En Route. J.-K. Huysmans
ceremonies and music of Holy Week.
He had visited the churches during that week; and they had opened to him like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.
And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church, became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.
At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebræ by the slow chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at nightfall.
The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate before the Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.
By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own, sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ Himself.
Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.
Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.
Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner of the poorer part of Paris.
He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were thoroughly at home.
Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.
There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.
He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten o'clock.
He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base, hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like celery.
No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered, the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags like handfuls of russet lace.
And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one, strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof the broken stems fell from above the arches.
The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their surface.
This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton trees, a conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up the memory of an impossible phœnix and unlikely palms; but it also recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a ship's prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars, to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.
On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers, street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe, who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.
Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir, and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion, above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ.
At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order, more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.
At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself: "It is impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as to be superhuman, and far from profane music, which has never attained to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."
The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The "Kyrie eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus," concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become loud.
Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced there as in other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds from the deep.
It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful surroundings of the Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose