merrily belch these truthful words: “To think we are
the successors of the Apostles!” Bolo is for the “royalty of the drawing room,”
for perfumes, for good cooking especially, feeling that greediness is an
essentially intellectual pleasure and that “the more one is intelligent, the more
one ought to be daintily nourished,” which somewhat removes us from the desert
Fathers, upon whom he probably looks as animals. Bolo is a “regenerator.” Such
preachers are ordinarily brought forth on the eve of catastrophes.

[The Distinction between the General and the Universal.] My Belgian

poet, not content with being burdensome and even exorbitant, has managed to
become unbearable. Jeanne spoke to me with vexation of the extreme freedom
with which this supposed Catholic judges priests, in the presence of our
children. She informed me that such talk greatly scandalized our young Lutheran
Danish woman, who told Jeanne, shortly before she left, how astonished she was
at hearing priests judged so harshly by a Catholic, as though there were not a
single one who merited esteem and respect. At once I expressed to our guest my
desire for a little reserve in my house, especially before the children. This in no
violent tone, but with much firmness. Then, all of a sudden, there leaped into
view the monster of a completely frightening, utterly invincible pride, as blind
and deaf as imbecility. He did not admit for one second that he might be
mistaken, and my strongest objections were of no use. Jeanne’s were of less than
none and irritated him all the more as they were unanswerable. But it’s the way
of pride to flee snarling. In vain did I say to him: “You have scandalized a young
woman brought up in the wretchedness of Protestantism by exposing her to the
frightful danger of rejecting the Grace proffered her.” He “didn’t give a damn,”
and repeated with an idiotic, exasperating obstinacy that the truth must be told,
basing himself on texts which he did not understand and which he twisted. He
was ready to start all over again and went so far as to tell me that he would bring
up his son in contempt for the clergy, alleging, with inconceivable stupidity, that
here was the sole means to save this child from the likely schemes which
unworthy churchmen might some day hatch against him. He thought—those
were his words—that a child should distinguish, as a man does, between the
general and the universal.
Vainly did I invoke the law that one must nourish a child with milk and not
with raw meat. It had no effect. He grew angry and insolent. Then all was lost. I
saw I had made a mistake, once again, and that I was in the presence of a mean
imbecile whom I could not at once throw out of my house. An enormous sorrow
for which my appalling life has prepared me.

[Priests are Generators of the Infinite.] To a mathematician: Your letters

inform me of nothing, unless it be of the bankruptcy of your reason. So, my dear
friend, you have doubts concerning the Church because there exist priests and
faithful who are unworthy, whose true reckoning, moreover, you cannot know.
In other words you have doubts about mathematics because you have known one
professor—or three hundred and seventy-seven professors of algebra or
trigonometry who were swine. Really, that’s too stupid, permit me to say it to
you with love as I have said it so often to de Groux—too humdrum, too middle
class, too much like a salesman travelling in oil or cowhides. All is forgivable,
excusable, bearable, but you must not be mediocre. That is impossible. You say
you do not know “any priest who could have won your obedience.” Why say
that to me of all people, my dear friend? I am not a café acquaintance, or a clerk,
or a policeman, or a janitor, or even one of those deep-minded shoemakers
whose wisdom astounds. I think you cannot have written those words without a
little shame. I have known priests who were admirable men, I still know some,
and I shall know others who have in mind nothing but the Glory of God, the
Salvation of Souls, the Evangelization of the Poor. So low have we fallen that
these words have become grotesque; but I am not afraid to write them….
Sentimental objections are of no value. Does or does one not have the duty
of obeying God and the Church? The whole question lies there. From this very
simple point of view, the priest is nothing more than a supernatural instrument, a
generator of the Infinite; and one must be an ass to see anything else, for all this
takes place and must take place in the Absolute. For over thirty years, I’ve been
hearing masses said by priests unknown to me; and I go to confession to others
who may, as far as I know, be saints or murderers. Am I then their judge? And
what a fool I would be if I proposed to find out their condition! It is enough for
me to know that the Church is divine, that she cannot be anything but divine, and
that the Sacraments administered by a bad priest are precisely as efficacious as
those administered by a saint.
Isn’t it enough to make one weep, my dear friend? I am here among brutes,
suffering tortures, and I must write you, you, a Catholic, these rudimentary
things which an informed heretic has no right not to know. It’s appalling.
Here is a very simple comment which ought, I think, to make an
impression on you, for there is something mathematical about it. The Protestant
world surrounding me is beyond dispute ugly, mediocre, as devoid of the
absolute as is possible. What is the character peculiar to that world? It is this: the
Supernatural is excluded from it: the Supernatural is excluded from Christianity,
which amounts to the most illogical and unreasonable idea that can ever have
entered a human head. The consequence: contempt for the Priesthood, the
cheapening of the priestly function, outside of which the supernatural cannot be
made manifest. Without the power to consecrate, to bind and to loose,
Christianity vanishes, to give way, in the stables of Luther and Calvin, to an
abject rationalism, certainly inferior to atheism. A Catholic priest possesses such
an investiture that, if he is unworthy, the sublimity of his State shines forth all
the more brightly. Here, for instance, is a criminal priest liable, if you like, to the
fullest damnation, and yet who has the power of transubstantiating!… How can
you not perceive this infinite Beauty?

[What Sorry Christians We Are.] To a priest: So now you have become a

solitary. I do not know whether I ought to congratulate you, for it seems to me
that it is causing you suffering, but there are days when I am tempted to envy
you, so much does contact with the world seem tiresome and discouraging to
me. Really, there are too many idiots.
And yet I see in your letter a line of which I do not approve. “I do not have
the soul of a saint,” you say, referring to yourself. And it’s to the author of
L’Exégèse des Lieux Communs that you write this! Well, then I answer you with
certainty that I have the soul of a saint; that my fearful bourgeois of a landlord,
my baker, my butcher, my grocer, all of whom may be horrible scoundrels, have
the souls of saints, having all been called, as fully as you and I, as fully as Saint
Francis or Saint Paul, to eternal Life, and having all been bought at the same
price: You have been bought at a great price. There is no man who is not
potentially a saint, and sin or sins, even the blackest, are but accident that in no
way alters the substance.
This, I think, is the true point of view. When I go to the café to read petty
or stupid newspapers, I look at the customers around me, I see their silly joy, I
hear their foolish nonsense or their blasphemies, and I reflect that there I am,
among immortal souls unaware of what they are, souls made to adore eternally
the Holy Trinity, souls precious as angelic spirits; and, sometimes I weep, not
out of compassion, but out of love at the thought that all these souls, whatever
may be their present blindness and whatever the apparent acts of their bodies,
will all the same go invincibly to God who is their necessary end.
Ah! if people only knew how beautiful that is! But you know it, and it
would be your duty to teach it to me if I did not know it myself. “What sorry
Christians we are! We have received the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation,
Holy Orders sometimes… and yet with all that, we lack character!
There is a deceptive form of humility that resembles ingratitude. We have
been made saints by Our Lord Jesus Christ and we dare not believe and say
resolutely that we are saints! Ah! my dear friend, what beautiful and enrapturing
words could be said by a preacher who would be truly filled with this thought!
 [The People of God in the Twentieth Century.] What about the People of
God? you ask me. Have I not pointed it out to you? In the old days, over three
thousand years ago, the People of God was the Hebrew people. Miracles were
not lacking to it. Jehovah led it by the hand in the midst of the waves and
through deserts, to the astonishment and the extermination of other peoples. Ever
since Jesus Christ, the people of God is every one of us; it is I, it is you the
cabinet maker, you the locksmith, you the clerk, the garbage collector or the
poet. It is everyone who is poor, everyone who suffers, everyone who is deeply
humiliated. It is a vast flock in the wilderness, an infinite multitude of sad hearts
in quest of Paradise. Some among them barely earn their bread, never have an
hour in which to cultivate their souls and end by denying they have any.
What is more, who could instruct them, guide them, encourage them? The
clergy, insufficient in number, is nearly always appallingly mediocre. As for the
Léon Bloys, when there are any to be found, they, are so successfully strangled
and smothered that it is impossible to know them and there is no means of
hearing them. Then what? Nothing is left except employers or landlords. Quite
frankly, that is not enough.
And yet souls do exist! You have been bought, paid for at a great price,
Saint Paul used to say. I should think so! It took nothing less than the Blood of
God! Such are things which we cannot understand.
But what we understand very well is that nothing in this world or in hell
would be able to pay for our souls. “I am the son of man and of woman,
according to what people tell me. This surprises me. I thought I was something
more!” These words were written by a completely modern poet, who was as
unhappy as one can be. Pascal burns with glory for having said far lesser things.
Some saints have declared that if, by divine permission, one could see a
soul as it really is, one would die on the spot as though one had been thrown into
a furnace or a volcano. Yes, the soul of anyone, the soul of a bailiff, the soul of a
concierge would consume us.
Ah! Lord, what a sorry people of God! What a strange and inconceivable
people of God! An endless and universal procession, a torrent of torches more
brilliant than the stars, and they do not even know what they are! Sirius,
Aldebaran, Altair or that terrifying star in the Constellation of Hercules toward
which our sun is hurtling at a speed accelerated by several thousand leagues a
second—of such stars, I say, absolutely shrouded in darkness, whose existence
cannot be suspected and yet which is nonetheless sure, since they cost Jesus
Christ’s entire blood, of such is composed the People of God. Blast furnaces
large as worlds, but invisible, and not knowing themselves to be furnaces….
It is a thought monstrously hard to conceive, it is enough to make one die
of wonder to reflect, for instance, that here is some poor shipping clerk of
between eighteen and twenty-five, a poor devil of an employee who pushes a
pen on some administrative paper only to copy filthy nonsense, who will keep on
with this until death, without hope, growing increasingly brutish, and yet whose
soul cost the Son of God his life!… After which, reflect that this unfortunate is
also an aristocrat, a kind of courtier or king’s favorite, as compared with other
slaves of the kingdom. Think of the fact that there are other hundreds of millions
who do not even know that God exists, and who are being knocked about from
morning to night. Is it to these that Jesus Christ said: “Leave everything, sell
everything, forsake everything and follow me”? Assuredly, since no one is cut
off from the preaching of the Gospel. Let this multitude answer: “We have
nothing to leave, nothing to sell and, as we possess nothing, not even our bodies
or our souls, we don’t know what to renounce. We do not refuse to follow you,
but we are desolate souls, hundreds of thousands of desolate souls, lost in gloom.
If we grope to the right: is that your Heart, O Jesus? Is that the Wound in Your
Side? If we grope to the left, is it the Devil who will take us by the hand?…
Reflect, if it please you, Lord, that there never was a God who had a more pitiful
people.”
My dear friends, whether we say this or not, it is a fact that our bowels cry
it forth, if not for ourselves, at least for our wholly disinherited brothers.
The service of God is harsh. Only hypocrites will tell you the opposite. It
has cost me twenty years of torture, complete ignominy, and the death of two of
my children, killed before my very eyes by the most ferocious poverty.
Yet I do not wish to complain. Suffering is an infinitely precious grace of
which not everyone is deemed worthy. So much the worse for me if I am too
cowardly to ask for more of it.
I am come to tell you that we are all of us, in a body, most interesting
wretches, since we are the People of God, and since we are not landlords. But
such language cannot suit anything but souls, and I naturally assumed you had
souls. Your souls! Ah! I am constantly thinking of those invisible roaring fires!
Question the first bourgeois you meet. He will tell you that the serious business
of life is to keep one’s guts filled. This being the case, I have never been serious
and I declare that I don’t know how to talk to a piece of meat. You have just had
proof of it.
 Priests Wanted. “Anything else?” sighed a slumbering old curé, worn out
with childish confessions. It was about the time of my first Communion. I recall
that this invariable question left me disconsolate. Later on in life, it seemed to
me I could well have answered:
“Anything else, do you say? It’s quite simple. I demand your heart. I want
you to fulfill the words of the Master that you give your life for me. Until then
you will be nothing but a hireling, a bad shepherd who does not know his sheep,
and whom his sheep do not know. When the thief shall come, he will find you
sound asleep—so soundly asleep that nothing less will he needed to awaken you
than the song of the Seven Bugles of the Judgment.”
Thus growl today the last Souls, the forsaken and the desolate, the ultimate
remnants of the Likeness, the few surviving and abhorred specimens whom the
artillery of Apostasy’s catchwords has not been able to crumble.
Priests wanted. Different Priests are wanted. Priests are wanted who would
have brotherly love for Men’s Minds, who would love Beauty and Greatness to
the point of dying for them, who would not forsake their duty, as so many have
during the last two hundred years.
You are asked, O honorable successors of the Apostles, not to nauseate the
Poor Man who seeks Jesus, not to detest Artists and Poets, not to send into the
enemy’s camp, through injustice, unreasonableness and insults, those who seek
nothing better than to fight at your side and for you, if you were humble enough
to command them.
But you are not even listening, you don’t want to hear anything, you are
heavily sleeping on the bodies of wounded men who are bleeding or dying.
When a cry more despairing than the others forces you to half open your eyes,
you have only this to say: “Anything else, my child?” and you at once fall back
to sleep, with a feeling of surprise that you no longer have dominion over the
world.
What other conclusion can there be to this book, in which above all is laid
bare the terrifying sterility that comes to minds deprived of higher culture?

PRIESTS WANTED!
 She Who Weeps1

[The Cemetery of La Salette.] August 25, 1906. Before leaving La Salette I

went up one last time to the little cemetery where lie the pitiable remains of my
dear Father Tardif de Moidrey, who took me to La Salette in 1879, only to die
three weeks later, thus leaving me an orphan.
The last days of this priest of Mary were bitter, bitter indeed! No one,
except myself, knew of it. His sorrow at not seeing the triumph of La Salette,
and the endless spectacle of clerical mediocrity gnawed at his heart and partly
accounted for his death.
Yet how far he was from knowing the whole truth, then so hidden and so
little known since! Besides, the greatest iniquities had not yet been perpetrated,
or had been committed too recently and with too much cunning for him to
suspect them. It was misery enough for him to see La Salette slighted and its
missionaries infinitely unequal to their task….
Farewell then to that dear little cemetery, to that woeful basilica, to that
winding Way of the Cross that marks the exact route taken by the Procession of
Our Lady of Threats…. Uncertain of ever seeing any of this again, I tried to
engrave the image of it on my memory.
The dawn was coming. Austere Obiou and the bald peaks over which it
watches were dyed with pink. A limitless opal filled space. An enchantment
lasting a few minutes, after which the fearful sun would riddle all creation with
its fires. I stopped once again close beside the grave of the one I loved and I
thought on the frightening future—the inconceivably, unspeakably frightening
future—which has already begun.

[The Immaculate.] Christ is come out of Mary just as Adam is come out of
the earthly Paradise, to obey and to suffer. Mary is thus symbolized by the
Garden of Delight “planted by God in the beginning…” The second chapter of
Genesis is absolutely beyond comprehension if you do not remember Mary. It is
true that everything is beyond understanding without Her. But how much more
so in this case!
This Garden, closed fast since the Disobedience, hortus conclusus, to the
tribulation or the despair of many billions of human beings, was the goal of “the
generations of the heavens and the earth,” according to the Holy Book’s vastly
mysterious language.
That was a marvelous garden in which it never rained. A fountain sprang
from the earth to water everything, and a river older than all the geographies
flowed out of this paradise at once to branch into four great rivers, the names of
which, according to the most learned interpreters, mean or seem to mean:
Prudence, Temperance, Quickness of Spirit, Fecundity. We must believe that
these four names enfold in a way no man can understand the Vocation of Mary:
Queen, Virgin, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, Mother of God.
Divine commonplaces! Beyond these things nothing can be seen. Above,
below, to the right, to the left, in the Infinite, there is nothing to discern. It is well
enough for us to know that God is our end; what means have we without Mary
even to give shape to such a thought?
Our minds cannot receive God except through Mary, just as the Son of
God could not be born except through the operation in her of the Holy Spirit.
Human speech is there so powerless that all words are fearsome. Mary’s
Immaculate Conception, which puts her at an unspeakable distance from us, is
nevertheless the sole point of contact. By means of the Immaculate Conception
God was able to place His foot upon earth. Here is the sole door through which
He was able to escape from the Garden of Delight which is His Mother and
whom a thousand centuries of blessedness could not enable us to understand.
You would have to know what were Adam and Eve, what were the Plants
and Animals in that Garden, what was the Disobedience and what it cost. You
would have sufficiently to wipe away everything men have thought for seventy
or eighty centuries in order to make possible, I do not say the evidence or the
distant mental image, still less the vague expectation, but a bare something
resembling a heartbeat in the face of this fact: that with everything lost forever,
as it is with the fallen angels, there all the same remained preserved a drop of
divine Sap, just enough to save billions of worlds; and that in the end there
blossomed that Flower more beautiful than Innocence, which Christians name,
understanding nothing about it, the Immaculate Conception, Mary Herself, the
sublime Garden regained.
And yet shall I dare say this? Nothing had yet been achieved. That Garden,
closed so long by the Disobedience of the first Man, had first to open of itself to
eject the least of men, like unto a worm, who was to redeem all other men. For
this Mary’s obedience was not enough—it frightens me to write it. There was
needed, reabsorbed within Her, the impatience and sorrow of all the centuries.
The Immaculate Conception was not enough to procure the world’s
Salvation. The Impatience and Sorrow of the Immaculate Conception were
necessary.
We can understand nothing, of course. Yet it is possible to imagine an
earth abandoned to all the powers of darkness, a ravaged human race multiplying
from day to day and perverting itself more and more with each generation.
Despite this and throughout all this, a tiny little shining ray, a thread of light
which nothing could destroy, the Immaculate Conception piercing the ages and
the peoples until the miraculous hour, unknown to the greatest angels, when it
would manifest itself in Mary full of grace, conceived without stain of original
sin under the Gate of Gold. How are we to picture to ourselves such a Creature
without the endless train of the Lamentations and mournings of the entire human
Race of which she was the sole living Stem?
We know from tradition that our mother Eve for centuries bore an infinite
penance for all nations to come. Sinless Mary gathered the whole heritage of this
penance and made of it what She could, namely a Sorrow such as no other
sorrow in the world, the sorrow of all the generations, of all men, of all hearts, of
all intellects, the sorrow, some seers of visions might say, even of the devils and
the damned. This infinity of groans and torments in an infinite soul must have
had a recoil of impatience strictly equivalent to the impatience for the
Redemption which mystical theology ascribes to the second divine Person.
When on the day of the Annunciation the Angel Gabriel came to knock on
the door of the lost Paradise, that door might well not have opened. The sending
of the Son of God into the flesh of men and to his death was at issue, But
impatience won out and the door opened upon this answer of the Sorrowful one:
Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (Be it done to me according to thy word).
Wretched world, you were not to suffer a day longer!***
She weeps at La Salette. She whom all generations are to call Blessed. She
weeps as She alone can weep. She weeps infinite tears over all those betrayals of
trust listed by Her, and on each one of them singly. She is thus stricken by them
in the very bosom of her beatitude. The reason is bewildered. A beatitude that
“suffers” and weeps! Can one conceive of such a thing?***
In 1846, “no longer able to restrain the Arm of your Son,” incensed as He
was, you came to entrust your grief to the only creature able to listen to you and
understand you, to this humble Mélanie, whom you chose because she seemed to
be the lowest of all creatures, and you entrusted to her your Secret which you no
longer had the strength to bear by yourself alone, you who had borne without
any help whatever the Son of God.
Twelve years later you manifested yourself to another shepherdess, but
without showing her your great tears for which Christians had had no use, or
entrusting her with that terrible Secret which the first shepherdess had been
commissioned by you to divulge and propagate—how greatly in vain! Your
foreseeing and predicting the miracle of Lourdes at La Salette was a more heroic
effort, a disguising of your sorrow similar to the disguise of a mother who, with
death in her heart, would put on festive garments to cheer her children.
A little over twelve years more passed, and there came what people have
called the terrible Year. France, trampled upon by brutes, was wringing her
hands. A last time you appeared to some poor children, in wholly enigmatic
fashion. You unfurled in the sky strange images of yourself, accompanied by
brief and reticent written words which could equally well indicate the extremity
of the threat as the extremity of the forgiveness.2
And that is all. We have had no more news of you. The Christian world,
which this silence should terrify, went on downward. La Salette scorned,
Lourdes become a trading-place and a subject for pretentious writing, Pontmain
a pious picture! It is quite clear that you no longer have any authority over your
people and that you can do nothing for them. It would seem that the hour had
come for that people to perish.***
It is said that Eve wept for several centuries over the numberless children
she had lost, Rachel plorans filios suos et nolans consolari (Rachel weeping for
her children, and will not be comforted). Mary, the new Eve, finds them again,
and in what a state! Imagine an undefiled Mother of several billion children—
leprous, dying, sobbing in the midst of torments, doomed to the-vilest death,
soiled with the most squalid filth—She alone having remained pure, the
unblemished spectator of their damnation. And this everywhere and in every
century.
This incomprehensible torment was needed to “burst asunder the heavens,”
as Isaias said, and to make the Savior come down therefrom. The coming down
and the immolation of the Savior was still not enough. It was also necessary that
her wretched children agree to be saved, and we can see, after nineteen centuries,
that this was no less difficult.
Then Mary no longer knew what to do. She came down in Her turn. She
came down, all in tears, upon a mountain, and entrusted her immense grief to the
least of creatures, telling her to tell it to all her people.

