En Route

by J.-K. Huysmans

He strolled by chance into an alley, when a new phenomenon arose.

He had had, up to this hour, in the sky within him, a rain of scruples, a tempest of doubts, a thunderstroke of lust; now was silence and death.

Complete darkness was within him.

He sought his soul by groping for it, and found it inert, without consciousness, almost icy. He had a body living and healthy; all his intelligence, all his reason, and his other powers, his other faculties, were benumbed little by little, and stopped. In his being there was manifested an effect at once analogous and contrary to that which curara produces on the organism, when it circulates in the network of the blood; the members are paralyzed, no pain is experienced, but cold rises, the soul ends by being sequestered alive in a corpse; in this case it was the living body that detained a dead soul.

Harassed by fear, he disengaged himself with a supreme effort, he would make a visit to himself, see where he was, and like a sailor who descends into the hold in a ship that has sprung a leak, he had to step backwards, for the gangway was cut, the steps opened upon an abyss.

In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung fascinated over the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances; in a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons that approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders; the place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but besides the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded.

He saw himself exhausted; he knew that he had no further force to extirpate the last roots, and he fancied that he had again to sow the seed of virtues, to till this arid soil, manure this dead ground. He felt himself incapable of all work, and had at the same time the conviction that God rejected him, that God would aid him no more. This certainty tore him to pieces. It could not be expressed, for nothing could translate the anxiety, the anguish of a state through which he must have passed who could understand it. The terror of a child who has never left its mother's petticoats, and who is deserted, without warning, in the open country in a fog, could only give a vestige of an idea of it, and again by reason of his age the child after having felt desolate would end by growing calmer, by distracting himself from his grief, no longer seeing the danger which surrounds him, while in this state is danger, clinging and absolute, the immovable thought of abandonment, obstinate fear, which nothing diminishes, nothing appeases.

One dare not advance nor retreat; rather cast oneself on the ground, with bowed head, and wait the end of what we know not, and be assured that the menaces we ignore, and those at which we guess, are removed. Durtal was at this point; he could not return on his steps, for the way he had quitted horrified him. He would rather have died than return to Paris, there to begin again his carnal experiences, to live again his hours of libertinage and lassitude; but if he could not again retrace his road, neither could he advance, for the road ended in a blind alley. If earth repulsed him, heaven at the same time was closed for him.

He was lying, half on his side, in the darkness, in the shade, he knew not where.

And this state was aggravated by an absolute failure to understand the causes which brought him there, was exaggerated by the memory of graces before received.