the constant
immutability of its ideas and language. Just as the Church perpetuated
the primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics of
her dogmas, piously retaining, as the frame that encloses them, the
oratorical language of the celebrated century. As one of the Church's
own writers, Ozanam, has put it, the Christian style needed only to
make use of the dialect employed by Bourdaloue and by Bossuet to the
exclusion of all else.

In spite of this statement, the Church, more indulgent, closed its
eyes to certain expressions, certain turns of style borrowed from the
secular language of the same century, and the Catholic idiom had
slightly purified itself of its heavy and massive phrases, especially
cleaning itself, in Bossuet, of its prolixity and the painful rallying
of its pronouns; but here ended the concessions, and others would
doubtless have been purposeless for the prose sufficed without this
ballast for the limited range of subjects to which the Church confined
itself.

Incapable of grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the most
simple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualified
to explain the complicated wiles of intellects indifferent to the
benefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent when
it treated of abstract subjects. It proved valuable in the argument of
controversy, in the demonstration of a theory, in the obscurity of a
commentary and, more than any other style, had the necessary authority
to affirm, without any discussion, the intent of a doctrine.

Unfortunately, here as everywhere, the sanctuary had been invaded by a
numerous army of pedants who smirched by their ignorance and lack of
talent the Church's noble and austere attire. Further to profane it,
devout women had interfered, and stupid sacristans and foolish
_salons_ had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of such
women.

Among such works, Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those of
Madame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous
of the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him with
insufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched:
they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny
chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news
of one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeply
mysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts and
the sta