[Let a Woman Remain Silent.] Obedience to the Mother of God, who came
on purpose sixty years ago today to make known her will, was the only device of
which no one bethought himself.
Yet it could have been viewed as simple enough. The Sovereign of
universes was inconveniencing herself, if I dare so express it, just as the Milky
Way would inconvenience itself were this incalculable creature, appalled at
men’s wickedness, to kneel in the dark blue of the firmament. She
inconvenienced herself in order to bring us with Her tears3 the “great news” of
the enormity of our danger. Speaking as the Trinity alone can speak, this
Ambassadress proclaimed the imminence of punishments and cataclysms, and
told what must be done to keep from perishing, for the threats she made were
conditional threats starting with the first words of their utterance: “If my people
will not submit, I am FORCED to let go the arm of my Son.”4
What is there more simple, I say, than to humble oneself and obey? Just the
opposite was done. Mary had asked for the observance of the Seventh Day and
for respect toward her Son’s name. She wanted the laws of the Church to be
observed, and wanted her children during Lent to abstain from going to the
butcher’s, “like dogs.” She had entrusted to each of the two young shepherds,
but especially to Mélanie, a secret of life and death, expressing it as her formal
will—since ratified by Pius IX and Leo XIII—that this secret be transmitted to
all her people, after a certain fixed time. And finally she had given, in French,
the Rule of a new religious Order: “The Apostles of the Latter Times”***
It is difficult, I do not say to imagine, but even to conceive a more pitiable-
supplication:
“For how long a time now have I suffered for you all; for nineteen
centuries have I led through the mountains the Seven Sorrows of which I am the
Shepherdess, the seven sheep of the Holy Spirit which are one day to browse
upon the world; if I want my Son not to abandon you, I am burdened with
endlessly begging Him. What can I do for you that I have not already done? I am
Egypt and the Red Sea; I am the Desert and the Manna; I am the very beautiful
Vine, but I am, at the same time, the divine Thirst and the Spear that pierces the
Heart of the Savior.*** Ah, my children, if only you would be converted….”
Men then rose up who had mitres on their heads and held in their hands the
crooks of the shepherds of Christ’s flock. And these men said to Our Lady:
“Now that’s about enough! Taceat mulier in Ecclesia! (Let a woman
remain silent in Church!) We are the Bishops, the Doctors, and we have need of
no one, not even of Persons who are in God. Besides, we are the friends of
Caesar and we don’t want any tumult among the people. Your threats do not
disturb us in the very least, and your little shepherds will receive from us, even
in their old age, only contempt, calumny, mockery, persecution, poverty, exile
and finally oblivion!…”

[The Obvious Failure of the Redemption.] So that’s what we’ve come to!
The Tears of Mary and her Words have been so well concealed for sixty years
that Christendom is unaware of their existence. The horrible anger of her Son is
not suspected, not even by those who eat His Flesh and drink His Blood, and the
world goes about its business. Yet numerous and singularly unanimous
prophecies assert that our age is appointed for the satisfaction of God, who will
prove the Flood of all Catastrophes. A glimpse at this or only a guess is enough
to turn heads and even to make the globes spin.
The vastness of this matter would require an archangel’s power of vision.
Full nineteen centuries of Christianity, which amounts to some hundred
generations, sprinkled with the Blood of Christ! And to what end? The twentieth
century can ask itself this dumbfounded. The fierce optimism which assumes
that henceforth the Gospel has been preached to all nations can he maintained
only in the pious press or in the lowest school grades, coming before the
rudiments of the most elementary geography. The all too certain truth is that out
of the fourteen or fifteen hundred million human beings inhabiting our globe,
one third at most knows the Name of Jesus Christ, and ninety-nine per cent of
this third know it in vain. As for the quality of the residue, that is an infinitely
mysterious shame, a prodigy of sorrow, to be likened only to the
incomprehensible Seven Years of the Sorrows of Mary’s Compassion.
The obvious reality is God’s want of success throughout the earth, the
failure of the Redemption. The visible results are so frightful in their
insignificance, becoming daily more so, that one insanely asks oneself whether
the Savior has not abdicated. “Quae utilitas in sanguine meo, dum descendo in
corruptionem?” (What use is there in my Blood if I must come down into
corruption?) Such indeed is the Agony in the Garden as ecstatics have seen it!
Ah! much good it did to bleed so copiously and to groan so deeply, to receive so
many blows, so much spittle, so many lashes, to be so atrociously crucified!
Much good it did to be the Son of God and to die as a son of man, only to end,
after being trampled upon by devils throughout nineteen centuries, with the
Catholicism of our day!***
What is one to say, after this, of the numberless idolaters among whom it
would be unjust not to count the traditional Catholics, entrenched in the
unshakable certainty that they have been sifted, sorted out grain by grain like
eucharistic wheat, and that penance has nothing to do with them? These
especially are frightening. The plain savages of Africa or Polynesia, the human
fruits of hideous Asiatic culture, the monstrous polymorphs of the most debased
intellectual capacity, of the most degraded reason—all these unfortunates have
their wooden or stone gods, some of which are so devilish and so black that one
can neither laugh nor weep after seeing them. Yet, let Jesus be shown them on
His Cross and most of them on the instant will become gulfs of humility.***
Clearly Our Lady of La Salette says nothing and has nothing to say to such
Christians.
Will the Mother of God then have to show Herself in vain on the
mountains? The Message of La Salette is the most sorrowful sigh heard since the
Consummatum. Who would dare say the Virgin was “blessed”5 at seeing the
Blood of Her Son shed in vain for so many centuries, and where is the Seraph
who would set limits to this Her torment?

[They Will Not Make Their Examination of Conscience.] “Tu es ille vir, tu
fecisti hanc rem abscondite!” (You are the man, you have done this thing
secretly!) says the Holy Spirit. You are the culprit! says the conscience.
Whatever be the crime committed, in whatever part of the world, these words
must strictly and with justice he applied to each of us. The saints have always so
understood it. And because priests are closer to God and are thus more
responsible, it is natural that they should be the first to be arraigned.
“You are the light of the world!” their Master said to them. There will
never be any more positive statement. But we know that the purest earthly flame,
when put forth against the sun, casts a shadow. Similarly, if the Light of God
were to arise behind the light of the world, the latter would at once throw an
impenetrably opaque, black, sticky, sooty shadow. Such must be the feeling of a
humble priest who makes his examination of conscience.

[The Vast Dignity of Mary.] That no one understood the Fact of La Salette
is a natural consequence of lack of comprehension or of ignorance of the
boundlessly inexplicable Privileges of Mary. To consider only her Immaculate
Conception, which is an appalling mystery, it is to be noted that at Lourdes she
did not say “I was conceived without sin,” but: “I am the Immaculate
Conception.” It is as if a mountain said: “I am Height.” Mary is the only creature
who has the right to speak of herself absolutely, as Christ speaks of Himself
when He says: “I am the Light, the Truth and the Life.” The “Clothes made from
the Sun,” mentioned in the Apocalypse, are her clothes of Absoluteness, She is
so close to God and so removed from other creatures that it requires an effort of
the reason not to be confounded. I dare even to say, at the risk of confounding
myself, that the more Reason and Faith grow, the more grows the Mother of God
and the less able one becomes to ascribe limits to her, to distinguish her.
Ah! I know how wretched these words are! They at least have this in their
favor, that they equal the wretchedness of human thought. How would an angel,
even if one could listen to his speech without being thunderstruck with love from
the very first syllable, how would an Angel explain that it is possible to conceive
Mary without conceiving the Trinity Itself, and possible still to perceive Her a
little in the dazzling light of the great Darkness?
At La Salette she spoke in the first person, as God alone can speak. This
has attracted much attention. Stout fellows dashed forward to shore up the walls
of the Church, which such language surely threatened to cast to the ground; to
explain—oh, how weakly—that all the canonical prophets expressed themselves
thus and that on this occasion their admirable Queen was, like them, but a
mouthpiece, nothing more. No one thought of asking in what other way the
Mother of God might have expressed herself. In her public Address, the Name of
her Son always accompanies the reproaches and the threats. It is thus shown to
us that she speaks, above all and solely, as the Mother of God, as an absolute
Sovereign, to the point where the Son who is her own Creator seems to be able
to do nothing without her permission. Try replacing the First Person with the
Third, reading, for instance: “God gave you six days in which to work, He kept
the seventh for Himself, and people will not grant it to Him.” At once the
address turns into the sermon of some preacher or other exhorting his flock to
virtue, and that which constitutes the very characteristic of this famous Address
which has astounded so many souls—supreme Authority—disappears.
Granted at once that Mary is not God, although she is the Mother of God.
Yet nothing can express her dignity. Theologically speaking, it is as impossible
to adore her as it is to exaggerate the cult of honor that is owed her. Mary’s glory
and universal excellence defy Hyperbole. She is that fire of Solomon which
never says: “Enough!” She is the earthly Paradise and the heavenly Jerusalem.
She it is to whom God has given everything. If you think of her Beauty, it would
be mocking her to say She is Beauty itself, since She is infinitely above that
praise. If you wish to extol her Strength and Power, you could do nothing better
than to recognize that She is, in truth, the least of creatures, since She has been
able to accomplish the inconceivable wonder of humbling herself lower than all
the abysses before which She had already been conceived. If you wish to die, all
those of good will who are dying lie in her Arms. If you are asking to be born,
the Milky Way will spout forth from her Breasts to feed you. If you were so
good a poet that you could even astound the innocent Couple beneath the plane
trees of Paradise, you would still seem to be selling the most rotten of goods,
short weight, you would look like a slave trader or a slum landlord were you—
even in tears and on your knees—so much as to dream of saying a word about
Her Purity, which makes the sweat of the damned in the depths of hell look like
the droplets of dew that hang on a summer morning from the silver and opaline
webs woven by engaging forest spiders. “In vain will you pray, in vain will you
strive: never will you be able to repay the pains I have taken for you.” Should
the Church militant continue for ten thousand years more, should there take
place hundreds of councils, each one of which would add a priceless jewel to the
heavenly Queen’s attire, all that would not do as much for her splendor as this
Testimony by Herself to Herself, in the wilderness, before two poor little
children.

Is there anyone who knows that today, the third Sunday of September, is
the feast of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows? And will there be found along the
front lines anyone, priest or layman, to recall this to those who are fighting? This
day is exactly the seventieth anniversary of the Apparition of this Queen of
France who came in tears to predict the woes with which we are at last
overwhelmed. It would perhaps give strength to many to know this, to reflect
that the Mother of God saw them long before their birth at the very place where
they now are, and that she has wept over each of them, begging their parents to
be converted while there was yet time. This thought would certainly give them
more courage than the speeches of cabinet ministers or the reading of official
communiques. A tear of Mary, that is really something! A tear of the Most Pure
One for me, a poor man sunk in the flood of the divine Anger and the divine
Repentance. A tear of the Mystical Rose for me alone, in this stinking pit where
I rot away while awaiting a death that will perhaps be horrible! For after all, She
can have wept only in the way her Son shed His Blood, that is to say for each
man in particular, considered by Her and by Him also as of a value equal to all
the universe.
“Behold thy son,” Christ said to her, singling us out from high on His
Cross. Whatever His anger, He says it still and forever. He says it in such
fashion that the terrifying Consummatum has not yet, for almost two thousand
years, had time to come about, and that these supreme Words of the dying Christ
resemble, in the Gospel, a prophecy from the Psalms which has not yet been
fulfilled. This Motherhood of Mary is as sorrowful, as universal, as unending as
the Redemption.
There once existed in old churches representations of the Transfixion
venerated time out of mind; a Mother in tears having seven swords planted in her
heart. The sacrilegious silliness of the Sulpicians has caused a great proportion
of these naïve and dusty embodiments of the people’s ancient piety to disappear,
and poor people in sorrow no longer know where to go.
Nevertheless some few of the humble defenders of the Kingdom of the
Sorrowful Mother may have seen such pictures, in their earliest youth, when
their care-laden mothers went to kneel before the transfixed Consolatrix,
offering her a cheap little taper. They may have forgotten much, but they
remember this, especially during their worst hours, during the evil nights, in the
midst of rain and snow and squalls of shell fire, when the heart is like a desert
island visited only by flotsam. At such times a single word would suffice to
plunge them into prayer.
I remember having had that experience, forty-six years ago, when the
Germans, who were as perfidious and dreadful then as today, were waging
against us a far less infamous war. In that distant time the faith also was perhaps
a little less shattered. I think I can still see the Virgin with the seven swords of
my childhood passing back and forth along our fighting front, like a captain; nor
was I the only one to see her. It was at the time of the miracle of Pontmain, and
of the greater miracle of the many conversions—my own in particular, if my
memory does not fail me.
“Blessed be the Lord who created heaven and earth,” said the Church this
morning, speaking to Mary, “who raised you up to break the head of the Prince
of our enemies, for today He has so magnified your Name that your praises will
no longer leave the mouth of men. You did not spare your soul for them, seeing
the anguish and the tribulation of your people; on the contrary, you stood up in
the presence of our God to oppose yourself to its ruin.”
She thus has not yet entirely lost the strength which, seventy years ago, she
feared she no longer had, to “hold back the Arm of her Son.” If it be true that
those sacred Words have a prophetic immanence, I ask what can be more
reassuring, even for men of little faith, more comforting to the most timid souls,
than this testimony, borne like a torch held against the blast of the storm, by the
ever calm and grave voice of the Church.

1. Celle qui Pleure (She who Weeps) is the title of a book which Léon Bloy wrote
upon the happenings at La Salette, the apparition of Our Lady to two little
shepherds, Mélanie and Maximin, in a village of Danphiné on September 19, 1846.
These children had had a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who at first was seated and
weeping, then stood up and foretold dire misfortunes. (R. M.)
2. The words which the Virgin Mary wrote in the sky at Pontmain were: Mais priez
donc, mes enfants. (Pray, pray, my children.) (Translator’s Note.)
3. With Her tears! The Angels do not weep, but the Queen of Angels weeps, and that
is why she is their Queen.
4. “The people do not want to yield, and the City of the Most High is forced!”
Imagine the Angels and the Saints uttering this cry of alarm in the heavens!
5. “Bienheureuse”: blessed and also very happy. (Translator’s Note.)
 The Mystery of Israel

SALVATION IS OF THE JEWS

[The Christian Testimony.] Aside from supernatural inspiration, it can be

said that Le Salut par les Juifs is without any doubt the most vital and most
urgent Christian testimony in favor of the First-born Race since the eleventh
chapter of Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
“Now if the offense of them,” said that Apostle, “be the riches of the world
and the diminution of them the riches of the Gentiles: how much more the
fullness of them?
“If the loss of them be the reconciliation of the world, what shall the
receiving of them be, but life from the dead?”
Le Salut par les Juifs, a book one might believe to be a paraphrase of that
chapter of Saint Paul’s, points out from the very first line that the Blood shed on
the Cross for the Redemption of mankind, as well as that which is shed invisibly
every day in the Chalice of the Sacrament of the Altar, is naturally and
supernaturally Jewish blood—it is the immense river of Hebrew Blood whose
source is in Abraham and whose mouth is at Christ’s Five Wounds.

[Salus ex Judaeis est.] Salvation is of the Jews. I have wasted several

precious hours of my life reading, like so many other unfortunates, M.
Drumont’s anti-Jewish lucubrations, and I do not remember his having emoted
these simple and arresting words of Our Lord, reported by Saint John in the
fourth chapter of his Gospel.***
Salvation is of the Jews! A most disquieting text which sets us at a furious
distance from M. Drumont! God forbid that I declare war on this man of
superlative skill! The struggle would indeed he far too unequal.
This pamphleteer of La France Juive can boast of having struck oil.
Realizing, with deep wisdom and with the composure of a wily intelligence, that
the philosopher’s stone of worldly success consists in feeding human bellies
exactly the mast on which they dote, he dug up against the Jews the explosive
and persistent claim that they have enriched themselves by petty cheating at our
expense.
Here was the infallible secret for mastering everything, for breaking all
barriers, for perching his own self on the highest peaks of glory.
To tell every passerby, were he the most pitiable new arrival in the
cesspool of those bereft of hope: “Those faithless Hebrews who bespatter you
with their mud have stolen every penny you had. Get it back from them, my
Egyptian friend! Tear their hides off, if you have any mettle left in you, and
chase them into the Red Sea.”
Ah! To say this, to say it everywhere, to bellow it without respite in books
or in newspapers, occasionally even to fight over it so that it might more nobly
resound the other side of mountains and rivers! but especially—oh, especially—
newer to talk about anything else: such is the recipe and the arcanum, the
formula and the secret trick for firing your heavy guns at brilliant success. Who,
my God, could resist that?***
All the leaden-cheeked Christian onion-eaters of Upper and Lower Egypt
understood admirably that a war against the Jews could, in the end, be an
excellent dodge for healing up many a bankruptcy or reviving many a decrepit
business.
We have even seen priests without number—among whom there must
nevertheless have been sincere servants of God—fired at the hope of an
imminent affray in which enough blood of Israel would be shed to make millions
of dogs drunk, while the honest sheep of the Good Shepherd would munch,
blessing God, the cinqfoil and the golden clover in the longed-for pastures of the
Promised Land.
The enthusiasm had been so sudden and the impulse so prodigious that
even today not one among them seems to have troubled to find out—positively
—whether there might not be some grave danger in a priestly heart’s thus
begging for the extermination of a people which the Roman Apostolic Church
has protected for nineteen hundred years; in favor of which her most sorrowful
Liturgy speaks to God on Good Friday; from which have sprung the Patriarchs,
the Prophets, the Evangelists, the Apostles, the faithful Friends and all the first
Martyrs; without daring to mention the Virgin Mother and Our Savior Himself,
who was the Lion of Juda, the Jew of Jews, by birth—an unspeakable Jew!—
who surely had spent a whole previous eternity coveting that lineage.
But come! Was there not an obligation to follow to the bitter end that
greedy mountebank, organizer and preacher of that crusade for pittances, who
never ceases usuriously sermonizing on the small number of the elect of the
Almighty Strongbox? And could anyone quote as much as one Catholic protest
when on our flinching walls was spread the frightful likeness of this sacrilegious
Buffoon in the armor of a knight of the Holy Sepulchre, trampling on…
MOSES!!?
Ah! no more need be said.

[The History of the Jews.] The Jews are, in spite of everything, the Stock of
Our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently that Stock is reserved, not to be
uprooted, immortal. Of course it was frightfully shaken after the solemn
“Crucifigatur,” but it remained intact in its foundation and its roots cling fast to
the deepest of the bowels of the divine Will.***
The history of the Jews obstructs the history of mankind as a dam obstructs
a river, in order to raise its level. They are immovable forever and all one can do
is to clear them by leaping over them, with more or less fuss, but with no hope of
destroying them.
It has been tried often enough, hasn’t it? and the experience of some sixty
generations demands our acceptance. Rulers whom nothing resisted undertook to
wipe them out. Multitudes made disconsolate by the Affront to the living God
threw themselves on them to kill them. The symbolic Vine of the Testament of
Redemption was tirelessly pruned of these poisonous parasites; and this people,
scattered among a score of peoples, under the merciless protection of several
thousand Christian princes, accomplished all along the centuries its iron destiny,
which consisted simply in not dying, in preserving always and everywhere,
through squalls or tornadoes, the handful of wonderful mud mentioned in the
Holy Book, which it believes to be the divine Fire.
This neck of disobedient and treacherous men and women, which Moses
found so stiff, has wearied men’s anger as an anvil wrought out of sturdy metal
might wear out all hammers. The blade of Chivalry has blunted itself on this
anvil, and the finely tempered sword of the Moslem chieftain has been shattered
thereon as readily as the stick of the rabble.
Thus it has been thoroughly proved that there is nothing to be done, and in
the light of what God tolerates, it is assuredly fitting for religious souls to ask
themselves once for all, without presumption or foolish rage, face to face with
the Shadows, whether some infinitely divine mystery does not, in the last
analysis, lie hidden under the bread and wine of the unmatched ignominy of this
Orphan People, found guilty in all the courts of Hope, but perhaps not without
appeal on the appointed day.
The Middle Ages and the Jews. Exspectans exspectavi (in a spirit of
awaiting I have awaited), sang the Christians as they awaited the Resurrection of
the dead.
Exspectaveram et adhuc exspectabo (I had awaited and henceforward shall
I await) was the profound correction made by the groaning people of Israel. I
had awaited and I want still to await. Your Messiah is not my Messiah, and even
should all your graves open, I should ever await! The patient Church of Jesus
silently looked upon this “people endlessly waiting, which was strengthened
with an unspeakable hope, and whose frightful penance no Savior would have
been able to bear—at the same time that basilicas and monasteries chimed out
the glory of a Jewish child who, to save vagabonds, had died in ignominy.
The tears or the songs of bells at which every Christian empire shuddered
with love sounded in vain against the obstinate soul of these orphans of
Leviathan.
Creditors of an imperishable Promise which the Church considered
fulfilled, and strengthened by a sempiternal Covenant recorded by the Holy
Spirit as much as three hundred times, the Son of Mary seemed to them hardly
the equal of that leprous king who reigned over Jerusalem, that king who was
“full of leprosy until the day of his death” and was the terrifying inhabitant of a
house cutoff from all others because of his crime of having wrongfully seized
the incense burner of the high priest’s sons.1
How they must have scorned the woeful pomps of Christianity—those
untamed ragamuffins who still thought that the Glory of the God of Ezekiel
required their own glory!
Ah! in vain did the Church tell them: “If any man be found … selling …
his brother of the children of Israel and … shall take a price, he shall be put to
death,”2 Jacob’s entire posterity could answer him:
“If you think we are like unto Cain because we are wanderers and fugitives
over the earth, remember that the Lord set a Mark, upon that murderer, that
whosoever found him should not kill him,3 and see, this being so, how empty are
your threats of extermination,
“We have God’s word of honor, who has sworn to us His eternal alliance,
and we refuse to loosen Him. These words will live forever, and when they are
fulfilled you will become our slave.
“If it be His son whom we have crucified, let that Savior of others save
himself, since we have promised to believe in him when he will come down
from his cross.”***

Men bled with Christ, they were riddled with His wounds, they hung dying
of His thirst; they were mightily buffeted, as was His own Sacred Majesty, by all
the rabble of Jerusalem, and even children yet unborn shuddered! with horror in
their mother’s wombs when was heard sounding the Hammer of Good Friday.
Sobbing plowmen lit their poor torches in the furrows of the earth, so that
this nurse of the wretched might not be made barren by the flood of darkness
that spread from the top of Calvary like a boundless black plume, at the moment
of the Last Sigh.
This was the day of the great Interdict in which all souls were filled with
trembling and with compassion. The birds of passage and the wild inhabitants of
the forests were surprised to see men so sad, and the wild beasts sweated with
anguish within their stables at hearing their herdsmen weeping.
Christians before the likeness of a Most High God who had come down so
low bitterly reproached themselves with having made Him in their image, and
feared to look upon the ceiling of the heavens….
From the Matins of absolute Thursday until the vast alleluia of the
Resurrection, the world was very pale and silent, its arteries bound, its strength
crippled, “head languid and heart sorrowing.” An absolute despotism of
Penance. Only a single dismal door, surrounded by leaden-hued accusing
monsters, was ajar for a journey to God. The brilliant stained-glass was dimmed.
The friendly bells no longer chimed. Scarcely did one have the boldness to be
born; and one almost dared no longer die.
Vainly did men and women seek the Virgin of the Swords whose eyes,
burned out with tears, were like dead suns. This motherly Face, which seemed to
banish all comfort, had become a volcano of terror, and cast the multitudes to the
ground….
“Let him come down!” kept howling the jackals of the Synagogue.
“Why, O Israel? Is it to devour this new Joseph whom you have fathered in
your old age, for whom you have made so beautiful a ‘coat of divers colors,’4
and whom you now behold in the cross-shaped arms of this motionless Rachel
whom none can console?”
 [The Spirit and the Cross.] Shall I now dare—even with the gentleness of
doves and wiliness of serpents, at the risk of being taken for a miserable spewer
of heterodox sophisms—tell of the divinely puzzling conflict between Jesus and
the Holy Spirit?
I have spoken of Cain and Abel, of the prodigal Son and his brother, as I
might have spoken of the bad and the good Thief who so strangely bring them to
mind.
I could just as well have recalled the story of Isaac and Ishmael, of Jacob
and Esau, of Moses and Pharaoh, of Saul and David, and half a hundred others
less familiar, in which the mystical Competition between the Elder and the
Younger son, which was defmitively and sacramentally promulgated on
Golgotha, was announced throughout the ages in the prophetic mode.
The anathematized, the persecuting brothers always represent the People of
God against the Word of God. Here is a law invariable and without exception,
which even Eternity would not alter.
Now the People of God is the pitiable Jewish people, specifically deputized
to the Breath of the Sabbath which so often made them resound like the harp
strings of ancient forests.
Israel is thus invested, by privilege, with the representation, and one knows
not what deeply occult protection of that wandering Paraclete of whom it was
the abode and the custodian.
For anyone not devoid of the faculty of contemplation, to separate these
two seems impossible, and the deeper the ecstasy, the more closely welded to
each other do they appear. It ends up by resembling, when seen from the depths
of depths, a kind of identity.
But here is something strange. The Cross likewise represents the Holy
Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit Himself!
“Some day the Earth will learn, only to be death-stricken with fright, that
that Sign was my Love, that is to say the Holy Spirit hidden under an
inconceivable disguise!…”5
The Cross is essentially a Septenary sign.
Consequently, the Jews, so extraordinarily in harmony with the Holy Spirit
whose Jewish voice is perpetually to be heard in the undertones of our liturgies,
because this Spirit has breathed upon them like the whirlwind—the Jews
therefore gave the Cross to the Word of God in order that crushing Love might
be upon Him in its most perfect and in its hardest symbolic form.
 To this Cross, over which the Seven Days grieve, they securely nailed that
same Word of God, who is the poor Jesus, just as barbarous peasants nail the
bird of Wisdom to the door of their house.
They nailed him powerfully, so He might not come down without their
consent.***
The Glory of that Word which they did not recognize and the advent of the
Love so often foretold by their prophets cannot, together come to pass until the
day Jesus ceases being on the Cross, and that depends entirely on the unknown
Will which stirred up their malice.
But it was a million times necessary cruelly to nail these two to each other
beforehand, so that, in the future, might thus miraculously be confirmed the
impossible betrothal of the two Testaments…
A few lightning flashes quicker than light, here is all it is allowed us to
hope for. Revelation is a lackluster firmament obscured by mountains of sinister
clouds from whence occasionally darts forth, only at once to withdraw, the very
tip of the arms of lightning.

