Là-Bas quotes

“Say what you will, their theory is pitiful, and their tight little method squeezes all the life out of them. Filth and the flesh are their all in all. They deny wonder and reject the extra-sensual.

I don’t believe they would know what you meant if you told them that artistic curiosity begins at the very point where the senses leave off.

“You shrug your shoulders, but tell me, how much has naturalism done to clear up life’s really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of the soul—or indeed the most benign little pimple—is to be probed, naturalism can do nothing.

When an ulcer of the soul—or indeed the most benign little pimple—is to be probed, naturalism can do nothing. ‘Appetite and instinct’ seem to be its sole motivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of naturalism is the region below the umbilicus.

Oh, it’s a hernia clinic and it offers the soul a truss!

“I tell you, Durtal, it’s superficial quackery, and that isn’t all. This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register.

“I tell you, Durtal, it’s superficial quackery, and that isn’t all. This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our positively American ways.

It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register.

With amazing humility it defers to the nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every ideal, every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond.

It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to the nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every ideal, every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond.

It is so perfectly representative of bourgeois thought that it might be sired by Homais and dammed by Lisa, the butcher girl in Ventre de Paris.

”

The rules were precise and invariable.

Money attracted money, accumulating always in the same places, going by preference to the scoundrelly and the mediocre.

When, by an inscrutable exception, it heaped up in the coffers of a rich man who was not a miser nor a murderer, it stood idle, incapable of resolving itself into a force for good, however charitable the hands which fain would administer it.

Then its action was not limited to individual incitation to theft and murder but extended to the entire human race. With one word capital decided monopolies, erected banks, cornered necessities, and, if it wished, caused thousands of human beings to starve to death.

And it grew and begot itself while slumbering in a safe, and the Two Worlds adored it on bended knee, dying of desire before it as before a God.

Well! money was the devil, otherwise its mastery of souls was inexplicable. And how many other mysteries, equally unintelligible, how many other phenomena were there to make a reflective man shudder!

And it grew and begot itself while slumbering in a safe, and the Two Worlds adored it on bended knee, dying of desire before it as before a God.

Well! money was the devil, otherwise its mastery of souls was inexplicable.

And how many other mysteries, equally unintelligible, how many other phenomena were there to make a reflective man shudder!

For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most infantile of deceptions.

Old Clio ought to be represented with a sphinx’s head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets which babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out when they took a tumble.

Of course exactitude was impossible. Why should he dream of getting at the whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able to give a full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that matter?

And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers.

The depilators! taking all the hair off a real man’s chest.

They wrote ponderous tomes to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villon and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but an inn sign.

“Bah,” said Des Hermies, “dust isn’t a bad thing. Besides having the taste of ancient biscuit and the smell of an old book, it is the floating velvet which softens hard surfaces, the fine dry wash which takes the garishness out of crude colour schemes.

It is the caparison of abandon, the veil of oblivion.

Who, then, can despise it—aside from certain persons whose lamentable lot must often have wrung a tear from you?

In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy fat bellies.

Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.

“But this is where we stop.”

He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d’Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step.

In the Beyond all things touch.

He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges.”

“In spite of your killjoy character and your single track mind you testy, old bachelor, you are a very nice cat,” said Durtal, in an insinuating, wheedling tone. “Then too, for many years now, I have told you what one tells no man.

You are the drain pipe of my soul, you inattentive and indulgent confessor.

Never shocked, you vaguely approve the mental misdeeds which I confess to you. You let me relieve myself and you don’t charge me anything for the service. Frankly, that is what you are here for.

“Of course I am a fool to answer her. Who knows what situations a thing like this is going to lead to?

I am well aware that whoever she be, a woman is an incubator of sorrow and annoyance.

If she is good she is probably stupid, or perhaps she is an invalid, or perhaps she is so disastrously fecund that she gets pregnant if you look at her.

Mme. Chantelouve would never realize the ideal he had fashioned for himself, the tantalizing features, the agile, wild animal body, the melancholy and ardent bearing, which he had dreamed. Indeed, the mere fact of knowing the unknown rendered her less desirable, more vulgar.

