But, thought Des Esseintes, this sickly shamelessness often obstructed the inventive sallies of the casuist.  With more intolerance than even Ozanam, he resolutely denied all that pertained to his clan, proclaimed the most disconcerting axioms, maintained with a disconcerting authority that “geology is returning toward Moses,” and that natural history, like chemistry and every contemporary science, verifies the scientific truth of the Bible.  The proposition on each page was of the unique truth and the superhuman knowledge of the Church, and everywhere were interspersed more than perilous aphorisms and raging curses cast at the art of the last century.

To this strange mixture was added the love of sanctimonious delights, such as a translation of the Visions by Angele de Foligno, a book of an unparalleled fluid stupidity, with selected works of Jean Rusbrock l’Admirable, a mystic of the thirteenth century whose prose offered an incomprehensible but alluring combination of dusky exaltations, caressing effusions, and poignant transports.

The whole attitude of this presumptuous pontiff, Hello, had leaped from a preface written for this book.  He himself remarked that “extraordinary things can only be stammered,” and he stammered in good truth, declaring that “the holy gloom where Rusbrock extends his eagle wings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for such as him the far horizons would be a too narrow garment.”

However this might be, Des Esseintes felt himself intrigued toward this ill-balanced but subtile mind.  No fusion had been effected between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very jolts and incoherencies constituted the personality of the man.

With him was recruited the little group of writers who fought on the front battle line of the clerical camp.  They did not belong to the regular army, but were more properly the scouts of a religion which distrusted men of such talent as Veuillot and Hello, because they did not seem sufficiently submissive and shallow.  What the Church really desires is soldiers who do not reason, files of such blind combatants and such mediocrities as Hello describes with the rage of one who has submitted to their yoke.  Thus it was that Catholicism had lost no time in driving away one of its partisans, an enraged pamphleteer who wrote in a style at once rare and exasperated, the savage Leon Bloy; and caused to be cast from the doors of its bookshops, as it would a plague or a filthy vagrant, another writer who had made himself hoarse with celebrating its praises, Barbey d’Aurevilly.

It is true that the latter was too prone to compromise and not sufficiently docile.  Others bent their heads under rebukes and returned to the ranks; but he was the enfant terrible, and was unrecognized by the party.  In a literary way, he pursued women whom he dragged into the sanctuary.  Nay, even that vast disdain was invoked, with which Catholicism enshrouds talent to prevent excommunication from putting beyond the pale of the law a perplexing servant who, under pretext of honoring his masters, broke the window panes of the chapel, juggled with the holy pyxes and executed eccentric dances around the tabernacle.