[The Son of David.] Such are the Jews, the true Jews—like in every way to
that Nathanael beheld under the emblematic fig tree, who, in spite of everything,
caused the One Who called Himself the Truth to say: “Behold an Israelite
indeed, in whom there is no guile.”6
Thus was God pleased to shape them in the beginning, and thus He was not
afraid to conform Himself, through love, to the extent that He was a Son of
Abraham according to the flesh, subject to pain and death.
Too long ago did I forswear trying not to displease for me now to be
stopped, through fear of making apoplectic a handful of fire-eating sacristans,
from saying that our Lord Jesus Christ had also to bear that as He did all the rest,
that is to say, with infinite rigor.
Without alluding again to that great Holocaust which was obviously the
boldest “speculation” any Israelite has ever conceived, it would not be very hard
to find in the external sense of the infinitely lovable and sacred sayings of the
Son of God some family tie with the eternal Jewish thought over which the
Gentile world is ever in ferment.
Is not the unfaithful Steward, for instance, praised precisely for his fraud,
and does not Jesus inexplicably conclude with the formal precept of “making
unto oneself friends of the mammon of iniquity”?7
Here is, in brief, the traditional advice to despoil and to break faith, in
ancient days given to the six hundred thousand Hebrews of the Exodus, who left
Egypt laden with treasures borrowed not to be returned, and in this they were
abetted by the Lord Himself, who protected them in their flight.8
There is, deep down, a perpetual identity between those Sacred Texts,
whose literal meaning scandalizes so many evildoers, and whose sublime
interpretation by means of symbols is forever beyond the grasp of cretins.
One feels as if one were falling into an abyss when one reflects that the
word “Egypt”—Mizraïm, in Hebrew—literally means Anguish or Tribulation;
that the first Joseph, who was sold by his brothers, thus so clearly prefiguring the
Word made flesh, and who was obeyed by the entire kingdom he had saved from
famine, “was named in the Egyptian tongue Savior of the world”; and that
consequently Jesus Himself, the “consummator,” or the hypostatic concentrator,
of the prophecies and the symbols, who came from His Father exclusively to
reign over universal Suffering, did nothing other, after all, when He escaped by
means of the opprobrium of His tortures, than to carry away with Him the
hereditary treasures of anguish and the accumulations of suffering which He had
borrowed, never to return, from all those who had placed their confidence in
Him.

The First Jewish Speculation. “The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is

multiplied,” said the Lord, “and their sin is become exceedingly grievous.”9
These words were confidentially addressed to Abraham, immediately after
the promise of a Son in whom all the nations of the Earth would be blessed. This
promise had made old Sarah laugh “behind the door of the tent,” just as, a few
days earlier, it had made the hundred-year-old Abraham laugh.
Laughter is very rare in Scripture. Abraham and Sara, those two ancestors
of the sorrowful Mary, the Mother of Tears, were entrusted with beginning it,
and this mysterious circumstance was so significant that the name given to the
first stem of the genealogical oak of the Redemption, at the very moment when
that tree was springing from the soil, was Isaac, and Isaac means Laughter.
It was while the air was yet quivering from that surprising laughter that
God told His Patriarch about the cry of the guilty cities, and that began the
sublime story of the Fifty Just Men.
The infinite beauty of this passage commands so great a respect and so
trembling an admiration that one can hardly hope not to blaspheme in trying to
interpret it.
 You must remember you are here at the Beginning of everything, and that
the chosen People, that is, the Church militant, has just been given its elect.
Abraham, the Father raised above the multitude, the unique Man of whom
Noah was but the simulacrum, Abraham, on whose bosom the living souls of the
just must one day shelter their glory, Abraham offered hospitality in his tent to
the Three Divine Persons who appeared to him in the plains of Mamre, at the
hour of the great “heat” of the day.10
In his eagerness to serve Them, Mary’s progenitor multiplied symbols and
figures; after a series of acts that call to mind the Sacrifice of the Mass, he
finally stood up beneath the tree, close by Them.
It was the hour of the renewing of the Promise. The Lord would return at
the appointed time, and Sarah, the dweller in the tent, would have a son. Moses,
David, Solomon and the seventeen Prophets of the law of waiting would from
then on have nothing more to do than to echo and re-echo this beatific
announcement of the birth of the true Child of Abraham who would be the
Savior of the others.
After such a gift; in which infinite Love, as it were, exhausted itself, the
same Lord “could” no longer hide anything from the one He loved, and He made
known to him His fearful intention of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, whose
cry had come even unto Him.
The kind of scriptural metonymy used here to express the indescribable
enormity of the sin God is about to punish leaves a singular imprint on one’s
mind. It would seem that crime, like innocence, has a voice, and that Sodom’s
abomination cried out as did the blood of Abel.
“I shall go down,” the fearsome Speaker added, “and I shall see whether
they have done according to the cry that is come to me: or whether it he not so,
that I may know.” These last words were in an unutterable way a fatherly
instigation to the prayer that was to follow. What the Lord especially wanted to
see was the humility of His servant, a humility that was to shine forth all the
more as his supplications were more pressing, and, in appearance, more rash.
That is why He went down; and it is this prodigy of His Grace which He wished
Himself to witness.
To feel the sublimity of that scene, it might be well to reflect upon what
Christ expresses so profoundly when He speaks of “Abraham’s Bosom.”11 The
Patriarch hears within himself Jerusalem, and he prays with all the strength of
the universal Blessing he has just received—thus projecting that parabola of
prophetic ecstasies which starts with his own, and which, having stridden over
all the wanderings of Jacob, was to end in splendor with the last verse of the
“Magnificat.”
Sodom was the city of the Secret, and Gomorrah the city of the
Rebellion.12 They seemed to represent two unknown forms of crime against
Love, the crime of the first being the worse. Abraham interceded for Sodom with
particular insistence, as though the salvation of the rebels depended on the
forgiveness granted the secret sinners and the idolaters.
As Mary was to speak in the Gospel only six times, Abraham, given the
mission to prefigure “the Intercession of this Mother of the living, was only six
times to beg mercy for the guilty ones, and he was to ask it not in order that their
crime might be spared, but so that “the just be not slain in like case with the
wicked.”
“If fifty just men are to be found in the city, in the true City which will be
the heart of Your Mother, will You not forgive? Fifty cubits was the whole width
of the Ark in which the human race was saved.13 No, truly, it is not possible that
You should do such a thing: that You should exterminate the just with the
wicked and that the innocent should be treated like the guilty, that is not worthy
of You, who judge the whole earth. In no way could You make such a
judgment.”14
“I shall forgive on their account,” said the Lord.
Abraham reflected. He knew that he was but “ashes and dust”; but after all,
since he had started, why should he not go on speaking to his Master?
“What if there be five less than fifty just persons?” he ventured. “Would
You destroy the whole city because there were no more than forty-five of
them?”
The Lord reflected in His turn that being almighty He could destroy
everything, but that forty-five perfectly straight and magnificent columns would
be needed to hold up the dome of Solomon’s mystical palace,15 and He promised
not to destroy the town if He found forty-five just men in it.
Abraham spoke a third time.
“But what will You do if there be forty just men? Ah yes, Lord, what will
You do? The Flood lasted forty days and as many nights, after which You turned
off the fountains of the abyss. Your people is predestined to lament forty years in
the desert before coming to the land of its desire. Ezekiel, the seer of Your glory
and the herald of Your Evangelists, is to announce in a few centuries the taking
upon Yourself of Judah’s iniquity, during the forty days of Your fast.16 What
will You do with Sodom if You find in it as many just men as the number of
times Your incommunicable divine Unity is contained in the symbolic number
of Penance?”
“For the sake of forty, I agree not to strike,” said the Lord.
“Be not angry, I beg of you,” the Patriarch went on, “if I speak again. What
will happen if there be but thirty of them? Remember that the Ark, which carried
in its bowels the Reconciliation,17 was but thirty cubits high.18 You Yourself
gave this measure to the just Noah, and this will be exactly the wretched number
of silver pieces which one day will serve to buy You for the Sacrifice, when
there will remain in the world a total lack of holocausts able to appease You.”
“I shall do nothing,” at once answered the Lord, “if I find thirty there.”
Further to insist was obviously rash. A man of great discretion and of
moderate faith would have been content with that. Yet Abraham hoped for more.
He told himself, like David, that it is not possible for God to strip Himself of His
mercy, to forget pity, to imprison His clemency in His wrath.19 So then this man
of all beginnings made up his mind.
“Seeing that I have begun, I shall speak again to my Lord. What if He
found only twenty? What if it happened that there he only twenty truly faithful
sons in the heart of the Mother I am one day to give You? If the outer sanctuary
of Your Tabernacle were held up by only twenty brass columns with carved
silver capitals,20 would Your Immaculate Dwelling therefore collapse?…And
this is not all, Lord, You know that You will on another occasion be sold to the
Midianites, that is, to the men of justice,21 in the person of my great-grandson
Joseph, and in this case You will be sold for only twenty pieces of silver; for
You are saleable at any price, O my God!”
“Out of regard for the number twenty, I shall not kill,” said the Lord.
Scripture calls Abraham the “well-beloved” of God. One prayer still
weighed on his heart. He had to say it, and this was all the harder as it was
wholly similar to the others. But after all, from him was one day to come forth
Her whose womb and breasts would be called blessed. By virtue of this he could
dare everything.
“I do beseech you,” said he, “not to be angry if I speak yet once more, only
once more. What will You decide if you find ten just men in that place?… Will
there not come a day when ten men, indeed ten men ‘of all the languages of the
Gentiles,’ having hastened together to seek the Face of God, will hold fast the
skirt of the One who is a Jew and will say to Him: ‘We will go with you, for God
is with you…”22 Are not these ten as necessary to Your plans, fully as much as
the Ten Commandments of the Law which You will write with Your own Hand
on dreadful Sinai?”
In the luminous twilight of his prophet’s prayer, the Patriarch probably
confusedly foresaw those strangers of the end of ends… But what if they were to
be met with in Sodom, the city of mystery?… The Lord would surely be forced
to forgive them!
And indeed He forgave, pledging Himself not to destroy the city if these
ten just men dwelt there.
Here ended the dialogue between the Omnipotent avenger and the
Omnipotent suppliant.23 Having been vanquished six times, the Lord went away
and ceased speaking to Abraham, as though he feared being vanquished a
seventh time and being no longer able thereafter to “rest” in His justice.

THE RACE OF JESUS CHRIST

[The Attorney of the Holy Sepulchre.] Yes, of the Holy Sepulchre! and we
are dealing with a Jew, with a Jewish poet, an altogether extraordinary man, who
was never converted. But he was a Jew in the deep sense and consequently the
greatest poet the Poor Man ever had, which placed him very close to the TomB
of Jesus Christ, infinitely closer than are most Christians.
We know that Godefroi de Bouillon would not allow himself to be made
king of Jerusalem, but only Attorney or Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, “as he
did not want,” the Assizes say, “to wear a crown of gold where the King of kings
wore a crown of thorns.” There can be no question of royalty or of crowns of
gold for the poet Morris Rosenfeld. Yet never did the poor man have such a
defender. The holy City of his fathers which he conquered is poetry itself, the
Jerusalem of the poor and the sorrowful.
Poet of the destitute, he himself was poverty-stricken and expressed
himself in the language of the wretchedly poor. “Ruined and exhausted by the
long exile, driven forth and dispersed in strange countries, we have lost our
sacred tongue and our dignity of yore, and today we must be content with sighs
breathed in a poor and ridiculed dialect that we have picked up as we dragged
ourselves about among the peoples of the world.” But poets do what they will.
With this cosmopolitan jargon, made of the rags of every language, he created a
music like that of a lamenting harp.***
A true Jew of lamentations, he knew only how to weep over his unhappy
brothers even more than over himself. But his tears have a power of invocation
more fearful than wild outbursts of despair.***
 This man lying crushed at the bottom of some underground vault seems to
have felt more than anyone else the terrifying and supernatural sadness of that
Holy Week which for him has lasted these two thousand years, and which is the
whole history of the Jews since the Selling of their First-Born. But also, more
than anyone, he has felt its beauty. Some of his poems are like echoes within a
tomb of the grandiose Liturgy of Tenebrae, entirely drawn from the divine Book
which the Jews carry with them throughout the earth, trying to read it through
the dark fabric of their Veil.

The Jews are the first-born of all peoples, and when all things are in their
final place, their proudest masters will think themselves honored to lick the
Jewish wanderers’ feet. For everything has been promised them, and in the
meantime, they do penance for the earth. The right of the first-born cannot be
annulled by a punishment however rigorous, and God’s word of honor is
unchangeable, because “His gifts and vocation are without repentance.” The man
who said that was the greatest of Jewish converts, and the relentless Christians
who propose to perpetuate the reprisals for the Crucifigatur ought to remember
it. “Their crime,” likewise says Saint Paul, “has been the salvation of nations.”
What extraordinary people is this, of whom God asks permission to save
mankind, after having borrowed His flesh from it in order the better to suffer? Is
one to say that His Passion would not have satisfied Him if it had not been
inflicted by His well-beloved, and that any blood other than that He holds from
Abraham would not be efficacious to wash away the sins of the world?
Assuredly Rosenfeld, who was but an ignorant working-man, had not read Saint
Paul, whom Jews hardly ever read. But his genius as a poet and the deep feeling
of his Race made him sufficiently aware of these things. As soon as he began to
sing, his places—as I said at the outset—was at the right hand of the Tomb of
Jesus Christ. Without knowing it, he carried on the imperishable Affirmations of
the Apostle of the Gentiles and, never having been a poet except for the poor, he
found himself—in the most mysterious sense—the Attorney of the Holy
Sepulchre, the king without crown or mantle of the poetry of those who weep;
the sentinel lost before the Tomb of the God of the poor whom his ancestors had
blessedly immolated. Thus, through the sole power of the divine laws, his
Judaism was outstripped, overrun from all sides by the feeling for a universal
brotherhood with the poor and the suffering of all the world.
 [Jewish Tears are the Heaviest.] However varied his work may be,
everything was said about Rosenfeld when he was called the poet of the
proletarians. This he is more than anyone, because he is a Jew, and because the
Jews are essentially proletarian. But the proletariat—like tears—belongs to all
peoples and all times. Only Jewish tears are the heaviest. They have the weight
of many centuries. Those of this poet have been generously shed on a great
number of wretches who were not of his Race, and now here they are, those
precious tears, in the scales of the Judge of human sorrows, who is no more a
respecter of peoples than He is of persons.
When the Father will want the First-born once more to take its due place, I
imagine that the most splendid night will illumine the feast, the tender crescent
of the moon marking the place of the Holy Sepulchre, and the tears of all the
poor shining indistinctly, unimaginably, in the depths of the heavens!

[Trade.] The Jews are the fathers of trade just as they were the fathers of
that Son of man, of their own purest Blood, whom, by a divine decree, they had
on a certain day to buy and to sell. Their close neighbors by origin the
Carthaginians of Carthage, the lost ancestors of the Carthaginians of England,
must have learned much from them. This is certainly not to run them down.
When they are converted, as has been foretold, their commercial power will be
converted too. Instead of selling dear what cost them little, they will bountifully
give away what will have cost them everything. Their thirty coins soaked in the
Blood of the Savior will become like to thirty centuries of humility and hope,
and it will be unimaginably beautiful.
To tumble from such a level to the level of contemporary trade frightens
one; it is enough to disgust you with life and with death. Much has been said
about Jewish meanness. Here, of course, we are dealing with Jewish traders, the
scum of Jewry, making exception of most noble individuals who have retained a
proud heart, a “truly Israelite”24 heart, under Saint Paul’s fearful Veil. In what
way is the Jews’ famous meanness worse than the servility of the most
supercilious shopkeeper toward a customer he assumes to be rich, and his
caddish insolence toward another customer he thinks is poor? If you grant that
their base attitudes make them seemingly equal, there will always remain, even
at this level, the infinite seniority of the chosen Race, and the enormous pre-
eminence of twenty centuries of humiliations most carefully recorded. Jewish
meanness can call down thunderbolts, the commercial meanness of Christians
can call down only cloudbursts of spit and excrement.

[The Promise Without Repentance.] As for the Future, the future starting
with Abraham, the name of Israel adequately provides for it. Only Christians can
be rich. They have Baptism, Penance, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Extreme
Unction, Holy Orders and Matrimony. They have the Mantle of the Virgin and
the protection of the Saints. They have nineteen centuries of blessed ground, and
the miraculous fountain of Traditions. When they pierce the Heart of Jesus, what
floods over them to sanctify them is the river of divine Blood.
Israel has nothing but his never-abolished right of the first-born and the
promise of a sure triumph, however indefinitely postponed. Money, of which
Israel is the symbolic possessor, and which mean Christians envy him when they
are unable to tear it away from him, money rolls toward Israel like a torrent of
mud and of misery clamoring for a gulf of despair. So well does Israel feel, more
and more, that here is not the God who went before him in the wilderness in the
column of cloud and the column of fire. But Israel has his promise which
nothing erases, because He who made it is “without repentance.” Whatever be
the “perfidy” of this people which has survived all peoples, it holds in its talons
the promissory note of the Holy Spirit, the note of hand of its Patriarch, the word
of honor of God to Abraham whereby it is assured of the better part which will
not be taken away from it.

[Anti-Semitism.] Our current Catholics, whose complete mediocrity is

perhaps the most frightening sign, nearly all think in terms of human means. All
we hear about are leagues, congresses, elections, etc.… To my mind all this is
vain and profoundly stupid. The truth, to me very certain, is the absolute
worthlessness of this prattle and the impotence, henceforth incurable, of
Christian society condemned without remission. Everything is useless now
except the acceptance of martyrdom.***
You will notice that I point out the evil without suggesting any remedy. Of
course; for I know that there is no possible remedy. I tell you and I tell everyone
that there is no way today to escape the punishment.*** Two crimes, two
outrages have irreparably filled the measure to overflowing. These two
enormous crimes are altogether of our own day, peculiar to our century, and had
never been seen before.
 The first is known to you. It is the formal, complete disobedience to Our
Lady of La Salette.***
The second of these crimes, contemporary to and mysterious consequence
of the first, unfortunately is too little known to you. It is called anti-Semitism,
and was first spread by Drumont, then by the Fathers of the Assumption. As this
idea is new to you, I shall try to make myself clear.
Suppose some people around you were to speak continually of your father
and your mother with the greatest contempt, and were to do nothing but throw
insults or outrageous sarcasms at them, how would you feel? Well, this is
exactly what is happening to Our Lord Jesus Christ. People forget, or rather do
not want to know, that our God made man is a Jew, the Jew of Jews by nature,
the Lion of Judah; that His Mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish Race;
that all His Ancestors were Jews; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the
Prophets; finally that our holy Liturgy is entirely drawn from the Jewish books.
That being the case, how is one to express the enormity of the outrage and of the
blasphemy which consists in vilifying the Jewish Race?
In days gone by, the Jews were hated, they were gladly massacred, but they
were not held in contempt by virtue of their race. Quite on the contrary, they
were feared, and the Church prayed for them, remembering that Saint Paul,
speaking in the Name of the Holy Spirit, promised them everything, and that
they must one day become the stars of the world. Anti-Semitism, a wholly
modern thing, is the most horrible blow yet suffered by Our Lord in His ever
continuous Passion, it is the bloodiest and the most unforgivable because He
receives it upon His Mother’s Face and at the hand of Christians.
It is frightening to think, for instance, that a priest who is required every
day to offer the Holy Sacrifice through Abraham’s intercession, sacrificium
Patriarchae nostri Abrahae, will immediately afterward laugh, while reading M.
Drumont, at that same most holy Name, which will seem to him to sum up all
that is ridiculous and infamous. I wrote these things, nearly twenty years ago, in
Le Salut par les Juifs, my best book. Why don’t you read it?
The Attorney of the Holy Sepulchre, in Le Sang du Pauvre, seems
“disconcerting” to you; you are astonished at seeing a Christian book “finish
with the apotheosis of a Jew.” And indeed how else would you want it to finish?
It is the necessary ending, since the God we adore is a Jew. What I am writing
you here, dear friend, is in no way sophistic; here is the root, the true root of
Christianity.
Besides, in writing a book on the Poor Man, how could I have avoided
speaking of the Jews? What people is as poor as the Jewish people? Ah! I know!
there are the bankers, the speculators. Legend and tradition would have it that all
Jews are usurers. People refuse to believe anything else. That legend is a lie. The
usurers are the dregs of the Jews. Those who know the Jewish people and look
upon it without prejudice know that this people has other aspects and that,
bearing the wretchedness of all the centuries, it suffers infinitely. Some of the
noblest souls I have ever met were Jewish souls.
The thought of the Church in every age has been that Holiness is inherent
in this people, in this exceptional, unique and imperishable people, guarded by
God, preserved by Him like the apple of His eye, in the midst of the destruction
of so many peoples, for the fulfillment of His ultimate Plans. The very
abjectness of that Race is a divine Sign, the very manifest sign of the constant
lingering of the Holy Spirit over these men so scorned by the world who are to
appear in the Glory of the Consoler at the end of ends.

[Christians Arouse God’s Indignation Much More than Do the Jews.]

Without being overly surprised, I have once again wondered at the fact that the
Jews are just as foolish, just as blind as the Christians. Here is a mysterious, all-
embracing preparation for the cataclysms to come. Equally unable, both of them,
to tell their friends from their foes, they are, all as One, “hound with the same
chain of darkness,” as it is written in the Book of Wisdom, in order to be
enfolded in one unique and prodigious punishment.
Yet this much should be said. In a period when all men stray from the right
path, you necessarily run the risk of being considered a monster of extravagance
when you say the most reasonable things. What a scandal, for instance, were one
to make this statement, elementary enough, after all, that Christians arouse
God’s indignation much more than do the Jews, even as before Christianity, the
Lord, ever angered by the betrayals of His people, commanded the Gentiles to
trample them under their feet. The greater criminal is surely he who has most
received. Now the Jews had received nothing but the Promise, They crucified
their God, refusing to recognize Him, and for this crime they have been
wanderers, themselves crucified, for twenty centuries. What are we to think of
the Christians who have been crucifying Him for two thousand years, having
recognized Him, knowing that they had been put in the world in order to adore
Him? How are we to conceive of the vastness of the punishment and the shame
that awaits them?
 The anti-Semitism stirred up by Drumont and his cronies is, first of all, a
vile business. But at the same time it’s a cheat, in the sense that it is one thing
treacherously substituted for another, that is, the incidental displayed in place of
the principal. The question is not at all as they state it. What does the Jews’
financial power amount to beside that of the Protestant millionaires? Ah! the
Jewish question is indeed something else. It is serious, profound in altogether
different fashion.
Christians are warned by their horribly indebted conscience of an immense
danger. Knowing nothing, understanding nothing, they feel coming toward them
the Prodigal Son, who remembers the house of his father. Instinctively they
divine his return from that distant land where for so long he has tended swine
and coveted for his food the husks those beasts rejected. Something warns them
that this return is infinitely fearful for them and such is the true though deeply
concealed origin of their aversion for the Jews.
No purpose is served in talking about the race’s having been divided in two
on Calvary. This is a threadbare notion without the least value. It is as if one said
that the Church was divided in two because there are good Christians and bad
ones. A race cannot be divided. Whether good or bad, converted or not
converted, a Jew is always a Jew, that is to say heir to all the promises God has
made to His people, the fulfillment of which has only provisionally been
postponed. But first of all, and especially, a Jew is always the first cousin of
Jesus Christ.

I speak in the Absolute, I thought you had understood this, and you seem to
want to have nothing to do with the Absolute. So how can you and I come to an
understanding? What is more, you come very late in the day. It was in 1892,
nineteen years ago, that my Salut par les Juifs was published, wherein the
Jewish question is dealt with thoroughly and on an infinitely high level, in the
spirit of Saint Paul’s ninth chapter—inspired by the Holy Spirit—of the Epistle
to the Romans, of which you seem to be unaware. Very recently, in 1909,1
brought out Le Sang du Pauvre, in which the same affirmations are to be found
in chapters 17 and 18, which are among the things whereof I am proudest, and
that gave you no pause. Why not?
You undertake to show me contradicting myself by quoting at random.
“What a change!” you exclaim. Empty victory. Even dismissing the possibility
of my having used antiphrasis or irony, which is often the case with me, it costs
me nothing to admit that in the already distant days of Désespéré, without going
further back to the mythological era of my schoolboy days, I may have said or
written foolishness which my riper age has utterly rejected. That I call a happy
and a normal change.
But there is something else which you do not see, having so little or so
clumsily read me: this is the method of argument, which I have adopted from
Saint Thomas Aquinas, consisting in wearing out your opponent’s objections by
letting him talk all he can. That’s what I did in Le Salut par les Juifs.

[By Means of the Jews Did Christians Crucify the Redeemer.] To such an
extent am I absorbed by absolute thinking that when someone does not speak to
me absolutely I feel as though nothing were being said to me, and then—I do not
understand. My incomprehension, which is directly occasioned by the Relative,
sometimes materializes as a monstrous show. Thus when someone tells me,
giving the Gospels a kick, that you can be a disciple of Jesus Christ without
giving up everything, I at once, become a raving idiot. That is a sight worth
seeing.
The same thing takes place when I am confronted with anti-Semitism—of
which to my dismay and sorrow I learn you are not free. And yet I had adorned
your library with a handsome copy of Le Salut par les Juifs. What have you done
with it? And especially, oh, especially, there is Saint Paul’s eleventh chapter to
the Romans, to which you can hardly object. There the Holy Spirit is speaking.
In it, it is written that the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.
This is said Absolutely and is terribly formal. Hence the Jews are forever God’s
people and everything is promised to them. And how many other texts there are!
What do I care if there are among them usurers, infamous speculators,
Freemasons? Must I resolve never again to eat bread because most bakers are
thieves?
What’s more, here is a major fraud, if we must discuss the matter further.
The diabolical sophism of the Jew Drumont was to make his readers believe that
the Jews are protagonists, or if you want, inciters, whereas—by divine Decree—
they can never be anything but more or less subtle tools in the hands of their
temporal masters—the Christians—who through them crucified the Redeemer.25
I beg you to read with care every word of this paragraph, which is in no sense
commonplace.
The Word of God suffices me. Were even all Jews—what an absurdity!—
scoundrels, with the exception of one who would be righteous, under the veil,
that single man would bear in him the Promise, God’s Word of honor, in its
fullness and in its strength, and nothing would be changed.
Moreover, remember that every morning I eat a Jew named Jesus Christ,
that I spend a part of my life at the feet of a Jewess with a transpierced Heart, of
whom I have made myself the slave; and finally, that I have put my confidence
in a pack of kikes—as you call them—one of them presenting the Lamb, another
carrying the keys of heaven, a third commissioned to teach all nations.… And I
know that only with such feelings can one be a Christian. Everything else is
vulgar contingency, and does not exist in the absolute.

1. 2 Chronicles 26:21.
2. Deuteronomy 24:7.
3. Genesis 4:15.
4. Genesis 37:3.
5. Cf. Désespéré, p. 367 (Soirat Edition). (R. M.)
6. John 1:47.
7. Luke 16:9.
8. Exodus 12:35–36.
9. Genesis 18:20.
10. Genesis 18:1–2. The text speaks of three men, three men standing, and Abraham
continually speaks to them in the singular. Is one not to conclude from this as well
as from the extraordinary tokens of respect he manifested toward them, that the
patriarch knew that he was in the presence of the Lord Himself? A large number of
Fathers have thought so. The council of Sirmich anathematized those who should
say Abraham had not seen the Son, and the Church was to adopt that opinion, since
in her office she sings: Tres vidit et Unum adoravit. Saint Augustine says, in his
70th sermon, De Tempore: “In seeing the three men he understood the mystery of
the Trinity. He adored them as one, but knew that the one God is in three persons.”
11. Luke 16:22, 23.
12. Such is the Hebraic meaning of these two names.
13. Genesis 6, 15.
14. Genesis 18, 25.
15. 3 Kings 7:3.
16. Ezekiel 4:6.
17. Eccles. 44:17.
18. Genesis 6:15.
19. Psalms 76:9, 10.
20. Exodus 27:19.
21. Midian means judgment, and implies the idea of litigation.
22. Zacharias 8:23.
23. Omnipotentia supplex. This wonderful name for the Virgin was revealed by Saint
Bernard.
24. “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47).
25. If we are to understand the thought here expressed by Bloy in astonishingly
summary form, we must recall that it is through the sins of each one of us that the
Redeemer was crucified. (R. M.)
 Suffering, Faith, Sanctity

[Suffering.] Freedom, that prodigious, incomprehensible, indescribable gift

by means of which we are given the power to vanquish the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit, to kill the incarnate Word, to stab seven times the Immaculate
Conception, to excite at a single word all created spirits in the heavens and in
hell, to hold God’s Will, Justice, Mercy and Pity in abeyance on His Lips and to
prevent them from flowing down upon His creation; this inexpressible freedom
is nothing but this: the respect God has for us.
Let us try to picture it a little to ourselves: God’s respect! And so great is
this respect that never, since the law of grace, has God spoken to men with
absolute authority. On the contrary, He has ever spoken with the timidity, the
gentleness, I would even say the obsequiousness, of a poor petitioner whom no
affront could rebuff. By a highly mysterious and inconceivable decree of His
eternal will, God seems to have condemned Himself until the end of time never
to exercise over man any immediate right of master to servant, of king to subject.
If He desires to have us, He must seduce us, for if His Majesty does not please
us, we can throw it from our presence, buffet it, scourge it and crucify it to the
applause of the vilest rabble. God will not defend Himself with His power, but
only with His patience and His Beauty.***
Between man involuntarily clothed in his freedom, and God voluntarily
stripped of His power, it is normal that there be an antagonism; attack and
resistance reasonably balance each other, and this perpetual combat between
human nature and God is the gushing fountain of inexhaustible Suffering.
Suffering! Here then is the key word! Here the solution for every human
life on earth! The springboard for every superiority, the sieve for every merit, the
infallible criterion for every moral beauty! People absolutely refuse to
understand that suffering is needful. Those who say that suffering is useful
understand nothing about the matter. Usefulness always supposes something
adjectival and contingent, and Suffering is necessary. It is the backbone, the very
essence of moral life. Love is recognized by this sign, and when this sign is
lacking, love is but a prostitution of strength or of beauty. I say that someone
loves me when that someone consents to suffer through or for me.***
Well, we are—what, Lord God?—yes, we are the members of Jesus Christ!
His very members! Our unutterable wretchedness comes from our continually
taking for figures or inanimate symbols the clearest and most living assertions of
the Scriptures. We believe, but not substantially. Ah! the words of the Holy
Spirit should enter and flow through our souls as did molten lead in the mouth of
a parricide or a blasphemer. We do not understand that we are the members of
the Man of Sorrows, of the Man who is supreme Joy, Love, Truth, Beauty, Light
and Life solely because He is the Lover eternally stricken with the supreme
Suffering, the Pilgrim of the last torment, who, to endure it, rushed up through
infinity, from the far deep of eternity, and on whose head have been heaped in an
appallingly tragic unity of time, place and person, all the elements of torture,
collected from every human act performed during each second, over the whole
surface of the earth, for the length of sixty centuries!***
We can use this as a starting point to measure all things. In declaring us
members of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit clothed us with the dignity of
Redeemers, and, when we refuse to suffer, we are strictly guilty of simony and
betrayal of trust. We have been made for that, and for that alone. When we shed
our blood it flows on Calvary, and from thence over the whole earth. Woe to us,
therefore, if this blood be poisoned! When we shed our tears, which are “the
blood of our souls,” they fall on the heart of the Virgin, and from there onto all
living hearts. Our standing as members of Jesus Christ and sons of Mary has
made us so great that we can drown the world in our tears. Woe, then, and three
times woe upon us, if these tears are poisoned! Everything in us is identical with
Jesus Christ, to whose likeness we have been naturally and supernaturally
shaped. So when we refuse suffering, we adulterate as much as we are able our
own substance: we cause to enter into the very Flesh and even the Soul of our
Head, a profaning element which He must afterwards cast from Himself and all
His members by an inconceivable redoubling of torment.
Is all this clear? I have no idea. The gist of my thought is that in this
tumbling world, all joys burst forth in the natural order, and all suffering bursts
forth in the divine order.***
The Saints have sought the society of Jesus’s Passion. They believed the
saying of the Master when He said that he possesses the greatest love who gives
his life for his friends.1 In all ages, ardent and magnificent souls have thought
that in order to do enough, it was absolutely necessary to do too much, and that
thus did one ravish the Kingdom of the Heavens.

[Paradise Lost.] Look about you on the distant mountains, on all the
balconies of the horizon; look at those panic-stricken heads, those millions of
faces taking on expressions of horror and grief as soon as the Fall and the lost
Paradise are mentioned. Here is the universal testimony of men’s consciences:
the deepest, the most invincible testimony.
There is but one sorrow and that is to have lost the Garden of Delights, and
there is but one hope and one desire, to recover it. The poet seeks it in his own
way, and the filthiest profligate seeks it in his. It is the only goal. Napoleon at
Tilsit and a foul drunkard picked up in the gutter have precisely the same thirst.
They must have the water from the Four Rivers of Paradise. All know
instinctively that it cannot be bought too dearly. The ditch digger and the tinker
spend their fortnight’s salary on it, and Napoleon, four million men.
Empti estis pretio magno (You have been bought at a great price). That is
the key to everything, in the Absolute. When you know this, when you see it and
realize it, you are like a God and ceaselessly do you weep. Your wish to see me
less unhappy, kindly Raïssa, is a thing that was in you, in your substantial being,
in your soul which prolongs God, long before the birth of Nachor, who was
Abraham’s grandfather. Strictly speaking, your desire is the desire for the
Redemption accompanied by the presentiment or the intuition of what it cost
Him who could pay. It is Christianity, and there is no other way of being a
Christian. Kneel then at the edge of this fountain and pray for me thus:
“My God who has bought me at a great price, I most humbly beg You to
make me at one in faith, hope and love with this poor man who is suffering in
Your service, and who is perhaps suffering mysteriously for me. Set him free
and set me free for the Eternal life which You have promised to all those who
would hunger for You.”
Here, my most dear and blessed Raïssa, is what a man truly sorrowful is
able to write you today, but a man filled with the most sublime hope for himself
and for all those he bears in his heart.”

[Faith.] To Jacques Maritain: You are seeking, you say. O professor of

philosophy, O Cartesian, you believe, with Malebranche, that truth is something
one seeks! You believe that the human mind is capable of something! You
believe—in other words—that with a certain degree of effort a person with black
eyes could manage to acquire green eyes spangled with gold! You eventually
understand that one finds what he desires only on that day when he has most
humbly renounced seeking what lay under his hand, unbeknown to him. For my
part, I declare that I never sought or found anything, unless one wishes to
describe as a discovery the fact of tripping blindly over a threshold and being
thrown flat on one’s stomach into the House of Light.

[The Friend of God.] At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an

idiot or a swine? Merely this: you should do something great, you should lay
aside all the foolishness of a more or less long existence, you should become
resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a brace of janitors and a
notary if you are to enter the service of Splendor. Then will you know what it is
to be the friend of God.
The Friend of God! I am on the verge of tears when I think of it. No longer
do you know on what block to lay your head, no longer do you know where you
are, where you should go. You would like to tear out your heart, so hotly does it
burn, and you cannot look upon a creature without trembling with love. You
would like to drag yourself on your knees from church to church, with rotten fish
strung from your neck, as said the sublime Angela da Foligno.

[I Am a Pilgrim Whom the Very Sun Dissatisfies.] To Henriette Charasson:

You say you are “anaesthetized,” which is the ugliest way of being dead. Why
could you not be mistaken? Your love of the Beautiful shows you to have a lack
of certainty which cannot help make you suffer. You have too much insight to
hope that works of art will be able to satisfy your heart. You know very well that
beyond the masterpieces there is a burning hearth of Love from which artists
must necessarily draw their inspiration, without ever becoming satisfied, and that
they cannot, even with genius, give more than a very faint echo, a most pallid
reflection of that thunder and that furnace. “You do not know,” says Ruysbroeck
the Admirable, “the delights God gives, and the delicious taste of the Holy
Spirit.” You know what that means. You must have lodged in your past, prior to
the disaster that has befallen your faith, some remembrance of the joy of love, of
the dazzlement of which, he speaks; and the feelings or stirrings you have
experienced over beautiful human works must have seemed little, compared with
that wondrous moment.
“Talent does what it wants, genius does what it can,” is Hello’s
magnificent statement. The more a man has genius, the more he gives evidence
of his incapacity. Here is what deep souls feel. An artist of talent shows all there
is to be seen; an artist of genius imparts the desire for what cannot be seen, and
so the matter stands. I am one of those whom nothing can satisfy, I am that
pilgrim in La Femme Pauvre “whom the very sun dissatisfied.” How could I not
have pity on you? The greatest poet, the greatest musician in the world is a
beggar, a pitiable ragamuffin, a man dying of hunger and thirst, whom your alms
of admiration is prodigiously, ridiculously incompetent to assuage. I have
believed I saw a soul within you, and that is why I am writing you these things.
“When the first doubts pierced me,” you have written me, “I was stricken
with horror because I thought that there was the breath of the Devil.” You were
right, but this devil would certainly and on the spot have lost all his power had
he told you his name: “I am the devil of the Hackneyed.” Everything you tell me
is worn utterly threadbare. “I spent hours before my crucifix in order to find the
truth … I could not accede to intellectual dishonesty, I could not practice when I
no longer believed … I had acted as I thought I ought to.” Poor pensive lamb,
who would have no further dealings either with grazing or with shepherd! “I no
longer had a God, but I had the hope that some day I should cease being.” As
though this frightful hope were a conceivable thing! And to this loss and hope
you add “the love of the Beautiful”! But child though you are, how can you not
have been aware that all this was hideously commonplace and mediocre, that the
ringing of this change is to be found in every cheap novel?…
God refuses His grace to no one. If He has withdrawn it from you for a
time, which I do not know that He has, it is because there lies within you some
obstacle unknown to me, but which your conscience must surely point out to
you. You speak of dishonesty, as if it could ever be dishonest to obey! To
practice when one no longer believes!
You are very wide off the mark and the meaning of the words escapes you.
Here is simply a case of seasickness. One day I was on the Baltic, making my
first sea voyage. As I stepped aboard, I decided I should not be seasick—an
ailment as ridiculous as it is painful. An hour later I felt it coming on. My will to
resist thereby grew all the firmer, and I began to walk about like a wild man,
telling myself that I would not give in. Complete victory, dizziness and nausea
disappeared, and my joy at having triumphed over them was a delight. Well, my
poor little one, you are doing the exact opposite; though you know better, you
cowardly retreat before phantoms. Pretty and clever, either by choice or by
laziness you pledge your troth to ugliness and folly. What a future is ahead of
you! A sophist against yourself and a sentimentalist against God, it is all too
easy for me to challenge you to scorn that which I adore. As much as I reread
your letter, I do not find a single intellectual objection in it, a single argument,
even though Specious. Nothing but literary cant phrases. Make a clean breast of
it; confession frightens you, pure and simple obedience revolts you, and the Hail
Mary or the Our Father seem less beautiful to you than a poem by Baudelaire.
How you must suffer at having come down to so low a level!
This morning at mass I was reading the liturgical words of the day’s
communion: “Qui manducat meam carnem … He that eateth My flesh and
drinketh My blood abideth in Me, and I in him.” I thought of you, of others who
are dying of hunger and thirst, and tears welled up within me. These
inexpressibly holy and mysterious words became a gulf of splendors for me. I
shall try to translate this into a book which I have tremblingly in mind.
Trembling from what I see, trembling from what I know, trembling from what I
do not know. More and more I work in this way. I go to mass, I go to
communion. I say the rosary with the joy or the hope of being with the simple
and the little ones, to whom belongs the “kingdom of heaven.” The vast door,
then, half opens … I come back twice as strong, often heaped with delights,
having God in me…

[Obedience.] There is but one action, and that is Obedience, which is the
characteristic mark of superior men, of true men; that sublime and holy and
salutary and virginal and miraculous and primitive Obedience which is quite
simply the theological term for the lost earthly Paradise … So go out and find a
poor priest, the one I mentioned to you or any other, but a Priest, O my child,
that is to say a man, good or bad, but invested with the sacerdotal character, and
thence having the very power of God to give peace to your soul, which is an
empire the greatest of which you do not know. “Father, have mercy upon me,
wash me, purify me, loosen me!” And then, the heavenly sweetness, the eyes
streaming with tears, the racing heart, the burning heart, the joy of which one
seemingly would die…Ah! if you but knew, if you but could get a glimpse of
this just once! There is Activity! Do you know that the mass, the Sacrifice of the
mass, is the sole act of obedience, the essential Act.
 [We Are on the Rack Only in Order to Avow Glory.] Christ said in the
Gospel: “I am the Truth,” and the truth, my dear Henri, is that we all must suffer,
since He who calls Himself the Truth, He who thus states His Family Flame, is
precisely the Chief of the suffering and of the tortured. We must suffer even as
He suffers, for others and in others, men or beasts, telling ourselves that God’s
words are not in vain, and that it is wholly certain that the humblest among the
oppressed will in the end be avenged and in the end consoled, when will come
the hour of the infallible retributions. We are on the rack only in order to avow
Glory.
Do you know that to be a real Christian, that is to say a Saint, one must
have a tender heart within a shell of bronze? Saint Luke tells that in the midst of
the most unutterable suffering, Christ had pity on the brutes who were crucifying
Him and that He entreated His Father to forgive them, “They know not what
they do,” He cried unto Him. Now remember that a filthy butcher or pigsticker
who, not satisfied with slaughtering his poor animals, unworthily and
ridiculously mutilates them after their death, carries on—after a fashion—in the
most unfathomable darknesses, the immolation of the Savior, and that they are
enfolded in His Prayer. All the more do they need it as they are more abject,
more unfeeling, more snug in an appalling ignorance of what they do.
Christ is at the center of all things, He takes all things upon Himself, He
bears all things, He suffers all things. It is impossible to strike a human being
without striking Him, to humiliate someone without humiliating Him, curse or
kill anyone without cursing Him or killing Him, Himself. The lowest of
contemptible fellows is forced to borrow the Face of Christ in order to receive a
blow, from no matter what hand. Otherwise the buffet could never reach him and
would remain hanging in interstellar space, through the ages of ages, until it
should have met with the Face which forgives.
The altogether noble sorrow and indignation which make your stomach
turn at the sight of the disgusting degradations whereof you tell me would serve
you as a counterpoise were you habitually mindful of deep realities, to think
about the vast scope of that Forgiveness. People who kill or cause suffering,
people who degrade or who dishonor in any way whatsoever the divine work
and who, consequently, cannot know what they do, are themselves in such
horrible wretchedness that it was needful for the dying Jesus to insert them into
the testament of His Passion, in order that they might obtain mercy.
So raise up your soul by contemplating the things that are not obvious. Be
a man of prayer, and you will be a man of peace, a man living in peace. Tell
yourself, I beg of you, that everything is but appearance, that everything is but a
symbol, even the most heart-rending sorrow. We are sleepers who cry in their
sleep. We cannot ever know whether this or that which grieves us is not the
secret principle of our later joy. At present we see, said Saint Paul, per speculum
in aenigmate, literally: “into a puzzle by means of a mirror,” and we cannot see
otherwise before the coming of Him who is all aflame and who is to teach us all
things. Until then all we have is obedience, the loving obedience which restores
for us, on earth, the paradise lost through disobedience.***
I knew well what fatherhood would accomplish in you. Before becoming a
father myself, I ill understood the Our Father. Our Father Who art in heaven….
When my little daughter speaks to me, it seems to me that my kingdom comes.
You will feel that.
All that happens is divine: this I maintain with all the authority of my utter
poverty, which is perfect as God is perfect, and which is therefore itself divine.
Complain all we will, you and I, we cannot escape from this law, and we shall
never succeed in giving life to a plausible grievance against Providence. If we
lack money, it is because money would be baneful to us, and we shall certainly
be rolling in it whenever that metal will have ceased to be, for us, an occasion of
peril.
To believe this, fully to see this, such is the sole means offered us not to
fall below the level of brutes. If your foot hurts you, my poor Henry, it is
because moving about would be harmful to you at the moment, and if I myself
am stuck, with my wife and child, for some time more in this devilish blind
alley,2 it is doubtless because pure air and the perfume of flowers would be less
advantageous for us than the odor of cesspools and the nasty smell of carrion
which we breathe here.***
Do we not know, at the very moment when we suffer some painful blow,
that it is Jesus, covered with wounds, who is tumbling upon the muddy carpet of
our souls, begging us, at the least, not to bristle too much against Him, and that
thus we are filled to overflowing with the most unimaginable happiness?
You know how Job speaks of the world: Terram tenebrosam (this
darksome earth), etc. What about it? Remember that this is the dwelling place of
fallen man, the tabernacle of the disobedient, this is what we refer to as our
spinning ball of earth, and we have been amply warned, by these sure Words,
that it would be either idiotic or ill-willed to suppose that what the Church calls a
“vale of tears” is, on the contrary, a luminous and comfortable place. Blessed are
the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who weep and those who
hunger for justice, blessed also are the merciful, the pure of heart and the
peacemakers. Blessed, finally, are those who suffer persecution. Ah! yes indeed.
Don’t you see that all these Elect, among whom we belong, more or less, even
though we be most unworthy, are in an admirable position to decipher Job’s text
and that it is always a beginning of Paradise to glimpse, even if barely at all, a
lineament of the Word of God.