Accessibility killed the chimera.

At the same time he experienced a lively relief. He might have been dealing with a hideous old crone, and Hyacinthe, as he immediately began to call her, was desirable. Thirty-three at most, not pretty, but peculiar;

“

It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything.

At the present hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it discovered.

This century thinks it discovered the terrible science of hypnotism, which the priests and Brahmins in Egypt and India knew and practised to the utmost.

No, the only thing this century has invented is the sophistication of products.

Therein it is passed master. It has even gone so far as to adulterate excrement. Yes, in 1888 the two houses of parliament had to pass a law destined to suppress the falsification of fertilizer. Now that’s the limit.”

She became demure. “But if I did not love you, would I have come to you?

Understand, then, that reality kills a dream; that it is better for us not to expose ourselves to fearful regrets.

We are not children, you see. No! Let me go. Do not squeeze me like that!” Very pale, she struggled in his embrace.

“I know it,” Durtal said, “and that horrifies me. I know also the Hindu dogma of the migrations of souls after death. These disembodied souls stray until they are reincarnated or until they attain, from avatar to avatar, to complete purity.

Well, I think it’s quite enough to live once.

I’d prefer nothingness, a hole in the ground, to all those metamorphoses. It’s more consoling to me.

I know also the Hindu dogma of the migrations of souls after death. These disembodied souls stray until they are reincarnated or until they attain, from avatar to avatar, to complete purity. Well, I think it’s quite enough to live once.

I’d prefer nothingness, a hole in the ground, to all those metamorphoses.

It’s more consoling to me. As for the evocation of the dead, the mere thought that the butcher on the corner can force the soul of Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, to converse with him, would put me beside myself, if I believed it. Ah, no.

“

That is probably why cats suddenly look upward and gaze curiously into space at something that is passing and that we can’t see,

” said the bell-ringer’s wife.

It has democratized evocation and opened a whole new vista. Only, it has lacked initiates to lead it, and, proceeding at random without science, it has agitated good and bad spirits together. In Spiritism you will find a jumble of everything.

It is the hash of mystery, if I may be permitted the expression.

”

“

If there are spirits in this room, they must be getting knocked to pieces,

” he said, setting the liqueur glasses on the table.

But he wishes only to turn the magicians away from their detestable practises and save their souls. Then Del Rio declares that ‘the question’ must not be applied to demoniacs after they have eaten, for fear they will vomit.

He worried about their stomachs, this worthy man.

Wasn’t it also he who decreed that the torture must not be repeated twice in the same day, so as to give fear and pain a chance to calm down? Admit that the good Jesuit was not devoid of delicacy!”

For the soul enters into this, the soul in conflict with the body, the soul overthrown in the demoralization of the nerves. You see, old man, all this is as dark as a bottle of ink.

Mystery is everywhere and reason cannot see its way.

”

“

No, there is no getting around it. The little blue flower, the perennial of the soul, is difficult to extirpate, and it keeps growing up again.

It does not show itself for twenty years, and then all of a sudden, you know not why nor how, it sprouts, and then forth comes a burst of blossoms. My God! I am getting foolish.”

These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: ‘They were seen complaining dolorously,’ ‘Exceedingly they did lament.’

Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.

“At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies and malicious genii are dispersing the generation, but little by little terrible suspicions are aroused.

He could not help laughing, and he said to himself, “

Remorse is perhaps the condiment which keeps passion from being too unappetizing to the blasé.

” Then aloud he jestingly, “Speaking of confessors, if I were a casuist it seems to me I would try to invent new sins. I am not a casuist, and yet, having looked about a bit, I believe I have found a new sin.”

He undressed, casting a rapid glance at Hyacinthe’s face. It was hidden in the darkness, but was sometimes revealed by a flare of the red hot fire, as a stick, half consumed and smouldering, would suddenly burst into flame. Swiftly he slipped between the covers.

