II.
And then I set foot once more in the country which I regarded as my second fatherland, and the overflowing happiness of once more feeling French ground under my feet returned undiminished and unchanged. I had had all my letters sent to Mlle. Louise's address, so fetched them shortly after my arrival and saw the girl again. Her family invited me to dinner several times during the very first week, and I was associated with French men and women immediately upon my arrival.
They were well-brought-up, good-natured, hospitable bourgeois, very narrow in their views. Not in the sense that they took no interest in politics and literature, but in that questions for them were decided once and for all in the clerical spirit. They did not regard this as a party standpoint, did not look upon themselves as adherents of a party; their way of thinking was the right one; those who did not agree with them held opinions they ought to be ashamed of, and which they probably, in private, were ashamed of holding and expressing.
Mlle. Louise had a cousin whom she used to speak of as a warm-hearted man with peculiar opinions, eager and impetuous, who would like to make the acquaintance of her friend from the North. The aunts called him a passionate Catholic, and an energetic writer in the service of the Church Militant. Shortly after my arrival, I met him at dinner. He was a middle-aged, pale, carelessly dressed man with ugly, irregular features, and a very excitable manner. With him came his wife, who though pale and enthusiastic like himself, yet looked quite terrestrial. He introduced himself as Ernest Hello, contributor to Veuillot's then much talked of Romish paper, L'Univers, which, edited with no small talent by a noted stylist, adopted all sorts of abusive methods as weapons in every feud in which the honour of the Church was involved. It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the introduction to his excellent comedy, Le Fils de Giboyer, and he made no secret of the fact that in the Déodat mentioned in the piece he had had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything Veuillot's vassal.
He was one of the martial believers who despised and hated the best free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them. He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire's education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire's attack on the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an enthusiastic admiration for weakness in fighting against external strength, and for courage that expressed itself in sheer defiance of worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane. Denmark's taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. "It is great, it is Spartan!" he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe, esteemed and admired in France.
As an instance of the paradoxicalness to which Huysmans many years later became addicted, the latter tried to puff up Hello as being a man of remarkable intellect; and an instance of the want of independence with which the new Catholic movement was carried on in Denmark is to be found in the fact that the organ of Young Denmark, The Tower, could declare: "Hello is one of the few whom all men of the future are agreed to bow before.... Hello was,--not only a Catholic burning with religious ardour,--but a genius; these two things explain everything."
When Hello invited me to his house, I regarded it as my duty to go, that I might learn as much as possible, and although his circle was exceedingly antipathetic to me, I did not regret it; the spectacle was highly instructive.
Next to Hello himself, who, despite his fanaticism and restlessness, impressed one as very inoffensive at bottom, and not mischievous if one steered clear of such names as Voltaire or Renan, the chief member of his circle was the black doctor, (le Docteur noir,) so much talked of in the last years of the Empire, and who is even alluded to in Taine's Graindorge. His real name was Vries. He was a negro from the Dutch West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black, bald physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he spoke almost unintelligibly.
He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted--in 1859 he had been imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery--because all great men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself was the greatest man living. Moi vous dire le plus grand homme d'universe. Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never grew tired of listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the conversation: He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he understood Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science, Metereology --like Molière's doctors and Holberg's Oldfux. His greatest and most special gift was that of curing cancer. Like writing-masters, who hang out specimens of how people wrote when they came to them, and of their caligraphy after they had benefited by their instruction, he had his cancer patients photographed before and after his treatment, looking ghastly the first time, and as fresh as a flower the second, and these pictures hung on view in his house. No wonder, therefore, that Napoleon III--so Vries said--had his portrait in an album containing, besides, only portraits of European sovereigns.
He pretended that he had made many important prophecies. This was a bond between him and Hello, who claimed the same extraordinary power, and had foretold all sorts of singular events. He performed miraculous cures; this appealed to Hello, who was suspicious of all rational Science and ready to believe any mortal thing. He could read everybody's characters in their faces. This was a pretext for the most barefaced flattery of Hello, his wife, and their friends of both sexes, and of course everything was swallowed with alacrity. To me he said: "Monsieur is gentle, very calm, very indulgent, and readily forgives an injury."
Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The married women whispered languishingly: "You have a marvellous power over women." The husbands looked on smilingly.
Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches' Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had dictated Voltaire's works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right. Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise to the Madonna.
I had then read two of Hello's books, Le Style and M. Renan, L'Allemagne et l'Athéisme au 19me Siècle. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.
It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.