[The Tears We Have Shed.] Dear friend, you have written me a beautiful
and painful letter. I would that God might give me words of comfort for you. In
my helplessness and sorrow which are indeed great I wish first to try to answer
your question: “What have you been doing with yourself?” It would be easier for
me to tell you what I have not been doing. Here it is more than thirty years that I
have sought the one and only happiness, Sanctity. The result makes me ashamed
and fearful. “I have this much left, that I have wept,” said de Musset. I have no
other treasure. But I have wept so much that I am rich after this fashion. When
you die, that is what you take with you: the tears you have shed and the tears you
have caused to be shed, your capital of bliss or of terror. It is on these tears that
we shall be judged, for the Spirit of God is always “borne upon the waters.” A
sculptor of great talent is at present finishing my bust. “Do not forget the
furrow,” I said to him, “this gutter here under each of my two eyes.”
That is what I wish for you, my dear Rouault. I should like you to be
bathed in tears at the feet of Jesus. Quare tristis es, anima mea … why art thou
sorrowful, my soul, and why troublest thou me? Spera in Deo. As I read this
sublime beginning of the mass, how often have I not shed those tears that are
worth more than canticles and that place the heart in the meadows of Paradise.
You are among those whom God seeks. Quaerens me, sedisti lassus…As
you sought me, you sat down, outworn with weariness. Let yourself be found, go
forth to meet that shepherd…. Then He will make you weep so sorely that
almost you will be no longer able to suffer.

[Sorrow Is Not Our Last End.] Your whole article “De Profundis” bears
witness to and heralds a religious, ardent and profound soul. When you wrote me
in answer to my friendly counsel, you declared yourself without appetite for
happiness—which is obviously absurd. It is in the power of no man not to seek
Paradise, were it even in despair. But in that case it is the earthly Paradise.
Sorrow is not our last end; it is Blessedness which is our last end. Sorrow leads
us by the hand to the threshold of eternal Life. There it takes leave of us, that
threshold being forbidden to it. You yourself see it this way, when you write:
“The solid understructure of every great moral edifice is despair,” an utterance
that would be a contradiction in terms if you had in mind philosophic despair
alone, which consists in expecting Nothing from men and All from God, “the
great starry despair,” to use your magnificent phrase. “From this do hope and
religion take their flight toward heaven.” So here we are wholly in agreement. A
new edition of my Le Désespéré could bear this epigraph drawn from Carlyle:
“Despair carried far enough completes the circle and becomes once more a kind
of burning and fruitful hope.”
As for the other despair, the theological, the despair that expects nothing
from God, we shall leave it to the bourgeois who seek the joy of their bellies.
“I am too beautiful to be loved!” says Sorrow.

[I Have Asked to Suffer.] I find in your dear letter a phrase that worries me.
You tell me that you want to sacrifice your time to prayers. I fear you may be
under an illusion. What God asks of each of us is the sacrifice of our will,
nothing more, and that includes everything.
If circumstances demanded that for a while you give to lesser pursuits the
time you could give to prayer, you must look upon this as an order from God and
believe that that sacrifice is more agreeable to Him than your prayer, that it is
itself an infinitely better prayer.
As for my sufferings, my beloved Jeanne, accept them generously as
having been willed by God and, I beg of you, do not pay too much attention to
my complaints. If I must be unhappy, very unhappy, for a long time still—which
I do not believe is the case—all the better for you. The reason would be that it is
needful for the payment of your debt. When we receive a divine grace, we
should be confident that someone paid for it on our behalf. Such is the law, God
is infinitely good, but He is at the same time infinitely just and, as such, He
shows Himself an infinitely rigorous creditor. About fifteen years ago, when you
were still a little girl, I spent months asking God, in prayers that were like the
tempest, that He should make me suffer all a man can suffer, so that my friends,
my brethren, and souls unknown to me who lived in darkness might be helped,
and I assure you, my love, that my prayers have been granted in a terrible
fashion. Well, I am just about convinced that it is thus that I have won you, and
that it is through the infernal sorrows of fifteen years that I have paid for the
extraordinary joys which will come to you.

[Suffering in Others.] Do you know, my love, that what is hardest for the
soul is to suffer, I do not say for others, but in others. That was the most terrible
of the Savior’s agonies. Underneath the appalling visible Passion of Christ,
beyond that procession of tortures and ignominies, to form a vague idea of which
in itself gives us so much trouble, there was His Compassion, which we shall
need eternity to understand—a heart-rending compassion, absolutely beyond
words, which quenched the sun and made the stars waver in their courses, which
made Him sweat blood before His last agony, which made Him cry out His thirst
and beg His Father for mercy during His agony.

[The Compassion of Jesus.] Reflect that Christ, suffered in His heart with
all the knowledge of a God, and that in His heart were all human hearts with all
their sorrows, from the time of Adam until the consummation of the ages.
Ah, yes! suffering for others, that can be a great joy when one has a
generous soul, but suffering in others, that is what really deserves to be called
suffering!
When he in whose church you go to pray every Sunday, when the
wonderful Saint Vincent de Paul, having no other means of redeeming a poor
galley convict, paid with his own person by taking on his irons in his place, this
Christian hero must have felt a great joy, but at the same time a most great
sorrow, a sorrow that infinitely surpassed that joy, when he said that his sacrifice
could serve for only one miserable wretch and that around him a multitude of
captives continued to suffer.

[Reflect, My Gentle Redeemer.] “My divine Savior Jesus, who for two
thousand years are crucified by me, for me, in me, and who Yourself are waiting
to be set free while bleeding upon us, from the height of that terrible Gross
which is the image and the infinitely mysterious likeness of Your devouring
Spirit—I implore you to look upon my appalling wretchedness and utterly to
have pity upon me. Reflect, my gentle Redeemer, that I, I too, have had pity on
You, that Your sufferings have very often torn my heart, and that I have wept
day and night tears without number while remembering Your agony. Have You
not seen me whole years through at Your holy feet, shot through with love and
compassion and turning away with horror from the joys of life in order to sob
with Your Mother and the throng of Your dear martyrs who did not blush at
accepting me for their companion? Nor can you have forgotten that out of
respect for Your divine Wounds I have seldom neglected to suffer for the
unhappy, and that I have drawn a few of them from the bottom of all abysses to
bring them with brotherly love into Your presence.
“Nonetheless, You have demanded much of me, You have overwhelmed
me with a very heavy burden, and You have willed that I should endure sorrows
so great that You alone, my God, can know them. When I wanted, in these latter
days, no longer to hope in You, to part from You forever, You sent me, in Your
mercy, this sweet creature who loves You, who has been seeking You for so
long a while and whom You have at last pushed into my arms. My divine
Master, Yourself put to death, You cannot be the executioner of the poor souls
for whom You are in agony. I implore You, by the sacred name of Joseph, by the
pierced heart of Your Mother, and by the glorified bones of all Your saints, have
pity upon my well-beloved Jeanne and upon me. Fill us to overflowing with
Your grace and unite us into Your service forever.”

We must pray. Everything else is fruitless and stupid. We must pray to

endure the horror of this world, we must pray to be pure, we must pray to obtain
the strength to wait.
There is neither despair nor bitter sadness for the man who prays much. It
is I who tell you that. If you but knew how much I have the right and with what
authority I speak to you!
You know the commonplace troubles of life, but you do not know true
Sorrow. You have not received the true blow that pierces the heart. Perhaps you
never will receive it, for very few do, though many claim that they have.
There is an infinite number of men who have never grown up and think
they suffer immeasurably while actually suffering very little. There is an infinite
number who imagine that they have the Faith, yet whose faith would not raise a
grain of dust. As for Hope and Love, what words have been more prostituted?
Faith, Hope and Charity, and Sorrow which is their substratum, are
diamonds, and diamonds are rare, as you have learned. They are very expensive,
never forget.
Diamonds of such sort cost Prayer, which is, itself, a priceless jewel only
wrested by conquest.

[When We Pray.] Christians know or ought to know that prayer is the

surest of all forces, but its effects are unknown. When we pray we place in
God’s hand a naked, magnificent and dread sword wherewith He doeth as He
listeth, and we know nothing more. Prayer for a little child is surely the most
mysterious of all with respect to its effects. We are then ourselves like children
at the edge of the sea, or like beggars who look upon the Milky Way. In the
heights and in the depths lie treasures or terrors beyond conception.
I feel strong, my dear Benoit, that is to say, able to act upon God
(praevalens Deo), only when I feel my utter wretchedness and when this makes
me weep. I refer, of course, to the wretchedness of my soul and mind, which is
far more real than one might think. Believe me, all I may ever have written that
was good, beautiful if you prefer, all that was profitable to a few souls, was
given me because I wept over myself at the same time as I wept over many
another, over the whole creation mutilated by the fall, and those blessed tears,
they too, were a wonderfully free gift, so that I am, in truth, a very poor man, the
poorest of the poor, God knows.

[Alone in the Presence of God.] To Jean de la Laurencie: Dear friend, my

wife, who saw you today, tells me that you ascribe to me the power of
comforting you. You have already written me similar things and it always
astounds me. Does no one of your own age exist, so that you think you need me!
What need have I not myself to lean upon someone! How many times have I
tried it! How many times have I thought I had found columns of granite which
were nothing but ashes, or even worse! And I am truly fearful that I myself am
nothing more.
What little I have, God gave me without my playing any part in it, and
what use have I made of it? The worst evil is not committing crimes but failing
to do the good one could do. It is the sin of omission, which is nothing other than
non-love, and of which no man accuses himself. Anyone who might watch me
every day, at the earliest mass, would often see me weeping. These tears, which
might be holy, are rather tears of great bitterness. I do not, at such moments,
think of my sins, some few of which are enormous. I think of what I could have
done and did not do, and I tell you it is black indeed.
Do not tell me that it is the same with everybody. God had given me the
feeling, the need, the instinct—I do not know how to put it—of the Absolute,
just as He has given quills to the porcupine and a trunk to the elephant. An
extremely rare gift, of which I was aware even in childhood, a faculty more
dangerous and tormenting even than genius, since it implies a constant and
ravenous appetite for that which does not exist on earth, and since through it is
infinite isolation acquired. I could become a saint, a worker of wonders. I have
become a man of letters.
If only people knew that these sentences or pages they choose to admire
are merely the residue of a supernatural gift of which I have made a hateful mess
and for which I shall be required to make a fearful accounting! I have not done
what God wanted of me, that’s sure. I have dreamt, on the contrary, of what I
wanted from God, and here I am, at sixty-eight, with nothing in my hands but
paper! Ah! I know well that you will not believe me, that you will assume this to
be some quirk of humility. Alas! when one is alone, in the presence of God, at
the entrance of a most darksome avenue, one sees into oneself and is in no
position to overrate oneself! True kindliness, unadulterated good will, the
simplicity of little children, all that calls for a kiss from the Mouth of Jesus—you
know very well that you have none of this and that you really have nothing to
give to poor suffering hearts which beg for succor. Here is my position with
regard to you, dear friend. Certainly I can pray for you, I can suffer with you and
for you, by trying to bear a little of your burden; yes, but the drop of water
drawn from a chalice of the earthly Paradise it is impossible for me to give you. I
have felt today I had the duty to tell you this so you might not count too much on
a weak and sorrowful creature.

[The Sin of Omission.] I have often thought that the most dangerous injury
to the soul is the sin of omission. The sin of action, however vast it may be, can
be forgiven because Jesus has paid. But He has not paid for the sin of omission,
which concerns the Holy Spirit. Here is a tormenting thought, especially at the
end of your life, when you accurately remember certain circumstances in which
you could so easily have accomplished certain acts God asked for, and which
you neglected or formally refused to carry out. That is my case. In this way, I am
exactly on a level with the rich who could, without giving themselves the least
trouble, have helped me to fulfill my mission, and who did not want to. All I can
do is to weep bitterly, as did Saint Peter, who could have avoided denying his
Master, and who obtained forgiveness only when the Holy Spirit fell upon him
like a thunderbolt.

I am going to communion. The priest has uttered the fearful words which a
fleshly piety calls consoling: Domine non sum dignus … Jesus is about to come,
and I have only a moment in which to prepare myself to receive Him…In a
moment He will be under my roof.
I do not recall having swept clean this dwelling wherein He will enter as a
king or us a thief, for I do not know what to think of this visit. Indeed, have I
ever swept it clean, my dwelling place of unchasteness and carnage?
I give it a glance, a poor glance of terror, and I see it full of dust and full of
filth. Everywhere there seems to be an odor of dirt and decay.
I dare not look into the dark corners. In the last shadowy places, I behold
awful spots, old or new, which remind me that I have slaughtered innocents, and
in what numbers, with what cruelty!
My walls are alive with vermin and trickling with cold droplets that recall
to me the tears of so many unfortunates who implored me in vain, yesterday, the
day before yesterday, ten, twenty, forty years ago….
And look! There, before that ghastly door, who is that squatting monster
whom I had not noticed until now, and who resembles the creature I have
sometimes glimpsed in my mirror? He seems to be asleep on that trap door of
bronze, sealed by me and padlocked with such care, in order that I might not
hear the clamors of the dead and their pitiful Miserere.
Ah! truly it takes God not to fear entering such a house!
And here He is! How shall I greet Him, and what shall I say or do?
Absolutely nothing.
Even before He may have crossed my threshold, I shall have ceased
thinking about Him, I shall no longer be there, I shall have disappeared, I know
not how, I shall be infinitely far away, among the images of creatures.
He will be alone and will Himself clean the house, helped by His Mother
whose slave I claim to be, and who is, in fact, my humble serving-maid.
When They will have gone, both of Them, to visit other dens, I shall return
and I shall bring with me a new mass of filth.
 My well-beloved sovereign, I do not know what it is to honor You in this
or that of Your Mysteries, as has been taught by certain of Your friends. I want to
know nothing except that You are the sorrowful Mother, that all Your earthly
life was nothing but sorrow, infinite sorrow, and that I am one of the children of
Your sorrow. I have placed myself at Your service like a slave, I have entrusted
to You my temporal and spiritual life in order to obtain through You my
sanctification and that of other men. Only in this way, under this title alone, can I
speak with You. I lack faith, hope and love. I do not know how to pray and I am
unacquainted with penance. I can do nothing and I am nothing but a son of
sorrow. You know that long ago, more than thirty years past, in obedience to an
impulse that surely came from You, I called down upon myself all possible
suffering. Because of this I reason with myself that my suffering, which has been
great and continual, can be offered to You. Draw from this treasure to pay my
debts and those of all the beings I, love. And then, God willing, vouchsafe me to
be Your witness in death’s torments. I ask this of You by Your most tender name
of Mary.
We are created that we may be saints. If anything is written, this surely is.
Sanctity is so required of us, it is so inherent in human nature, that God
presumes its existence, so to speak, in each of us, by means of the sacraments of
His Church, that is, by means of mystical signs invisibly making operative in
souls the beginning of Glory. Sacramentum nihil aliud nisi rem saeram, abditam
atque occultam significant. (A Sacrament is nothing other than a sacred,
withdrawn and mysterious thing.) This sacred and mysterious thing thus alluded
to by the Council of Trent has the effect of uniting souls to God. The most
transcendent theology contains nothing stronger than this affirmation. There are
even three sacraments that imprint a character, and whose mark cannot be
effaced. Thus we are virtually saints, pillars of eternal Glory. A Christian may
disown his baptism, debar the Holy Spirit from his thought, and, if he is a
spoiled priest, reject the succession of the Apostles conferred upon him by holy
orders; in short, he may damn himself forever; nothing will be able to disunite
him, to separate him from God, and what an unfathomable mystery of terror is
this persistence of the sacred Sign even into the infinite pangs of perdition.
Hence it must be said that hell is peopled with fearsome saints become the
companions of the hideous angels!
However evil such saints or angels may be, they have God in them.
Otherwise they would not be able to subsist, even in the state of nothingness,
since nothingness, also inconceivable without God, is the eternal reservoir of
Creation.
All that God has made is sacred after a fashion which only He could
explain. Water is holy, stones are holy, plants and animals are holy, fire is the
devouring likeness of His Holy Spirit. His entire work is holy. Man alone, who
is more holy than other creatures, will have none of sanctity.
He considers it ridiculous and even insulting to his dignity. Such is, in the
twentieth century of the Redemption, the visible and perceptible result of the
unfaithfulness of so many shepherds, of the monstrous blindness brought about
by those who should have been the light of the world, and who extinguished all
light.
It is certain indeed that never, at no age of the world’s history, were men as
far from God, as contemptuous of the Sanctity which He demands, and yet never
has the necessity for being saints been so manifest. In these apocalyptic days it
truly seems as though only a film of nothingness separates us from the eternal
gulfs.***
“Not all men are called to saintliness,” says a Satanic cant phrase. To what
then are you called, O wretch? and above all in our day and age? The Master
said you must be perfect. He said it in an imperative, absolute way, giving to be
understood that there is no alternative, and those whose duty it is to teach His
word, by themselves presenting an example of perfection, ceaselessly assert that
it is not necessary, that a reasonably trifling average of love is more than enough
for salvation, and that the desire for the supernatural way of life is rash, when it
is not culpable presumption.
Aliquam partem, “a certain portion,” they argue, debasing an expression in
the Liturgy, a tiny little corner in Paradise, that is what we need. To this base
retreat, to this formal denial of the divine Promise, they give a color of humility,
cunningly omitting the heroic sequel to the two liturgical words, in which is
specified that the “portion” in case is nothing less than “the company of the
Apostles and the Martyrs.”
But cowardly minds and mediocre hearts can avail nothing against the
Word of God, and the Estote perfecti (be ye perfect) of the Sermon on the Mount
continues to weigh upon us infinitely more than all the globes in the firmament.
Sanctity has always been required of us. In older days, it was possible to
believe that sanctity was demanded from afar, like a debt due on a vague date,
which might possibly lapse. Today sanctity is laid on our doorstep by a wild-
eyed, blood-smeared messenger. Behind him, a few steps behind him, are panic,
fire, pillage, torture, despair, the most frightful death…
 And we have not even a moment in which to choose!

[There Is But One Sadness.] Today Clotilde is forty-eight, and looks as

though she were at least a hundred. But she is more beautiful than before, and
resembles a pillar of prayer, the last pillar of a temple wrecked by cataclysms.
Her hair has become entirely white. Her eyes, burned by the tears that have
furrowed her face, are almost extinguished. Yet she has lost none of her strength.
Hardly ever is she to be seen sitting still. Ever journeying from one church
to another, or from cemetery to cemetery, she stops moving only to get on her
knees, and you might say that she knew no other posture.
Her head covered only with the hood of a great black coat which reaches to
the ground, her invisible feet naked in sandals, upheld for ten years by an energy
far more than human, there is no cold or foul weather capable of frightening her.
Her dwelling place is that of the rain which falls.
She asks for no alms. She limits herself to taking with a very tender smile
whatever is offered to her, and giving it in secret to the destitute.
Whenever she encounters a child, she kneels down before it, as did the
great Bérulle, and, with its pure little hand, traces upon her forehead the sign of
the cross.
Comfortable and well-clad Christians, who are inconvenienced by the
Supernatural and who “have said to Wisdom: Thou art my sister,” judge her to
have a disordered mind, but ordinary people are respectful to her, and a few
churchdoor beggarwomen believe her to be a saint.
Silent as the celestial spaces, she seems, when she speaks, to return from a
beatific world situate in an unknown universe. This can be felt in her distant
voice, which age has deepened without impairing its tender charm, and this can
be felt even better in her words.
“Everything that happens is divine,” is her usual comment, with the
ecstatic air of a creature a thousand times overwhelmed, who would find no
other utterance for every movement of her heart and mind, were the occasion a
universal plague, or were the moment that of her being devoured by wild beasts.
Although they know she is a vagrant, the police, themselves astounded by
her power, have never sought to molest her.
After Leopold’s death—his body was never found amid the nameless and
appalling ruins—Clotilde had sought to conform herself to that one of the
Precepts in the Gospels the rigorous observation of which is considered more
unbearable than even the torture of fire. She had sold all that she possessed, had
given the proceeds to the poorest of the poor and overnight had become a
beggar.
What the first years of this new life must have been like, God only knows!
Wonders have been told about her which resemble those wrought by the Saints,
but what seems altogether likely is that the grace was granted her of never
needing rest.
“You must be very unhappy, my poor woman,” some priest once told her,
after he had seen her bathed in tears before the Blessed Sacrament exposed—a
man who happened to be a real priest.
“I am perfectly happy,” she answered. “You do not enter Paradise
tomorrow, or the day after, or in ten years, you enter it today, when you are poor
and crucified.”
“Hodie mecum eris in paradiso (today thou shalt be with me in Paradise),”
murmured the priest, who moved off overwhelmed with love.
By virtue of suffering, this pulsating and vigorous Christian found out that
there is, above all for women, only one way of being in contact with God and
that that way, that wholly unique way, is Poverty. Not that easy, beguiling
poverty of complicity, which gives alms to the world’s hypocrisy, but that
difficult, revolting, scandalous poverty, which must be succored without the
least hope of glory and which has nothing to give in return.
She even understood—and this is not very far from the sublime—that
Woman really exists only on condition of being without bread, without abode,
without friends, without husband and without children, and that only thus can
she force her Savior to descend.
After the death of her husband, this beggarwoman of good will became
even more the wife of that extraordinary man who gave his life for Justice.
Perfectly tender and perfectly implacable.
Linked to every form of wretchedness, she was able fully to see the
murderous horror of what calls itself public charity, and her constant prayer is a
torch shaken against the mighty.
Lazare Druide was the sole relic of her past who still occasionally saw her.
Here was the only tie she had not broken. The painter of Andronic was too
upright to have been able to win the favors of fortune, whose age-old custom is
to spin her wheel in filth. This made it possible for Clotilde to visit him without
exposing to the mud of a worldly luxury her ragged vesture of a wanderer and
“pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre.”
 At rare intervals, she came to inject into the soul of that profound artist a
little of her peace, of her mysterious grandeur, then she went back to her vast
solitude, in the midst of the streets swarming with people.
“There is but one sadness,” she told him, the last time she saw him, “and
that is for us not to be SAINTS.”

