Among such works, Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous of the most fervent Catholics.  Her writings had filled him with insufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched:  they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news of one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeply mysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts and the state of the weather.

But there was even worse:  a female laureate licensed by the Institute, Madame Augustus Craven, author of Recit d’une soeur, of Eliane and Fleaurange, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press.  Never, no, never, had Des Esseintes imagined that any person could write such ridiculous nonsense.  In the point of conception, these books were so absurd, and were written in such a disgusting style, that by these tokens they became almost remarkable and rare.

It was not at all among the works of women that Des Esseintes, whose soul was completely jaded and whose nature was not inclined to sentimentality, could come upon a literary retreat suited to his taste.

Yet he strove, with a diligence that no impatience could overcome, to enjoy the works of a certain girl of genius, the blue-stocking pucelle of the group, but his efforts miscarried.  He did not take to the Journal and the Lettres in which Eugenie de Guerin celebrates, without discretion, the amazing talent of a brother who rhymed, with such cleverness and grace that one must go to the works of de Jouy and Ecouchard Lebrun to find anything so novel and daring.

He had also unavailingly attempted to comprehend the delights of those works in which one may find such things as these: 

    This morning I hung on papa’s bed a cross which a little
    girl had given him yesterday.

Or: 

    Mimi and I are invited by Monsieur Roquiers to attend the
    consecration of a bell tomorrow.  This does not displease
    me at all.

Or wherein we find such important events as these: 

    On my neck I have hung a medal of the Holy Virgin which
    Louise had brought me, as an amulet against cholera.

Or poetry of this sort: 

    O the lovely moonbeam which fell on the Bible I was reading!

And, finally, such fine and penetrating observations as these: 

    When I see a man pass before a crucifix, lift his hat and
    make the sign of the Cross, I say to myself, ’There goes a
    Christian.’

And she continued in this fashion, without pause, until after Maurice de Guerin had died, after which his sister bewailed him in other pages, written in a watery prose strewn here and there with bits of poems whose humiliating poverty ended by moving Des Esseintes to pity.