tails and claws affected a satanic form.

After certain pieces of Baudelaire that, in imitation of the clamorous
songs of nocturnal revels, celebrated infernal litanies, this volume
alone of all the works of contemporary apostolic literature testified
to this state of mind, at once impious and devout, toward which
Catholicism often thrust Des Esseintes.

With Barbey d'Aurevilly ended the line of religious writers; and in
truth, that pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secular
literature than to the other with which he demanded a place that was
denied him. His language was the language of disheveled romanticism,
full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delighted
with extravagant comparisons and with whip strokes and phrases which
exploded, like the clangor of noisy bells, along the text. In short,
d'Aurevilly was like a stallion among the geldings of the
ultramontaine stables.

Des Esseintes reflected in this wise while re-reading, here and there,
several passages of the book and, comparing its nervous and changing
style with the fixed manner of other Church writers, he thought of the
evolution of language which Darwin has so truly revealed.

Compelled to live in a secular atmosphere, raised in the heart of the
romantic school, constantly being in the current of modern literature
and accustomed to reading contemporary publications, Barbey
d'Aurevilly had acquired a dialect which although it had sustained
numerous and profound changes since the Great Age, had nevertheless
renewed itself in his works.

The ecclesiastical writers, on the contrary, confined within specific
limitations, restricted to ancient Church literature, knowing nothing
of the literary progress of the centuries and determined if need be to
blind their eyes the more surely not to see, necessarily were
constrained to the use of an inflexible language, like that of the
eighteenth century which descendants of the French who settled in
Canada still speak and write today, without change of phrasing or
words, having succeeded in preserving their original idiom by
isolation in certain metropolitan centres, despite the fact that they
are enveloped upon every side by English-speaking peoples.

Meanwhile the silvery sound of a clock that tolled the angelus
announced breakfast time to Des Esseintes. He abandoned his books,
pressed his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that,
among all the volumes he had just a