[In Paradise.] The basis of Paradise or of the idea of Paradise is union with
God starting in the present life, which is to say the infinite Distress of man’s
heart, and union with God in the future Life, which is to say Beatitude.***
Union with God is certainly achieved by the Saints, starting in the present
life, and is perfectly consummated at once after their birth into the other Life, but
that is not enough for them and it is not enough for God. The most intimate
union is not enough, there must be identification, which itself will never be
enough, and thus Beatitude cannot be conceived or imagined except as an
ascension ever more lively, more impetuous, more thunderous, not toward God,
but in God, in the very Essence of the Unbounded. A whirlwind of the
knowledge of God without end or sur cease, which the Church, speaking to men,
is forced to name Eternal Rest!
The raging multitude of the Saints is like unto a vast army of cyclones,
hurling itself upon God with a blast able to uproot the nebulae, and this for all
eternity.***
It will be a firmament of differentiated, inconceivable splendors. The
Saints will rise to God like lightning, supposing that lightning doubled itself in
strength, second by second, for ever and ever, their charity ever growing along
with their brilliance—ineffable Stars who will be followed at an enormous
distance by all those who will have known only the Face of Jesus Christ and who
will have been unaware of His Heart. As for the others, the poor Christians
called practicing, the observers of the easy Letter, yet not perverse, and capable
of a certain generosity, they will follow in their turn, not being lost, at a distance
of billions of lightning flashes, having previously paid for their places at an
unutterable price, but joyful all the same—infinitely more so than could express
the rarest lexicon of happiness—and joyous precisely at the incomparable glory
of their elders, joyful in depth and in width, joyful as the Lord when He finished
creating the world!
And all, as I have said, will climb together like a tempest without lull, the
beatific tempest of the endless end of ends, an assumption of cataracts of love,
and such will be the Garden of Delights, the indefinable Paradise named in the
Scriptures.

1. John 15:13.
2. In the Petit-Montrouge suburb of Paris, described in Chapter Five. (R.M.)
 The Sense of Mystery

THE WORD OF GOD

AND THE MYSTERY OF HIS CREATURES

Massillon can sleep. I shall not disturb his slumber. This famous preacher
was, like all the others, merely a retailer of Christian morality. And this morality
consists in the Word of God fitted to the customer, which is something other,
something infinitely other than the Word of God in itself, anterior to all creation,
to all revelation. Only the latter makes me tremble as I look upon it. You should
understand this, having read Le Salut par les Juifs. Whatever page of Scripture I
may read, I always find the words spelling out the story of the Holy Trinity, and
I read—without understanding it—but with a boundless emotion which warns
me I am not to seek there for anything else. Non loquebatur nisi in parabolis (He
spake not unless it were in parables): thus is it written of Jesus. After that, how
do you expect me to be impressed by a preacher who tells me that the Master
meant to say precisely this or that?

[The Invisible Companion.] We are taught that every man is accompanied,

from his birth to his death, by an Invisible Being charged with watching
carefully over his soul and over his body. That Invisible One is called the
Guardian Angel, the protector God willed for us, who may belong to any one of
the Nine Choirs of Angels.
Here is the universal belief of Christians. This perpetual companion is at
once an inspirer and a judge. Exalted thoughts come through him, and what are
called qualms of conscience he dins into our ears. He knows what we do not
know, he sees what we do not see, he is ever present within us and around us,
unspeakably respectful of our freedom, aware of the true greatness of our souls
and the ineffable dignity of our bodies of clay, called upon as they are to shine in
splendor when we shall have ceased to be asleep. When a man does wrong, his
angel silently retires into the deep places of his criminal soul, whither the sinner
himself does not penetrate, and there he weeps as Angels are able to weep.

If life is a feast, these are our table companions; if it is a comedy, these are
our fellow roisterers; and such are the dreadful Visitors of our slumbers, if life
be but a dream!
When a pander of the ideal warbles the angelic splendors of Célimène, his
silliness has for its witnesses the Nine multitudes, the Nine spiritual cataracts of
which Plato was unaware: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues,
Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels, among whom it might perchance
be necessary to choose. And if hell is invoked, it is—at the opposite pole—
exactly the same story.
And yet, they are our very close relatives, those ceaseless travelers on the
Patriarch’s shining ladder, and we are warned that each of us is jealously
guarded by one of them, like some invaluable treasure, against the utter
confusion of the other abyss—a thing which affords the most confounding
notion of mankind.
The most squalid ruffian is so precious that he possesses, solely to watch
over his person, someone similar to Him who went before Israel’s camp in the
pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire; and the Seraph who burned the lips of the
greatest of all the prophets is perhaps the escort, as vast as all the worlds,
commissioned to convoy the most unworthy cargo of some decrepit pedant’s or
shyster’s soul.
An angel comforts Elias when he is weary of life; another accompanies the
Hebrew children into the fiery furnace; a third closes the mouths of Daniel’s
lions; finally a fourth, called “the Great Prince,” considers, as he argues with the
Devil, that he is not mighty enough to curse him, and the Holy Spirit is
represented as being the only mirror in which these inconceivable attendants of
man can have any wish to contemplate themselves.
What then are we, in reality, that such guardians should be set over us?
And, above all, what are they themselves, these beings chained to our destiny of
whom it is not said that God made them, like us, in His image, and who have
neither body nor face?
On account of them was it written never to “forget hospitality,” for fear a
few of them might conceal themselves amongst needy strangers.
 Were some tramp suddenly to cry out: “I am Raphael! Seemingly I drank
and ate with you; but my food is invisible, and what I drink cannot appear to
men”—who knows if the poor bourgeois’ fright would not stretch even to the
constellations?
Steaming with fear, he would discover that each of us lives gropingly in his
little cell of darkness, knowing nothing of those who are at his right hand or of
those who are at his left, unable to guess the true “name” of those who weep
above or those who suffer below, with no premonition of what he is himself, and
without ever understanding the murmurs or the shouting which vaguely
reverberate through the resounding chambers.

Women are universally convinced that everything is their due. This belief
lies within their nature just as a triangle is inscribed in the circumference it
determines. Beautiful or ugly, slave or empress, each woman having the right to
presume herself the WOMAN, not one escapes this marvelous instinct for
preserving the scepter whose titulary mankind still awaits.
That awful pedant, Schopenhauer, who spent his life studying the horizon
from the bottom of a well, was certainly incapable of suspecting the
supernatural origin of that feeling of dominion which casts the strongest men
under the feet of women, and the brutishness of our day has unhesitatingly
glorified this blasphemer against Love.
Against Love, indeed, for a woman cannot be, or believe herself to be,
anything other than Love itself; and the earthly Paradise which the Don Juans of
every estate have sought for so many centuries is her prodigious Image.
Thus for a woman, a creature temporarily, provisionally inferior, there are
but two aspects, two essential modalities, to which the Infinite must necessarily
accommodate itself: Beatitude or Voluptuousness. Between these two there is
only the Respectable Woman, that is, the female of the Bourgeois, the absolutely
damned, whom no holocaust can redeem.
A woman saint may fall into the mire and a prostitute may ascend into
light, but never will either of them be able to become a respectable woman—
because the appalling barren cow known as a respectable woman, she who but
lately refused the hospitality of Bethlehem to the Infant God, is eternally
powerless to escape from her nothingness, either by falling low or mounting
high.
Yet they all have a common trait, a calm assumption of their dignity as
dispensers of Joy. Causa nostrae laetitiae! Janua caeli! (Cause of our joy! Gate
of heaven!) God alone can know in what fashion, at times, these sacred
formularies become fused in the meditations of the purest among them, and what
their mysterious physiology suggests to them!…
All women—whether they know it or are unaware of it—are convinced
that their bodies are Paradise. Plantaverat autem Dominus Deus paradisum
voluptatis a principio: in quo posuit hominem quern formaverat (And the Lord
God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed
man whom he had formed).
Consequently no prayer, no penance, no martyrdom have a sufficient
impetrative power to obtain that inestimable jewel which the weight in diamonds
of all the nebulae could not pay for.
Consider what they give when they give themselves, and weigh their
sacrilege when they sell themselves!
Here now is the conclusion, drawn from the Prophets: Woman is right to
believe all this and claim all this. She is infinitely right, since her body—that
part of her body!—was the tabernacle of the living God, and no one, not even an
archangel, can set limits to the solidarity of this baffling mystery!

“Why do animals suffer? I have often seen animals mistreated, and I have
wondered how God was able to tolerate this injustice wreaked on poor beings
who have not deserved, as we have, their punishments.”
“Ah, Mademoiselle! We should first have to inquire where man’s limit lies.
The zoologists writing out their little labels two steps from where we stand
would tell you exactly the natural peculiarities that distinguish the human animal
from all the lower species. They would inform you that it is altogether essential
to have only two feet or two hands, and to be covered—at birth—with neither
feathers nor scales. But that would not explain to you why this unfortunate tiger
is a prisoner. We should have to know what God has revealed to no one—
namely, what is this feline’s place in the universal apportionment of our joint
burden since the Fall. You must have been taught, if it were only in catechism
class, that in creating man, God gave him dominion over the beasts. Do you
know that in his turn Adam gave a name to each animal, and that in this way the
animals were created in the image of his reason, even as he himself was shaped
in likeness of God? For the name of a being is that being itself. Our first
ancestor, in naming the animals, made them his, after an inexpressible fashion.
He did not merely subject them to himself like an emperor. His essence
penetrated them. He fastened them, sewed them to himself forever—joining
them to his equilibrium and enmeshing them in his own destiny. Why should
you wish that the animals about us be not captive when the human race is seven
times captive? It was needful, after all, that everything fall into the same place
where man fell. It has been said that the beasts rebelled against man at the same
time that man rebelled against God.
“Pious and shallow rhetoric. These [zoo] cages are in shadow only because
they are placed beneath the human Cage which they prop up, and which weighs
heavily upon them. But captive or not, wild or tame, very close to or very far
from their wretched sultan, animals are obliged to suffer under him, because of
him, and consequently on his behalf. Even when they are far away, they are
subject to the invincible law and devour one another—as we do-in the
wilderness, under the pretext of being carnivorous. The enormous weight of their
sufferings makes up a part of our ransom and at every point along the animal
chain, from man down to the last of the brutes, universal Suffering is one
identical propitiation.”
“If I understand you, Monsieur Marchenoir,” said Clotilde hesitantly, “the
sufferings of animals are just and willed by God who seemingly condemned
them to bear a very heavy share of our burden. How can this be, since animals
die without hope?”
“Why then would animals exist, and how could we say that they suffer, if
they did not suffer in us? We know nothing, Mademoiselle, absolutely nothing,
except that creatures, be they bereft of reason or wise, suffer outside of God’s
will, and consequently, of His Justice…. Have you noticed that a suffering beast
is ordinarily a reflection of the suffering man it accompanies? The world over,
you are always sure of meeting a sorrowing slave being followed by a
disconsolate beast. Does not the angelic dog of the Poor Man, for instance,
whom the minstrelsy of romance has so overworked, seem to you to be a
likeness of his soul, a sad vista of his thoughts, indeed something like an external
dumb-show of that unfortunate’s consciousness? When we see a beast suffering,
the pity we feel is keen only because it pricks within us our presentiment of
Deliverance. We believe we feel, as you were saving a moment ago, that this
creature is suffering without having deserved it, without compensation of any
sort, since it can expect no good other than the present life, and that hence here is
a frightful injustice. Thus it must necessarily be suffering for us, the Immortals,
if we do not want God to be absurd. It is He who gives Suffering, became only
He can give anything, and Suffering is so holy that it idealizes and magnifies the
most wretched beings! But we are so light-headed and so hard-hearted that we
need the most awful admonitions of misfortune before we become aware of this.
Mankind seems to have forgotten that everything capable of suffering since the
beginning of the world is indebted only to himself alone for sixty centuries of
anguish, and that his own disobedience has destroyed the precarious well-being
of those creatures scorned in his arrogance as a divine animal. Again I say,
would it not be strange if the eternal patience of these innocents had not been
intended by an infallible Wisdom, with a view to counterbalancing, in the most
secret scales of the Lord, the barbarous uneasiness of humanity?***
“It would seem to me, Monsieur, that you must rather seldom be
understood, for your sayings go further than ordinary ideas. The things you say
seem to spring from a foreign world which no one knows. Hence I have much
trouble following what you say, and I admit the essential point is always obscure
to me. You state that animals share the fate of man, who dragged them down
with him in his fall! So be it. You add that, being deprived of consciousness, and
not having to suffer on their own account, since they could not disobey, they
necessarily suffer because of us and for us. This I understand less well. Yet I can
still accept it as a mystery which in no way revolts my reason. I am well aware
that suffering can never be useless. But in heaven’s name, must it not also avail
to the being who suffers? Does not sacrifice—even involuntary sacrifice—call
for some compensation?”
“In short, you want to know what recompense, what wages the animals
receive. If I knew enough to tell you, I should be God, Mademoiselle, for I
should then know what animals are in themselves, and no longer, merely, what
they are in relation to man. Have you not noticed that we cannot know beings or
things except in their relations with other beings or things, never in their depth,
in their essence? There is not one man on earth who has the right to state, with
full assurance, that a discernible form is indelible and bears in itself the character
of eternity. We are, according to the holy sayings, ‘sleepers,’ and the outer world
is in our dreams as ‘a riddle in a mirror.’ We shall understand this ‘groaning
universe’ only when all hidden things shall have been revealed to us, in
fulfillment of the promise of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then, we must accept,
with the ignorance of sheep, the universal spectacle of immolations, reminding
ourselves that if suffering were not wrapped in mystery, it would have neither
strength nor beauty for the recruiting of martyrs, and would not even deserve to
be endured by the animals.”
 THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY

[The Symbolism of History.] And now he resolutely turned his attention

back toward history. Here had lain his greatest ambition and his most fervent
intellectual love.***
As he had confided to his friend, he dreamt of being the Champollion of
historical events, looked upon as the divine hieroglyphics of a revelation through
symbols, corroborating the other Revelation.***
He had drawn the initial idea for this from those exegetical studies which
were, in perhaps a unique fashion, the point of departure of his intellectual life,
immediately following his conversion. Bolstered by Saint Paul’s sovereign
affirmation that we see everything “in riddles,” this absolute spirit had come to
the firm conclusion that the symbolism of Scripture led to a universal
symbolism; he had succeeded in convincing himself that all human acts, of
whatever nature, unite in the infinite syntax of a mysterious book no one had
suspected, which could be dubbed the Gospel’s Paralipomena. From this point
of view—very different from that of Bossuet, for instance, who thought, in
contempt of Saint Paul, that everything was made clear—universal history
appeared to him as a homogeneous text, very tightly bound and jointed together,
vertebrated, reasoned out, but hermetically sealed, needing to be transcribed into
a grammar possible of being grasped.
He had conceived the hope of achieving this, and lived only for this
project, which became the nerve center of his thoughts. Little did he care that
people would consider him extravagant or ridiculous. For a long time he had
determined never to please, and was little troubled even by open hostility, the
immediate effects of which can, after all, never easily overtake a man who is
equally formidable in his pen, his tongue and his biceps.
Needless to say, the numerous enemies he had already created in the press
had the usual weapon of generously closing all outlets to him, thereby depriving
a penniless writer of money when his talent ought to have sufficed to feed him.
Such was the mediate danger, by no means to be scorned. But what could he do?
He felt himself being dragged by the hair along his dolorous way, and even if he
had not wanted to, he had to follow his fate. He had, if possible, to utter
something great, then die under the blows and the execration of the universe! “I
leave it to God’s grace!” he often said. This is the feeling of many a rash man,
but in his mouth it had a high and almost holy meaning.***
Here was the great illuminative contract in the eyes of this magician of
exegesis, who wanted all things simultaneously to pass in review before the
tribunal of his mind: Every earthly thing is ordered for Suffering. Now this
Suffering was, in his eyes, the beginning, just as it was the end. It was not only
the purpose, the hidden idea pregnant with threats, it was the very logic of those
mysterious Scriptures, in which he presumed God’s will should be read. He
applied in all its rigor the terrible condemnation of Genesis, when Paradise was
lost, to the always agonizing birth pangs of the slightest change in the world’s
ecumenical story.
Thus on this accursed planet, condemned to germinate nothing but thorns,
there was fulfilled for the fallen race during sixty centuries the frightful mockery
of Progress, in the everlasting repetition of the repeated foreshadowings of that
Catastrophe which is to explain everything and consummate everything in the
end of ends.
The angels must have been frightened and moved to pity at this spectacle,
over which one could justifiably be fearful that the curtain of divine shame ever
might fall! The generations of mankind, constantly devoured at the banquet of
the strong on all continents where the children of Nimrod had spread their
tablecloth; and the Poor Man, whose surprising destiny it is to represent God
Himself, the poor man who is eternally vanquished, buffeted, flouted, raped,
cursed, cut into pieces, yet who never dies—the poor man who is shoved under
the table, like some piece of refuse, from Asia to Africa, and from Europe onto
the whole world—without so much as an hour being granted him to quench his
thirst with his own tears, or to scrape the crusts of his blood! And continuing all
through the societies of antiquity, summed up, as they are, in wonderful epitome
by King Balthasar’s orgiastic feast.
Then the coming of the perfect Poor Man, in whom were united the most
exquisite abominations of utter misery, and who was Himself the Balthasar at a
feast of tortures, to which were invited all the powers of suffering. Redemption
of a kind to make you tremble, which transfigured the poetics of man without
renewing his heart, in mockery of that which had been foretold.
A second register of formulas had been opened—that was all—and the
great merriment of the goats and vultures began all over again. In the immense
lands unexplored by Christianity, the cookery of the people’s shepherds did not
change, but in Christendom the poor man was now and then charitably invited to
fill his belly on the leavings of power, whereof he, himself, was the nutriment.
The burden of the weak, from thenceforth made heavier by an addition of
spirituality, shattered the bones of nine tenths of humanity.
 As though the appearance of the Cross had driven the nations mad, the
universe fell into vast turmoil. Over the Roman Empire, writhing with the colic,
its feet gouty, its heart syphilitic, become bald like its first Caesar, there paraded
millions of brutes with human muzzles. The Goths, the Vandals, the Huns and
the Franks sneeringly sat upon their shield and let themselves slide down in an
avalanche against all the gates of Rome, which burst under their onslaught. The
Danube, swollen with savages, spread in a flood over the latrines of the Late
Empire. Toward the Orient, the Camel-driver Prophet, squatting over the dung of
his herd, was already hatching in his verminous heart the famished grasshoppers
with which he was to fill two thirds of the known world. For eight hundred years
people fought each other, disembowelled each other, devoured one another’s
guts, from the end of Persia to the shores of the Atlantic. At last the great feudal
framework established itself in the midst of all this offal.
It was though the main stanchion of a quasi-celestial Jerusalem yet to be
built, and it turned out once again to be a scaffold. Even Chivalry, the noblest
thing men ever invented did not often show mercy to the suffering members of
the Lord, whose mission it was to protect. Even the Crusades without which
Europe’s past would be less than a mound of filth, were not free from the
horrible train of all the purulences of that responsible animal, man. And yet her
was young manhood with its burning heart, here was the time of love and
enthusiasm for Christianity! As tor saints, there were then, as today, a half dozen
of them for every hundred million mediocre or abject souls—more or less—and
the odious cattle who venerated them after their death, sometimes had to borrow
mud and spittle with which to revile them to their hearts’ content, when they had
the honor of holding them alive under their filthy hooves.
Barely two things seemed to Marchenoir to justify one’s overcoming one’s
nausea at this abominable retrospect: the unshakable preeminence of the Papacy
and the inalienable sovereignty of France. Nothing had been able to prevail
against these two privileges. Neither the hostility of the times nor the dealings of
Judases, nor the overwhelming unworthiness of certain office holders, nor
revolutions, nor defeats, nor denials, nor the unconscious profanations of
sacrilegious stupidity.… When either one or the other was threatened with
extinction, the world had seemed to be under an interdict. The bull Unam
Sanctam of Boniface VIII, the famous bull of the Two Swords, no longer had
anyone who believed in it, it is true, and France was being governed by
contemptible wretches…. No matter! A few souls knew there existed, in their
favor, a prescription against all the suing claims of the void, and Marchenoir was
a unit in the small number of these unhappy souls, borne along on a melting
block of ice, in the midst of an ocean of tepidity, toward a tropics of utter
foolishness!
But before sinking, this bearer of the burden of time wanted to summon the
modern Age, the most iniquitous and stupid age that ever was, before a Judge
whose near Arrival be felt was sure, even though that Judge seemed to have been
so fast asleep for so many centuries, and whom he hoped, by means of his
despairing cries, once and for all to jar from his heavens. These clamors he had
collected from everywhere; he had accumulated, amalgamated, coagulated them
within himself. A sublime student of his own torments, he had syncretized into
an algebra fit to make all minds burst the universal totality of sufferings.
From that forest there emerged, roaring, an unknown symbology which he
might have called the symbology of Tears, and which was to become his
language for speaking to God. It was like the infinite rustlings of all the
sorrowing voices of the crushed in all ages, under a miraculously condensed
formula which explained—owing to the necessity of a kind of divine ransom—
the interminable postponements of Justice and the apparent inefficacy of the
Redemption.
That is what he proposed to place, first, under the eyes of his inattentive
contemporaries; then, under the clear gaze of Him whose coming he called for,
as overwhelming evidence of the vile apostasy of a generation which may
perhaps be the last before the deluge—should its monstrous indifference have
made it an emissary to insure the opprobrium of its elders, less abominable, of
which written history has so cowardly stammered the guilt!

[History Is Like a Vast Liturgical Text.] Every man is symbolic, and it is

within the measure of his symbol that he is a living being. It is true that this
measure is unknown, as unknown and unknowable as the tissue of infinite inter-
weavings within the universal Solidarity. A man who would know exactly,
through a prodigy of infused knowledge, what this or that individual weighs,
would have spread before him, like a map of the heavens, the whole divine
Order.
What the Church names the Communion of Saints is an article of faith and
cannot be anything else. One must believe in it as one believes in the economy
of insects, in the smells of spring, in the Milky Way, knowing very well that one
cannot understand. When one refuses to, one is a fool or one is perverse. The
Our Father teaches that we must ask for our bread and not for my bread. This for
the whole earth and for all the centuries. Identity of Caesar’s bread and a slave’s
bread. Worldwide identity in seeking through prayer. Mysterious equilibrium
between strength and weakness in the Scales where all is weighed. There is not
one human being who can say what he is, with any certainty. No man knows
what he came to do in this world, to what correspond his acts, his feelings, his
thoughts; who are closest to him among all men, or what is his true name, his
imperishable Name in the account book of Light. Whether emperor or
longshoreman, no one knows his burden or his crown.
History is like a vast liturgical text in which the iotas and punctuation
marks are worth as much as versicles or whole chapters, but the relative
importance of each is not to be determined and is profoundly hidden. Therefore,
if I think Napoleon may well be an iota shining with glory, I am obliged to
remind myself, at the same time, that the battle of Friedland, for instance, may
easily have been won by a little girl of three, or a hundred-year-old tramp, asking
God that His Will be done both on earth and in heaven. So what is called Genius
would simply be that divine Will made flesh; if I dare say so, become visible and
tangible in a human instrument brought to its highest degree of power and
precision, but incapable, like a compass, of going beyond its ultimate
circumference.
It remains, for Napoleon and for the infinite multitude of his inferiors, that
we are all of us together figures of the Invisible, and that you cannot move a
finger or slaughter two million men without signifying something which will be
made manifest only in the beatific Vision.

