Joris-Karl Huysmans: Down There (Là-Bas)

"All right. Believe."

"I can't. There are so many discouraging and revolting dogmas in Christianity-"

"I am uncertain about a good many things, myself," said Des Hermies, "and yet there are moments when I feel that the obstacles are giving way, that I almost believe. Of one thing I am sure. The supernatural does exist, Christian or not. To deny it is to deny evidence-and who wants to be a materialist, one of these silly freethinkers?"

"It is mighty tiresome to be vacillating forever. How I envy Carhaix his robust faith!"

"You don't want much!" said Des Hermies. "Faith is the breakwater of the soul, affording the only haven in which dismasted man can glide along in peace."

"You like that?" asked Mme. Carhaix. "For a change I served the broth yesterday and kept the beef for tonight. So we'll have vermicelli soup, a salad of cold meat with pickled herring and celery, some nice mashed potatoes au gratin , and a dessert. And then you shall taste the new cider we just got."

"Oh!" and "Ah!" exclaimed Des Hermies and Durtal, who, while waiting for dinner, were sipping the elixir of life. "Do you know, Mme. Carhaix, your cooking tempts us to the sin of gluttony-If you keep on you will make perfect pigs of us."

"Oh, you are joking. I wonder what is keeping Louis."

"Somebody is coming upstairs," said Durtal, hearing the creaking of shoes in the tower.

"No, it isn't his step," and she went and opened the door. "It's Monsieur Gévingey."

And indeed, clad in his blue cape, with his soft black hat on his head, the astrologer entered, made a bow, like an actor taking a curtain call, nibbed his great knuckles against his massive rings, and asked where the bell-ringer was.

"He is at the carpenter's. The oak beams holding up the big bell are cracked and Louis is afraid they will break down."

"Any news of the election?" and Gévingey took out his pipe and filled it.

"No. In this quarter we shan't know the results until nearly ten o'clock. There's no doubt about the outcome, though, because Paris is strong for this democratic stuff. General Boulanger will win hands down."

"This certainly is the age of universal imbecility."

Carhaix entered and apologized for being so late. While his wife brought in the soup he took off his goloshes and said, in answer to his friends' questions, "Yes; the dampness had rusted the frets and warped the beams. It was time for the carpenter to intervene. He finally promised that he would be here tomorrow and bring his men without fail. Well, I am mighty glad to get back. In the streets everything whirls in front of my eyes. I am dizzy. I don't know what to do. The only places where I am at home are the belfry and this room. Here, wife, let me do that," and he pushed her aside and began to stir the salad.

"How good it smells!" said Durtal, drinking in the incisive tang of the herring. "Do you know what this perfume suggests? A basket funnelled fireplace, twigs of juniper snapping in it, in a ground-floor room opening on to a great harbour. It seems to me there is a sort of salt water halo around these little rings of gold and rusted iron.-Exquisite," he said as he tasted the salad.

"We'll make it again for you, Monsieur Durtal," said Mme. Carhaix, "you are not hard to please."

"Alas!" said her husband, "his palate isn't, but his soul is. When I think of his despairing aphorisms of the other night! However, we are praying God to enlighten him. I'll tell you," he said to his wife, "we will invoke Saint Nolasque and Saint Theodulus, who are always represented with bells. They sort of belong to the family, and they will certainly be glad to intercede for people who revere them and their emblems."

"It would take a stunning miracle to convince Durtal," said Des Hermies.

"Bells have been known to perform them," said the astrologer. "I remember to have read, though I forget where, that angels tolled the knell when Saint Isidro of Madrid was dying."

"And there are many other cases," said Carhaix. "Of their own accord the bells chimed when Saint Sigisbert chanted the De Profundis over the corpse of the martyr Placidus, and when the body of Saint Ennemond, Bishop of Lyons, was thrown by his murderers into a boat without oars or sails, the bells rang out, though nobody set them in motion, as the boat passed down the Saône."

"Do you know what I think?" asked Des Hermies, looking at Carhaix. "I think you ought to prepare a compendium of hagiography or a really informative work on heraldry."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, you are, thank God, remote from this epoch and fond of things which it knows nothing about or execrates, and a work of that kind would take you still further away. My good friend, you are the man forever unintelligible to the coming generations. To ring bells because you love them, to give yourself over to the abandoned study of feudal art or monasticism would make you complete-take you clear out of Paris, out of the world, back into the Middle Ages."

"Alas," said Carhaix, "I am only a poor ignorant man. But the type you speak of does exist. In Switzerland, I believe, a bell-ringer has for years been collecting material for a heraldic memorial. I should think," he continued, laughing, "that his avocation would interfere with his vocation."

"And do you think," said Gévingey bitterly, "that the profession of astrologer is less decried, less neglected?"

"How do you like our cider?" asked the bell-ringer's wife. "Do you find it a bit raw?"

"No, it's tart if you sip it, but sweet if you take a good mouthful," answered Durtal.

"Wife, serve the potatoes. Don't wait for me. I delayed so long getting my business done that it's time for the angelus. Don't bother about me. Go on eating. I shall catch up with you when I get back."

And as her husband lighted his lantern and left the room the woman brought in on a plate what looked to be a cake covered with golden brown caramel icing.

"Mashed potatoes, I thought you said!"

" Au gratin . Browned in the oven. Taste it. I put in everything that ought to make it very good."

All exclaimed over it.

Then it became impossible to hear oneself. Tonight the bell boomed out with unusual clarity and power. Durtal tried to analyze the sound which seemed to rock the room. There was a sort of flux and reflux of sound. First, the formidable shock of the clapper against the vase, then a sort of crushing and scattering of the sounds as if ground fine with the pestle, then a rounding of the reverberation; then the recoil of the clapper, adding, in the bronze mortar, other sonorous vibrations which it ground up and cast out and dispersed through the sounding shutters.

Then the bell strokes came further apart. Now there was only the whirring as of a spinning wheel; a few crumbs were slow about falling. And now Carhaix returned.

"It's a two-sided age," said Gévingey, pensive. "People believe nothing, yet gobble everything. Every day a new science is invented. Nobody reads that admirable Paracelsus who rediscovered all that had ever been found and created everything that had not. Say now to your congress of scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of the divine sphere. Tell them-and this, experience attests-that every man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and varices, hemorrhoids and leprosies; that it is, alas! the great purveyor to hospital and prison-and the scientists will shrug their shoulders and laugh at you. The glorified pedants and homiletic asses!"