En Route. J.-K. Huysmans
the choir boys swung, turning at each pause to face the priest.
"Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it," said Durtal to himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.
He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarrassed by his taper, which was guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling; while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but he listened no more and deplored the length of the service.
At last the moment of Benediction approached.
Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to God, Durtal forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious crowd.
The psalm "Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes," rang out when the beadle came to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly work.
Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pass, and approaching the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which the nuns belonged.
"They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary," answered the man, "but the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche: it is only joined by a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue de l'Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do, and they keep a school for the children of the district."
"It is a touching little chapel," thought Durtal, when he was alone. "It is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la Glacière. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what its neighbour the Bièvre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship.
"How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns' voices, which seem non-sexual and mellow! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and the man.
"Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that prayer, communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.
"In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes, voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.
Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de la Glacière, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents. He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not pass through them.
At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps; on the left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain, and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.
That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by groves of candles; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke; it was crammed with people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, passing up the nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab's claw.
He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a prie-Dieu, then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn; behind the high grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to the grating a woman's form, kneeling motionless on the ground, she too holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the square of the wicket opened in the arch.
Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face, with closed lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away, as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand.
All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming; the mass was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to her place, and was kneeling before him behind the grating.
He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole congregation bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a long murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers, while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse.
"It is admirable," he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on an hair mattress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts; always to eat, standing, vegetables and abstinence fare; to have no fire in winter, to chant for hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as, however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools, for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.
"We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the Carmelites, or even