Christopher Columbus is the most extraordinary of all the mad men of the
Cross and the most unique of all the divine senseless people….
Toward the end of his fourth journey, the saddest and most tragic of them
all—as also the journey most crowded with supernatural happenings—when he
saw himself shipwrecked, betrayed, ill and abandoned by everyone…he wrote a
last time to the Catholic Kings, and the enormity of injustice, the excess of the
ingratitude shown him impelled him to pity his own fate … The Globe’s
Revealer standing, as it were, in the future, looked back from the future, and
mourned the fate of Christopher Columbus. He cried out: “I have wept up till
now for others; now may Heaven have Mercy upon me and let the entire earth
weep over me! And may he weep over me who loves charity, truth, justice.”
 Contemplate this poor giant, this sorrowful Christ-Bearer, whom the
darkness has not been able to devour and who appears to us beyond a continent
of darkness in so luminous a solitude!
As he did so long age, he advances now, again, over the waves which are
not permitted to engulf him, and the peace of which has become so divine that
one would take these waves for an immense carpet of glittering light stretched
beneath the feet of this traveler.
It is always, and still, the Savior that he is carrying, and it is always, and
still, to the nations deprived of hope that he is carrying Him, but today it is
toward the sun that he is advancing….
The desolate Indian peoples whom he has discovered beneath unknown
constellations and whom he has wished reborn to God, exist no longer. Long
since we have massacred them, these Indians of Columbus….
And yet it is necessary that he should pursue his task … and so, now, he
retraces his steps, and it is toward ancient Europe, the murderess of the children
of his spirit, that henceforth he brings back Faith and Hope and Charity.
He knows better than does anyone else, the gentle and sublime Apostle,
that this look he has of an ancestor glutted with funerals is precisely what is
needed to change the heart of the apostate Christian societies. He knows also,
with the knowledge of one Blessed, that in this twilight of the world, it is
necessary that the ancient prefigurings of which his person was the constant
accompaniment, should now be finally verified through their absolute
accomplishment. For in all truth he is that dove which brings back at eventide to
the boatman of the Symbolical Ark the green olive branch of liberation from the
flood.

[Saint Bernard and the Second Crusade.] Saint Bernard, having armed
France and Germany against the East, was asked to head the expedition.
He refused, remembering Peter the Hermit, and he was wrong, frightfully
wrong. Through that refusal of his, the Crusade miscarried, and two hundred
thousand men paid with their lives for the ecstatic rest of the Servant of God.
He asked the Pope to free him from the “whims of men.” Ought he not
instead have asked Jesus Christ to spare men from his own whims?
Saint Bernard is a saint of Jesus, a saint of the buffeted Word, a saint of the
Poor Man and of the Crucified One. In this sense, he was right in refusing, and
his place is indeed upon the altars of the Man of Sorrows.
 But a saint of the Holy Spirit would have acted differently.
Jesus forgives everything, accepts everything, suffers everything.
The glorious Spirit, the Triumpher, the Burner, the Devourer, the Avenger
forgives absolutely nothing! He is the one you can outrage only in an
unforgivable manner.
The saints of Jesus, rewarded by Jesus for what they have done, will be
judged afresh by Love for what they did not do, and omission will be the fiery
cyclone which will burn all tabernacles.
A saint of Love would have cried to Jesus:
“I want none of the consolation and heart’s ease that await me at
Clairvaux. It does not suit me to weep silently, delightedly, at the foot of Your
Cross. I wish to suffer, like someone wholly lost, I wish to triumph, in Your
Name and for Your Love, just as the Demons hope to triumph in Your
detestation. I resist Your groans; I refuse to hear Your inexpressible appeals. I
want to hear nothing, know nothing except Your Glory, and even if in the
process I should have to be charred by volcanos, I hunger to un-crucify You,
before the hour.
“I shall not abandon these poor folk, these naked children, these darling
babes, these souls newly born to Redemption, who have no one to count on but
me. I shall command them as a general. I shall drag them through the deserts,
and it will be impossible to slaughter them without exterminating me as well.
For I shall always be between them and the infidels, bearing You, Lord Christ
and Lord Savior, in the chalice of my heart. If there be mountains, I shall bring
them low; if there be rivers, I shall dry them; if there be armies ranged in battle, I
shall strike them blind; and if bread be lacking, I shall multiply Your body until
is sated the last camp follower in this army which will be mine.
“And I shall do these things, even if You do not wish it, because Your
Glory urges me on even more than Your divine Sufferings, and because having
abandoned You to conquer the world for You, You will have nothing more to
refuse me.
“I shall devour Constantinople on my way, and Jerusalem, set free, will see
me come. Then shall I speak to the earth…”

[Jeanne d’Arc and France.] The historical figure of the Maid is like some
stained-glass Annunciation, boundlessly tender and pure, which time and the
Barbarians have by chance respected. Here is the azure of France and the fiery
color of her torment, gently filtered around this martyr’s face. As the result of a
sublime confusion, she seems to be at once the angel of the Annunciation and
the most obedient Virgin, humbly receiving the dread sword that in the future is
to replace her pretty spinner’s distaff. At first she does not understand what is
asked of her. She does not know the history of France, she does not know war or
fearsome polities. She knows nothing, unless it be that God suffers in His
people, and that He has great pity for the Kingdom which He long ago chose for
Himself, even during His dolorous Passion, in the paschal night, when the Cock
began to crow. So she quietly, resolutely arises, like a good daughter of God,
and, guided by her Voices, instantly becomes an invincible strategist, tutor of the
highest princes and their faultless counsellor. When she has freed France, she
lacks nothing but to be freed herself of her mission; and because she is of the
Holy Spirit, this other more glorious freedom cannot be accomplished except
through fire, after the preliminary horrors of the vilest trial that ever appalled
men since the unspeakable trial of Our Lord Jesus Christ!***
That shepherdess of Domremy, who embodied France and was never to
grow old, was a truly supernatural apparition! “It is not possible,” the English
said, “that this young girl should belong to humanity! She is a creature of the
Devil! She is a sorceress!” and they clung doggedly to that thought, refusing to
believe that one could be so young and so unconquerable.
Such is, today, the mortal error under which Germany labors, too senile
and too thick-headed to believe in the devils who manifestly possess her. The
renegade murderess is astounded at finding youthful and dangerous a France
which she presumed was broken with old age. Here is something she cannot
succeed in unraveling, but the barbaric rage which urged her to destroy the city
of Rheims betrays the most significant uneasiness.
Instinctively, without knowing and without understanding—like desert
animals who sense from afar a living well which they will trample—the German
brutes hurled themselves against the wonderful Basilica which was once the
heart of France, when Jeanne d’Arc had her king consecrated within it. Of
course, that was five hundred years ago, and Jeanne d’Arc is now somewhere
else, like unto the “sparrow which flies off into the mountain.” And there is no
king, either. Kings did away with themselves by coming down to the level of the
crowd. No matter, there perhaps remained at Rheims to attract the devastating
bison some precious remnant of that elixir of long life and eternal youth which
amazed the English. It was needful that this be done away with and that Jeanne
be killed anew, killed by fire, were it still possible.
 But the Maid is the unfading Passion flower, and she will no more pass
away than the Word of God. In the end the barbarians will perhaps understand
this, when the fire which they so cruelly misused turns hack against them,
lighting up their frightful faces and the imperishable face of the virgin they
insulted.
This exclusive privilege of France is a mystery. Whatever may be her
infidelities or crimes, she springs back to life under the blade of punishment.…
Stop and think! God has only France! Were France to perish, the Faith, perhaps,
would survive somewhere, were it in some polar nook, along with shivering
Charity, but there would be no more Hope!…
Time is an imposture of the Enemy of mankind, who despairs at the
immortality of souls. We are forever in the fifteenth century, as we are in the
tenth, as we are in the central hour of the Immolation of Calvary, as we are in
times before the coming of Christ. In all truth we lie in each of the folds of
ancient History’s multicolored apron. In spite of death, we are eternal in a
fashion, being Gods, as it has been said: Ego dixi: Dei estis (I say unto thee: ye
are Gods). If France is left out of account, what is the meaning of this saying of
the Holy Spirit? Mankind is explainable and plausible only by means of France.
Arbor de fructu suo cognoscitur (a tree is known by its fruit).
France is the fruit of the tree of nations. Everything has been done for her,
so that one day everything would be done by her.
The Jewish race, formerly the People of God, and still so in the mystical
sense, being, by nature, priestly and inherent to Sanctity, as accident is to
substance:—the Jewish Race, having become a penitent all over the world, has
been astonishing the world for twenty centuries by its persistent and verminous
paralysis, while it awaits the hour in which its First-born will command it to
arise and take its “pallet” into its house. But France is an adopted child who has
secretly always been preferred, and who will never need a pallet, because she is
not to know paralysis.
France has everywhere her deep-thrusting roots; in ancient Asia, in the cliff
chambers of Egypt, in the caves of Thessaly, in the catacombs of Rome,
probably even in the heart of the sunken Atlantis, and under the impenetrable
mountain chains of the lost Eden. She remembers having worshipped and broken
all her idols, including her own image, for she is at once unruly and spiritual,
mutinous and repentant, like those children of love whom it is hard to punish.
Yet she has been punished, at times severely punished. She is being
punished today, she will be punished tomorrow, very probably, and the Arm that
will fall upon her will be heavier than the withered arm of the German emperor.
No matter, everything in the end will be forgiven her, because she has loved far
more than any other nation, and because her radiant youthfulness is as
irresistible as her courage.

[History Is Like a Dream.] As history unfurls, it becomes at once God’s

secret, and even what is most authentic to the thinker’s mind is nothing more
than a probable opinion. However documented a historian may be, he knows
well that he does not see the fact confronting him, which he has so painfully
fished up, like a piece of flotsam from the depths of darkness. Its essential,
divine form necessarily escapes him. We have sure, indisputable proof of a great
number of historic events in clearly determined periods; but these proofs,
basically, have no other consistency than the absolute necessity of these events
and these periods. This is what was necessary, and not something else. Here is
the only criterion.
Jeanne d’Arc might have been freed or ransomed by the king—her death
was not a necessary consequence of her captivity, it has been said. True enough,
but that is not what happened, because these vast injustices were indispensable
to the working out of an enormously mysterious plan which we cannot
understand.

[Tears.]
There is nothing else. Everything is vain except tears. History is like a
dream since it is built upon time, which is an illusion often painful, always
uncapturable, an illusion impossible to make precise. Each of the infinitesimal
particles the sum of which we call duration hurtles toward the gulf of the past
with lightning speed, and history is nothing other than this swarm of lightning
flashes recorded upon the pupils of tortoises.
So, again, there are only tears, when one is sufficiently loved by God to
have some: Beati qui lugent (blessed are those who weep). Tears, it is true,
confuse the sight already none too sure, but the clear-sightedness of the heart can
take its place with profit, and a wonderful divination can illumine the poor
historian. And then, at a certain depth, determined by the level where lie the
great dead, one is truly forced to encounter that universal Solidarity, hidden from
us by the social lie so eloquently exposed for what it is by their dust! That above
all makes us weep!
How levelled we feel in the superabundant misery of all men! The
dazzlement of Heroism or of Beauty has disappeared. Be it Charlemagne,
Napoleon or Jeanne d’Arc, we see in them naught but our close kin, our very
humble brothers in the vast flock of the co-heirs of the Expulsion: Songs of
glory, cries of enthusiasm, the applause of the crowd no longer exist, never did
exist except in a dream which has now vanished. Nothing is left save the tears of
penance, of compassion, of love or despair, luminous or somber rivers flowing
toward unknown gulfs.
Jeanne wept with pity over the France which the English were ravaging.
Wherever her soul may be, is she not now weeping with a greater compassion
over that same France immolated by Barbarians even more ferocious?
In 1846 there were the prophetic Tears of the Mother of Sorrows, who
wept upon her Mountain, begging her people to have mercy on itself; and those
holy Tears which were to be so cruelly disdained, were not able to fall as far as
the ground. The Witnesses said they mounted toward the heavens. Thus today
the tears of several millions of mothers or of widows are needed to replace them,
and that is probably all that will remain of our contemporary history, which
already seems the most frightful of nightmares.

[The Cross of Wood and the Cross of Iron.] When Jeanne d’Arc was led to
the stake, she asked for a cross in order to contemplate it in her last moments. An
Englishman made one with two bits of wood and presented it to her.
That Englishman, who was less wicked than the others, who then
represented the whole of an England still Catholic, could have said to the martyr,
as does the priest when he addresses the people on Good Friday at the Adoration
of the Cross: Ecce Lignum Crucis: “Here is the Wood of the Cross where hangs
the salvation of the world.”
At that moment, the Maid understood what the Saints had foretold to her
concerning her deliverance and her supreme victory, and she cried from the
midst of the flames that her Voices had not deceived her. This enlightening
wooden cross put together by a compassionate petty soldier was the earthly
reward of her exploits and of her virtues. It sufficed her in her dying.
The malevolent and cruel petty Soldier who is the emperor of heretical
Germany today offers the Iron Cross to murderers and incendiaries as reward for
their crimes, and he presents it to them by the light of the embers of burning
towns, his feet in the blood of their slaughtered populations. This symbol of the
Hohenzollern, this apostate iron cross, is an infallible spell for arousing to the
point of madness the natural ferocity of his soldiers. Instead of the salvation of
the world, ruin and despair are bound to that sign whence darkness falls. And
what a darkness!
It was Luther’s masterpiece, a hundred years after the Flower of the
Middle Ages was stifled in the horrible flames of the stake, to have substituted
for the tender wooden Cross, which had consoled nations and strengthened
Martyrs, that implacable iron cross at which the world is appalled. What the
demons of the North have wished to call German culture is, after the lapse of
four centuries, the complete maturing, reached at last, of the fruit of the accursed
tree from which the bad apostle hung himself. It is the definitive and supreme
flowering of Lutheranism.***
The horrors of our day have an apocalyptic note which one can foresee will
grow even more clear. But the iron Cross will in the end be vanquished by the
wooden Cross, because this Cross is the choice of God and the sign of His love.
It can happen, in the course of the unthinkable events of which the present war
seems to be merely the prelude, that France will in her time climb onto the pyre
of the Heroine, condemned like her by her apostate priests who disowned the
Mother of God when she wept on the Mountain of La Salette, accusing them.
Yes, France, ever responsible for her spiritual leaders, might easily be
condemned, through their criminal unfaithfulness, to perish in horrible flames.
All she would then have left would be Jeanne d’Arc’s poor wooden Cross, no
part of which she does at present want, but which would miraculously save her
at the last hour so that mankind might not be lost.
The Cross of paupers and of vagabonds, the tender Cross of old country
roads, the welcoming Cross of the wretched, of the maimed, of those with
bleeding feet, of tearful hearts, of those who have been bitten by the snakes of
the desert and who are cured of their wounds by looking upon it, that Cross of
misery and of glory.

[Appearances.] It is the most threadbare of illusions to believe that we are

really what we seem to be; and this universal illusion is corroborated, all during
life, by the stubborn imposture of all our senses. Nothing less than death will be
needed to teach us that we are always mistaken. At the same time as will be
revealed to us our identity, now so utterly unknown to us, inconceivable abysses
will unveil themselves to our true eyes, abysses within us and without. Men,
things, events will at last be made clear to us, and each will be able to verify the
assertion of that mystic who said that, starting from the Fall, the whole of
mankind fell sound asleep.
Prodigious sleep of generations, naturally accompanied by the infinite
incoherence and distortion of all dreams. We are sleepers, full of the half-erased
images of the lost Eden’s blind beggars on the threshold of a sublime palace
whose gate is closed. Not only do we not succeed in seeing each other, but we
are not even able to distinguish, by the sound of his voice, our closest neighbor.
Here is your brother, we are told. Ah, Lord! how could I recognize him in
this indiscernible multitude, and how would I know whether he resembles me,
since he is made in Your image, as much as I am myself, and I do not know my
own face? While waiting for You to please to awaken me, I have nothing but my
dreams, and they are sometimes terrible. With how much greater difficulty
would I unravel things! I believe in realities that are material, concrete, palpable,
as tangible as iron, as indisputable as the water of a river, and an interior voice
arising from the depths assures me that these are nothing but symbols, that my
body itself is but a seeming, and that everything surrounding me is an enigmatic
seeming.
We are taught that God gives His Body to be eaten and His Blood to be
drunk only under the appearance of the Eucharist. Why should we want Him to
yield us in a less hidden fashion even an infinitesimal particle of His creation?
While men toss in the visions of their sleep, God, alone able to act, really
does something. He writes His own Revelation in the appearance of this world’s
events, and that is why what is called history is so utterly incomprehensible.***
It has become a commonplace to say that a miracle is order restored. Yet
there is no other way of proving how perennial are appearances! Everyone
thought that this beggar had been lame from birth. Peter said to him: “I have
neither gold nor silver, but what I have, that I give thee.” At once the lame man
was perfectly cured. What then did the Prince of the Apostles have to give him,
and what did this wretch lack? The one thing needful: the earthly Paradise.
Peter had not ceased watching ever since the crowing of the Easter cock,
and the beggar before the “beautiful” Door was soundly asleep. Peter had first
said to him with irresistible authority: “Look at me!” and the sleeping man, half
opening his eyes, had for the first time seen the primordial Integrity, the
supernatural hills of the Garden of delight, the infinitely pure springs, the health-
giving plantations, the indescribable avenues of that place of Innocence. All this
upon the countenance and in the eyes of the Fisher of men whom Christ had
chosen.
No more was needed at once to dispel appearances, and restore perfect
health, even life, to a wretch who knew nothing better than to beg for the illusion
of a piece of bread from wretches like himself, who had the illusion that they
possessed something. It is even said that Peter’s shadow healed.
We have today his two hundred and sixth successor. We do not know
whether he has a shadow, or whether he is not himself but a shadow. Yet no one
speaks of a miracle concerning him, and his face awakens in no one the remotest
memory of the lost Paradise. He is the only one among the Vicars of the Son of
God who has proclaimed, urbi et orbi, the neutrality of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
He is an appearance of a pope, a little more visible, perhaps, and certainly more
frightening than the appearances of emperors, of kings or of republics pressing
forward the red gate of the Apocalypse which will open wide on the abomination
of Hell.

I am alone. And yet I have a wife and two daughters who are devoted to
me and to whom I am devoted. I have godsons and goddaughters whom the Holy
Spirit seems to have chosen. I have sure, proven friends, far more of them than
one can usually have.
But, all the same, I am the only one of my kind. I am alone in God’s
antechamber.
When my turn comes to appear before Him, where will be those I have
loved and who have loved me? Of course I know that a few, who know how to
pray, will pray for me with all their hearts, but how far away they will then be,
and how terrible will be my solitude before my Judge!
The closer one draws to God, the more one is alone. Here is the infinity of
Solitude.
At that moment, all holy Sayings, read so many times in my dark cave, will
be made manifest to me, and the Precept of hating father, mother, children,
brothers, sisters, and even one’s own soul, if one would go to Christ, will weigh
on me as heavily as a mountain of glowing granite.
Where will they be, those humble churches with their beloved walls, in
which I prayed with so much love, at times, for the living and for the dead?
Where will they be, those cherished tears that were my hope as a sinner, when I
could not go on, crushed by love and suffering? And what will have become of
my poor books, wherein I sought for the story of the merciful Trinity?
On whom, on what will I lean? Will the prayers of the well-beloved souls
whom I gave to the Church have the time or the strength to come to my succor?
Nothing assures me that the Angel charged with guarding me will not himself be
trembling with compassion, and shaking like some ill-clad poor fellow forgotten
outside a door in desperately cold weather. I shall be inexpressibly alone, and I
know in advance I shall not even have a second in which to throw myself into
the abyss of light or the abyss of darkness.
“I am forced to accuse you!” my conscience will say, and my best-loved
friends will from an infinite distance confess their powerlessness. Defend
yourself as best you can, poor wretch!
“It is true that, after God, we owe you the life of our souls,” they will say,
sobbing, “and this makes us hope that yours will be treated gently. But look …
there is between you and us the great Chaos of Death. You have become to us
unimaginable, and you share in the unimaginable Solitude. We can do naught
but wring our hearts as we pray for you. If you have not been absolutely a
disciple, if you have not sold everything and forsaken everything, we know that
you are there where a thousand years are as a day, and that one single look from
the Eyes of your Judge can have the speed of lightning or the unutterable
duration of all the centuries. For we guess at nothing, unless it be that you are
inconceivably alone and that if one of us could go to you, he would not succeed
in recognizing you. But even this we are incapable of understanding. So farewell
until the wholly unknown hour of the universal Judgment, which is another,
more impenetrable mystery.”
Adjuro te per Deum vivum (I adjure thee by the living God), said the Chief
priest in order to constrain Jesus to speak. This prodigious summons, which
disconcerted the stars, still continues, and mankind will have uttered its last
outcry when it sees itself alone, at the end of ends, in the incomprehensible
valley of Josaphat.