He clasped a corpse; a body so cold that it froze him, but the woman’s lips were burning as she silently gnawed his features.

He lay stupified in the grip of this body wound around his own, supple as the … and hard! He could not move; he could not speak for the shower of kisses traveling over his face.

Ah, the lesson was hard and decisive. For having one time hoped so much, what regrets, what a tumble!

Decidedly, Reality does not pardon him who despises her; she avenges herself by shattering the dream and trampling it and casting the fragments into a cesspool.

“Don’t be vexed, dear, because it is taking me so long,” said Mme. Chantelouve behind the curtain.

He put out his lamp. In the darkness his distress increased. With death in his heart he said to himself, “

Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.

“To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France—to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that’s the dream!

“

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it.

A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable.

ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable.

Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.

”

To tell the truth, everything on earth culminates in the act you reprove.

The heart, which is supposed to be the noble part of man, has the same form as the penis, which is the so-called ignoble part of man.

There’s symbolism in that similarity, because every love which is of the heart soon extends to the organ resembling it. The human imagination, the moment it tries to create artificially animated beings, involuntarily reproduces in them the movements of animals propagating.

The human imagination, the moment it tries to create artificially animated beings, involuntarily reproduces in them the movements of animals propagating. Look at the machines, the action of the piston and the cylinder;

Romeos of steel and Juliets of cast iron.

Nor do the loftier expressions of the human intellect get away from the advance and withdrawal copied by the machines. One must bow to nature’s law if one is neither impotent nor a saint.

“It’s a fact that Satanic priests are relatively rare, and the lecheries of the clergy and the knaveries of the episcopate are evidently exaggerated by an ignoble press. But that isn’t what I have against them. If only they were gamblers and libertines!

But they’re lukewarm, mediocre, lazy, imbeciles. That is their sin against the Holy Ghost, the only sin which the All Merciful does not pardon.

”

“No merit on our part,” replied Durtal, “for what else is there to talk about?

Conversations which do not treat of religion or art are so base and vain.

”

“Ah, if there were some way of getting acquainted with Canon Docre, of insinuating oneself into his confidence, perhaps one would attain clear insight into these questions.

I learned long ago that there are no people interesting to know except saints, scoundrels, and cranks.

They are the only persons whose conversation amounts to anything. Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.

I learned long ago that there are no people interesting to know except saints, scoundrels, and cranks. They are the only persons whose conversation amounts to anything.

Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.

They are the crowd, more or less intelligent, but they are the crowd, and they give me a pain. Yes, but who will put me in touch with this monstrous priest?”

I’ll have to look around for another subject, and, when I find one, do all the drudgery of planning and then getting the introductory chapter written—the mean part of any literary work is getting started. I shall pass mortal hours doing nothing.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

”

“But our impenitent pride—and also our need of the miserable sous—make it impossible for us to keep our manuscripts sheltered from the asses. Art ought to be—like one’s beloved—out of reach, out of the world.

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.

So when one of my books appears, I let go of it with horror. I get as far as possible from the environment in which it may be supposed to circulate.

“

The dilettante has no personal temperament, since he objects to nothing and likes everything.

“Whoever has no personal temperament has no talent.”

“

Whoever has no personal temperament has no talent.

”

But he went on complaining. “You two don’t understand.

My bells are used to being well treated. They’re like domestic animals, those instruments, and they obey only their master.

Now they won’t harmonize, they jangle. I can hardly recognize their voices.”

“Books about bells! Ah, Monsieur Durtal, I have some inscriptions here of truly rare beauty. Listen,” and he opened a worm-bored book, “listen to this motto printed in raised letters on the bronze robe of the great bell of Schaffhausen, ‘

I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunder.

’ And this other which figured on an old bell in the belfry of Ghent, ‘My name is Roland. When I toll, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders.’ ”

And this other which figured on an old bell in the belfry of Ghent, ‘

My name is Roland. When I toll, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders.

’ ”

Yet Servandoni and Oppenord and their ilk were the real major prophets, the Ezekiels of building. Their work is the work of seers looking beyond the eighteenth century to the day of transportation by steam.