[The Communion of Saints.]1 What do those words mean for most

Christians, who repeat them each day as an article of their faith? The least
ignorant surely know that such is the theological designation of the Church, the
mystical Body of Christ, of which all the faithful are the visible members. That
is the elementary statement of the matter.
But how many are there of those who, going beyond this postulate, are
capable of thinking—with the Apostles—that only the devils are outside the
Church, that no human being is excluded from the Redemption, and that even
the blackest Pagans are virtually Catholics, inheritors of God and co-heirs of
Christ?
If all men without exception were not potential saints, the ninth article of
the Symbol would be meaningless. There would be no Communion of Saints.
That Communion is the concert of all the souls ever since the creation of the
world, and that concert works with such marvelous precision that one cannot
escape from it. The inconceivable exclusion of one single soul would endanger
the eternal Harmony. The word “reversibility” had to be invented to give some
idea, whatever it may be worth, of that enormous Mystery.
It has been said as a pleasantry that the celestial bodies located, as we
know from astronomic computations, at frightful distances from each other, are,
in reality, within the seraphic vision, a compact mass of immense bodies as
closely set as the grains in a block of granite. This apparent paradox is a truth if
one applies it to the infinite world of souls. And we must add that each one of
these souls knows not its neighbor, just as the luminaries of the Milky Way
know not the nearest of the stars with which they are thrown together in the
incomprehensible harmony of these colossal splendors.
But God knows his work and that’s enough. It is sufficient for us to know
that a sublime equilibrium is wished by Him, and that the importance of each of
His rational creatures escapes completely the loving conjectures of the greatest
saints. All we can dimly see, trembling and adoring, is the constant miracle of an
infallible balance between human merits and demerits, so that the spiritually
indigent are assisted by the opulent, and the timid supplemented by the rash.
Now all this goes on unbeknown to us, according to the marvelously unknown
ordering of the affinity of souls.
Such and such a movement of Grace which saves me from a grave peril
can have been determined by this or that act of love done this morning or five
hundred years ago by a man wholly unknown whose soul corresponded
mysteriously to mine, and who thus received his recompense.
As time does not exist for God, the inexplicable victory of the Marne may
have been decided by the very humble prayer of a little girl who will not be born
for another two centuries.
Inversely, it is allowable to each of us to cause catastrophes, ancient or
modern, to the extent that other souls can re-echo our own. What people call free
will is comparable to those common flowers whereof the wind carries off the
downy seeds to distances sometimes enormous, and in all directions, to sow no
one knows what mountains or what valleys. The revelation of these prodigies
will be a spectacle of a minute that will last throughout eternity.
Such thoughts have their place in our apocalyptic times. Millions of men
are cutting each other’s throats in Europe and Asia by the will of one single
imbecile. What does the conflict of these torrents of souls mean? Where do they
come from? What can be their respective kinship, and where do they go after
having left their pitiful fleshly clothes?
Oh! The prodigious and supernatural silence which of a sudden replaces
the monstrous din of battle! Infinite silence, whether in darkness or in light we
know not. But then doubtless there are ineffable meetings and surprises.
Inaudible voices, faces of souls recognize each other forever through the
diaphanous partitions between races and the translucid walls of the centuries….
“Here is your identity!” the Judge will say, addressing Himself to the
conscience of each. And that is truly all it is given us to conceive concerning that
dread instant.

In every soul—I write this for you, Elizabeth—there is an “abyss of

mystery.” Each person has his abyss of which he is not aware, which he cannot
know. When hidden things shall have been revealed to us, according to the
Promise, there will be unimaginable surprises. I do not know who has taught
you, my poor little one, but I know only too well what has certainly been omitted
from your education. You have been told that you have an immortal soul you
had to save, etc.… But no one told you that that soul is an abyss in which all the
worlds could be engulfed; that this soul is, in truth, the Sepulchre of Christ for
the deliverance of Whom, in the old days, multitudes gave their life.
You have also been told that Jesus died for you, for your soul, but you
were not informed that you had the right and even the duty to think yourself
alone in the world, in this sense that if you were the only daughter of Adam, the
Second divine Person would have become flesh, would have been crucified for
you, as He has been for millions of others, and thus you are inexpressibly and
particularly precious—the universe having been created for you alone, Paradise,
Purgatory and Hell having been prepared for you alone, and the Mother with the
transpierced heart suffering and entreating God for your soul alone.
You have most probably been told about the Communion of Saints, since it
is an article of faith; but you have not had it explained to you that since you
belong to Jesus Christ as an essential member of His divine Body; since, from
then on, you not merely participate, but you are identified, that is to say, you are
God yourself in that fashion, God the Redeemer, there are human creatures, in
numbers unknown, who depend on you, who need to be helped, saved by you,
Elizabeth, granddaughter without aureole of the old Cenomani who fought
Caesar. The Communion of Saints, antidote or counterpart to Babel’s
Dispersion, is the sign of so divine, so marvelous a human solidarity that it is
impossible for a human being not to be responsible for all his fellows, whenever
they may be living, whenever they may have lived or may be called to live. The
least of our actions resounds down to infinite depths, and causes to shudder all
the living and all the dead, in such a way that each one among the billions of
human beings is truly alone before God. Such is the abyss of our souls, such is
their mystery.

AWAITING THE GLORY OF GOD

[The Cross, the Figure of the Holy Spirit.] Reflect, my beloved, that the
Cross is the central point. Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis, says the Roman Church,
that is to say, the Cross stands upright and motionless while the universe goes
through its evolutions. Remember also this thing which long ago was revealed to
me, and which I alone in the world have been able to say, namely, that this Sign
of suffering and ignominy is the most expressive figure of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore Jesus, who is the Son of God, the Word made flesh, and who
represents the whole of humanity, hears this Cross which is greater than He, and
which crushes Him. Simon of Cyrene must help Him. When I think of that great
mysterious personage chosen from all eternity, from billions of creatures, one
day to help the Second divine Person hear the image of the Third, I am pierced
with an infinite respect which resembles terror.
The name Simon means Obedient, and Disobedience it is which imposed
the Cross, that is to say the Holy Spirit, on the shoulders of that other obedient
One, Jesus Christ. Take note of this, Jeanne, that this makes three, two Obedient
Ones to bear the terrible burden of the Disobedience, and that that pitiable trio is
on its way to vanquish death. What an abyss!

[De Profundis.] From the bottom of the abyss, Jesus cries out to His
Father, and that cry awakens, in the nethermost entrails of abysses—infinitely
below anything that can he conceived by angels, lower than all the presentiments
and all the mysteries of death—the stifled, the faraway, the pale groaning of the
Paraclete’s Dove, which echoes the terrible De profundis.
And all the bleatings of the Lamb resound thus in the frightful ditch,
without it being possible to imagine a single plaint emitted by the Son of Man
which does not resound identically in the impossible places of exile where squats
the Consoler.

[Justice and Glory.] And now, from the depth of my memory’s caverns,
there comes back to me a sublime apologue2 by Ernest Hello on Glory and
Justice—the appellations in counterpart of those two eternal antagonists.
That parable which was perhaps never written, and which the author very
likely would not have dared publish, I present gladly, approximately such as the
author himself told it to me, a few years before his death.
The Judge appears at His hour, which no one knows. As He approaches,
the dead are resurrected, mountains tremble, oceans grow dry, rivers fly away,
metals grow liquid, plants and animals disappear; the stars that have hastened
from the depths of the heavens climb one on top of the other to watch the
Separation of the good from the wicked. Human terror is beyond what can be
imagined.
“I was hungry and you did not give Me to eat; I was thirsty and you did not
give Me to drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in; I was naked and
you did not clothe Me; I was sick and in chains and you did not visit Me….”3
That’s the whole Judgment—appallingly infallible, appallingly beyond
appeal.

At last, a man presents himself, a horrible being, black with blasphemy and
iniquities.
He is the only one who is not frightened.
He it was, and no one else, who was cursed with the curses of heaven,
cursed with the maledictions of earth, cursed with the maledictions of the abyss
below. For him it was that malediction descended to the globe’s center to set fire
to the anger which was to sleep until the day of the great Assizes.
He it was who was cursed by the cries of the Poor Man, more terrible than
the roars of volcanoes, and the ravens that live near torrents have told the little
stones carried along river beds that he was truly cursed by every breath of air
wafted through the fields in bloom.
He was cursed by the white foam of the waves aroused in the storm, by the
serene blue sky, by Tenderness and by Splendor, and, finally, cursed by the
smoke which rises from thatched cottages at very humble people’s hour for
meals.
And since all this was still nothing, he was cursed in his infamous heart,
cursed by the one who is in need, who is eternally in need—and whom he never
succored.
Perhaps he is called Judas, but the Seraphim who are the greatest among
Angels could not pronounce his name.
He seems to be walking in a column of bronze.
Nothing would save him. Neither the supplications of Mary, nor the
crossed arms of all the martyrs nor the stretched-out wings of the Cherubim, or
the Thrones…. He therefore is damned, and with what a damnation!
“I appeal!” he says.
He appeals!… At this extraordinary assertion, stars are extinguished,
mountains sink below the seas, the very Face of the Judge becomes clouded.
Universes are lit up by the Cross of Fire alone.
“To whom do you appeal against my Judgment?” Our Lord Jesus Christ
asks this damned one.
And then, in the infinite silence, the Cursed one utters his answer:
“I appeal from your JUSTICE to your GLORY!”

[Israel and the Holy Spirit.] Silence!

A Voice from Below.
A voice of exile—extremely far-away, exhausted, almost dead—which
seems to grow louder as it rises from the depths.
The First Person is He who speaks.
The Second Person is He to whom one speaks.
The Third Person is He of whom one speaks.
This Third Person is I, Israel, prevailing over God; the son of Isaac, the son
of Abraham, the generator and blesser of the twelve Lion cubs who were set up
on the steps of the ivory Throne, for the Glory of the Great King and the
perpetual umbrage of the nations.
I am the One who is absent everywhere, the Stranger in all habitable
places, the Squanderer of Substance, and my tents are pitched on hills so sad that
even the reptiles which live among the tombs have enacted laws in order to blot
out the paths in my wilderness.
No veil can be compared with my Veil, and no man knows me, because no
one save the Son of Mary has been able to guess the infinitely equivocal riddle
of my damnation.
At the very age when I seemed hale and full of glory, in those ancient
times full of prodigies that preceded Golgotha, my own children did not always
know me, and often they refused to receive me, for my yoke is without
sweetness, and my burden very heavy.
I am so accustomed to bear the frightening Repentance of Jehovah, “it
repenting him that he made men and beasts,”4 and one can see so clearly that I
bear it in the same way as Christ bore the sins of the world!
That is why I have been made dusty by a very great number of centuries.
I shall nonetheless speak with the indelible authority of a Patriarch, of a
Patriarch who has been invested a hundred times with the elocution of the
Almighty.
I do not greatly love my children of Juda and Benjamin for having
crucified the Son of God. One can see they are the posterity of their two
ancestors, engendered by myself, whom I once long ago compared to two wild
beasts.
But they have suffered their punishment, and I have not refused to be the
husband and the titulary of their excessive damnation.
Remembering I had perfidiously defrauded my brother Esau, it was only
just that down to my last descendants I become an accomplice to a perfidy which
prepared the Salvation of the human race by depriving me of domination over all
empires.
It is true that these wretched children knew not that they were thus
bringing about the translation of the images and the prophecies, and that, by
their nameless and immeasurable crime, there was being inaugurated the bloody
Reign of the Second Person of their God, coming after the First, who had drawn
them out of dismal Egypt. From now on the Third Person must necessarily
come, whose imprint is on my Face, through whom all veils will be torn in the
temples of men, and all flocks confounded in luminous Unity.
At the same time, these things will not happen before people shall have
seen “the abomination of desolation in the Holy Place,” that is to say, before all
Christians, who so constantly reprove my unfaithful progeny, shall have
consummated in their turn, with even greater zest, the atrocities of which they
accuse it.
Listen, O Christians, to the words of Israel, the confidant of the Spirit of
God.
He who is knows nothing other than to repeat Himself, and the Lord of
Lords is always thirsty for suffering….
When the Promised One, called the Consoler, will come to take possession
of his heritage, Christ will necessarily have left you, since He declared that the
Paraclete could not come unless He himself first had gone away.
For He will seem to be abandoning you one day, as His Father had
abandoned Jerusalem and abandoned Him Himself, and you shall be handed
over as rigorously as were the Jews to “the everlasting reproach and the
perpetual shame which shall never be forgotten….”5
That Redeemer who is incapable of awakening you will thus be taken from
among you at a stone’s throw’s distance and your souls will be deserted by Him,
as are the tabernacles of His altars on the humiliated day of the deplorable
Friday.
In this abandonment of Him who is your strength and your hope, all the
universe steaming with fright will contemplate the unrevealable Torment of the
Holy Spirit persecuted by the members of Jesus Christ.
The Passion will start over again, no longer in the midst of a wild and
detested people, but at the crossroads and at the navel of all peoples, and the
wise will learn that God has not shut off His fountains, but that the Gospel of
Blood, which they believed to be the end of revelations, was, in its turn, like an
Old Testament entrusted with foretelling the Consoler of Fire.
This amazing Visitor, whom I have awaited for four thousand years, will
have no friends, and His wretchedness will make beggars look like emperors.
He shall be the very manure heap on which the destitute Edomite scratched
his sores. People will bend down over him to see the lowest term of Suffering
and Abjection.
At His approach the sun will turn into darkness and the moon into blood;
the proud rivers will turn backward, fleeing like runaway horses; the walls of
palaces and the walls of prisons will sweat with anguish.
Putrefied carrion will cover themselves with powerful perfumes bought
from bold seafarers, so as to preserve themselves from His pestilence; and, in the
hope of escaping Him, the poisoners of the poor and the murderers of children
will tell the mountains to fall upon them.
Having exterminated pity, disgust will kill even anger, and that Outcast of
outcasts will silently be condemned by judges the mildness of whose manners is
beyond reproach….
It will then be quite simple for Him to come down, that Crucified One,
since the Cross of His opprobrium is precisely the image and the infinite likeness
of the vagabond Liberator whom He called for nineteen centuries. And
undoubtedly also, people will understand that I am myself that Cross, from my
head to my feet!
For the salvation of the world is nailed upon me, ISRAEL, and from me it
is that He must “come down.”6

1. See above, p. 55–56, a paragraph quoted from Le Désespéré, relating to the

Communion of Saints. (R. M.)
2. Leon Bloy here used the word apologue intentionally. He knew well that hell is
without hope, and that it is absolutely impossible for someone damned, having
forever of his own accord rejected charity, to call on God’s love, or on His Glory.
But he expressed himself by means of a fable or myth to force the imagination to
“feel” in some way or other that incomprehensible “conflict” between Love and
Justice, within God Himself, which obsessed his heart like a mystery beyond all
intelligible expression, even analogical and deficient. (R. M.)
“We must surely reject the staging of the apologue given in Le Salut par les Juifs,
and begin by saying that, were some call on Mercy as against Justice possible, it
could not originate, as Hello and Bloy imagine, from the camp of the damned, nor
take the form of a summons addressed by the creature to the Creator. It could come
only from the camp of the elect, it would come from God Himself who would
suggest to His Elect that they entreat Him in favor of the damned, and it would
express some uninvestigatable depth of the mystery of intercession….
“Even if, in the hearts of the damned, hatred of God were one day abolished, not, of
course, through the infusion of theological charity, which would entail an essential
ordering toward the beatific vision, but through a miracle of forgiveness which
would allow their natural love of God, kept back and oppressed in the depths of
their being, suddenly to spout out; even then one would have to say that there
would persist for the damned the privation of the beatific vision and love, with the
endless humiliation and regret of having, by misusing the fugitive life of time, lost
the eternal promises of the highest life; and it would not be exaggerated to call that
privation and regret an eternal torment. In such a way, after a period of unspeakable
expiation, a miraculous mitigation of sorrows could be granted them, without hell
or damnation being abolished. It would be a passing from a hell of hatred to a hell
of exile. It would be the final victory of love….
“Yet who does not see how much these considerations—even if one supposes them
to be free of all paralogism—remain frail?…” (Charles Journet, Destinies d’Israel
 (Fribourg-Paris: Egloff, 1945), pp. 421, 422–25.)
3. Matthew 25:31–46.
4. Genesis 6, 7.
5. Jeremias 23:40.
6. “Later he explained to us many things in the magnificent but obscure text which I
have just quoted. It involves neither the manifestation of a new Gospel nor the
coming of the Holy Spirit under a visible and personal form, as has sometimes been
very falsely said.
“We understood that Léon Bloy was thinking of an invisible Passion, within the
Church and within men’s hearts, suffered by the Consoler whom we unceasingly
afflict, and more and more cruelly—by the Holy Spirit Who laments in us ‘with
groanings that cannot be uttered’ (Romans 8:26).
“But it is only today, confronted with the unspeakable Passion, that of Love,
afflicted in the hearts of men and among nations, and in the light of present events
that we can really take stock of the prodigiously exact vision Léon Bloy had of the
misery of his time and of our own….
“The Passion of the Holy Spirit, foretold by Léon Bloy, has already begun in the
hearts of the poor and the oppressed, and of all those who suffer persecution,
without any inspired voice calling for justice.
“If our world continues its descent into Hell, when men will have exterminated
pity, ‘disgust will kill even anger,’ and the Holy Spirit, that ‘Outcast of Outcasts,’
will be silently condemned by judges the mildness of whose manner is beyond
reproach.
“The Passion of Israel will be the reflected image of this agony of Love. And in this
unspeakable community of suffering, Israel will recognize Him of Whom it is the
symbol. It will be its ‘resurrection from among the dead’ affirmed by Saint Paul
and predicted by Ezekiel, from whom Léon Bloy quotes, as his own ending.”
(Raïssa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together. New York. Longmans, Green.)
 Random Thoughts

Providence is a gold mine of tears.

“My child, what do you know of God?” a priest asked a little girl at
catechism.
“I don’t know, Father, I have always seen Him suffering.”

Jesus shifts His Cross from His shoulders to ours, and from ours to His, so
that we are forever weeping either from pain or from compassion.

I remember having seen very clearly in my sleep what it is to help one’s

neighbor. I felt in a most intimate way—-and it grieves me not to be able to
express it—that there is only one sort of help. It is the absolute gift of self, as
Jesus practiced it. One must have oneself buffeted, spat upon, scourged,
crucified. The common expression: to cast oneself into someone’s arms, makes
this singularly clear. Everything else is vanity.

There are days when one would think God was burning with fury against
those who love Him. Our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).

I move along, ahead of my thoughts in exile, in a great pillar of Silence.

Marchenoir was, more than anyone else, a conquest of Love, and his heart
had been the evangelist of his reason.

Sentimentality is to have compassion for the executioners of Jesus Christ.

Poor people, so badly paid for so much wearisome toil!

Not one letter, not one friend, not one penny.

 The exercise of freedom consists in stripping oneself of one’s own will.

The only Education, the only Politics is that which concerns Souls, because
in dealing with the problem of Man, one must not oust man.

Human personality and individuality written and signed by God on each

human countenance—in so extraordinary a way, sometimes, on the face of a
great man—is something altogether sacred, something for the Resurrection, for
eternal Life, for the beatific Union. Every human face is a very special door to
Paradise, which cannot possibly be confused with any other, and through which
there will never enter but one soul.

Why does the bloody persecution not yet burst forth? Because the Devil
cannot make up his mind. He knows that out of ten or twenty thousand apostates
of whom he is sure, there will be one martyr, and this frightens him.

The threats of La Salette were conditional. There is reason to believe that

they are so no longer. The Apostles of Mary, who ought to have been instituted
before the Flood of blood and of fire, will be instituted afterwards, that’s all.

How could I endure dealing even with Catholics—with the Catholics of

today who think it possible to join the corpse of the past with the carrion of our
present and who dream of I know not what restoration of the ancient royal
structure in which a watchdog’s kennel would be offered to Our Lord Jesus
Christ?…

Consider the unutterable affliction, the unprecedented emptiness of the

mighty who have willed this devilish war, and compare their fate to come with
that of their innumerable victims.

You are always on the right side when you are with those who suffer
persecution and injustice.

The seniority and superiority of France, even in her worst days … She
never falls lower than a certain point, and there always comes forth from her a
divine Hand. France is incurable only of God; the most diabolical experiences
have proved this.

All the solvent Master of Eternity needs is time—and time is made of

men’s desolation.

History is the unfolding of a web of eternity under temporal and transitory

eyes.

Here is my secret for writing books which may please you: It is to cherish
with all my soul—to the point of laying down my life—such souls as yours,
known or unknown, destined some day to read me.

When one asks God for suffering, one is always sure one’s prayer will be
granted.

We know that there is no suffering without God being close at hand.

To suffer passes muster, to have suffered does not.

I have meditated often and much upon-suffering. I have come to the

conclusion that only suffering, here below, is supernatural. The rest is human….

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters
suffering in order that they may have existence.

If I did not feel my utter wretchedness, how could I feel my joy, which is
the eldest daughter of my wretchedness, and which bears a fearsome
resemblance to her?

When I look within myself I find no more calm there than in my days of
hatred and revolt. My torment is in a straight line, that’s all! With the light of
Faith I have won knowledge of why I suffer. I have learned to know myself, I
have been better able to see the anguish of my soul, but thereby have I likewise
won dread, and that is a terrible reward.

A heart without affliction is like a world without revelation: it sees God

only in the faint glow of twilight. Our hearts are filled with angels when they are
full of afflictions.

Suffering is the helper of creation.

Since we are taught that we were created in the image of God, is it so

difficult simply to presume that there must be in the impenetrable Essence
something that corresponds to us, without sin, and that the grieving panorama of
human troubles is but a shadowy reflection of the unutterable flamings of the
Light?

Would it not be enough to gather in a bundle, in a sheaf, all the

wretchedness, all the afflictions of the poor, and all their sufferings? You would
have the History of God.

The Fall is not a fact accomplished a long time ago, whereof we bear the
consequences. We are ever falling, and that is why Eve weeps. Her tears
accompany us into the abyss.

Nothing is true save what is Absolute.

The Words of the Holy Book nourish the soul, and even the intellect, in the
way the Eucharist does, without it being necessary to understand them.

The divine Word is infinite, absolute, irrevocable in every way, above all
and vastly repetitive, for God can talk only about Himself.

It is the darkness of the spiritual Calvary which pours over our souls the
tender light of our wonderful Savior.

When one speaks lovingly of God, all human words are like lions become
blind, seeking to find a watering place in the Desert.

The only profitable way to read the Psalms or the Book of Job, for
instance, is to put oneself in the place of Him who is speaking, since He who
speaks is always necessarily the Christ of whom we are the members.

The appalling vastness of the abysses of the sky is an illusion, an external

reflection of our own abysses, seen “in a mirror.” What we must do is turn our
eyes inward, and practice a sublime astronomy within the infinity of our hearts,
for which God willed to die.

The visible is the spoor of the Invisible.

We ask God for what pleases us and He gives us what we need.

 It is always a good thing to see death, and I am happy this thought has
filled you with the presence of God. Christians should constantly be leaning over
the abyss.

Sanctity is a sure return to the primal Integrity which preceded the Fall, but
with the colossal supplementary Beauty which Suffering added to it.

Over and above everything else, Jesus is the Forsaken One. Those who
love Him must be forsaken ones, but forsaken even as He was, forsaken Gods!
That is the torment which has no name.

Lord, I weep very often. Is it from sadness at thinking of what I suffer? Is it

from joy at remembering You?

I die for need of Justice.

 Sources

S ources for The Pilgrim of the Absolute are from the following titles
authored by Léon Bloy:

Au Seuil de l’Apocalypse
Belluaires et Porchers
Celle qui Pleure
Christophe Colomb devant les Taureaux
Dans les Ténèbres
Exégèse des Lieux Communs, I
Exégèse des Lieux Communs, II
Jeanne d’Arc et l’Allemagne
L’ame de Napoléon
L’Invendable
La Femme Pauvre
La Porte des Humbles
La Vie de Mélanie
Le Désepéré
Le Mendiant Ingrat
Le Pèlerin de l’Absolu
Le Salut par les Juifs
Le Sang de Pauvre
Le Vieux de la Montagne
Léon Bloy devant les Cochons
Lettres à sa Fiancée
Méditations d’un Solitaire
Mon Journal, I
Mon Journal, II
Un Brelan d’Excommuniés
Quatre Ans de Captivité