For Saint Sulpice is not a church, it’s a railway station!

“And the interior of the edifice is not more religious nor artistic than the exterior. The only thing in it that pleases me is good Carhaix’s aerial cave.” Then he looked about him. “This square is very ugly, but how provincial and homelike it is!

“

Well, it has its advantages over divorce, that system has.

”

Recently there was brought to M. Charcot a little girl who suddenly got down on her hands and knees and ran and jumped around, scratching and spitting and arching her back. So that metamorphosis is possible.

No, one cannot too often repeat it, the truth is that we know nothing and have no right to deny anything.

But to return to your Rosicrucians. Using purely chemical formulæ, they get along without sacrilege?”

“

Because it is not very flattering to a woman to be able to entertain a man only by telling him about another one.

”

He turned toward the people and said, weeping, “Ye, the parents of those whom I have so cruelly put to death, give, ah give me, the succour of your pious prayers!”

Then in its white splendour the soul of the Middle Ages burst forth radiant.

Jean de Malestroit left his seat and raised the accused, who was beating the flagstones with his despairing forehead. The judge in de Malestroit disappeared, the priest alone remained. He embraced the sinner who was repenting and lamenting his fault.

And if one descend lower yet, into the hole-in-the-wall places of the pythonesses, clairvoyants, and mediums, what does one find except agencies of prostitution and gambling?

All these pretended peddlers of the future are extremely nasty; that’s the only thing in the occult of which one can be sure.

”

“Mad? Why?

The cult of the Demon is no more insane than that of God. One is rotten and the other resplendent, that is all.

By your reckoning all people who worship any god whatever would be demented. No. The affiliates of Satanism are mystics of a vile order, but they are mystics.

“Oh, but it’s always been that way. The tail ends of all centuries are alike. They’re always periods of vacillation and uncertainty.

When materialism is rotten-ripe magic takes root.

This phenomenon reappears every hundred years. Not to go further back, look at the decline of the last century. Alongside of the rationalists and atheists you find Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Saint-Martin, Gabalis, Cazotte, the Rosicrucian societies, the infernal circles, as now.

“Oh, but it’s always been that way.

The tail ends of all centuries are alike.

They’re always periods of vacillation and uncertainty. When materialism is rotten-ripe magic takes root. This phenomenon reappears every hundred years. Not to go further back, look at the decline of the last century.

“Hmm,” he said to himself. “

It doesn’t look as if Satan made his faithful happy.

”

Since the day when thou didst issue from the complaisant bowels of a Virgin, thou hast failed all thine engagements, belied all thy promises.

Centuries have wept, awaiting thee, fugitive God, mute God!

Thou wast to redeem man and thou hast not, thou wast to appear in thy glory, and thou sleepest. Go, lie, say to the wretch who appeals to thee, ‘Hope, be patient, suffer; the hospital of souls will receive thee; the angels will assist thee;

Strike!’ The last method is calculated to scatter the fluids to the wind and paralyze the powers of the assailant.

In magic, any act known and made public is lost.

As for the shock in return, one must also know beforehand of the attempt if one is to cast back the spells on the person sending them before one is struck by them.

Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that?

No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies.

Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”

And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies.

Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

”

“

I believe, alas, that a dotard Heaven maunders over an exhausted Earth.

”

“

Lyons is celebrated for delicatessen, silk, and churches.

At the top of every hill—and there’s a hill every block—is a chapel or a convent, and Notre Dame de Fourvière dominates them all.

“Well, the little romance is over.

It’s a good thing to have your heart on strike.

In my brain I still have a house of ill fame, which sometimes catches fire, but the hired myrmidons will stamp out the blaze in a hurry.

“

When I was young and ardent the women laughed at me. Now that I am old and stale I laugh at them.

That’s more in my character, old fellow,” he said to the cat, which, with ears pricked up, was listening to the soliloquy. “Truly, Gilles de Rais is a great deal more interesting than Mme. Chantelouve.