the Maristes Brothers,
biphosphate of medicinal lime and arquebuse water; the jacobins, an
anti-apoplectic elixir; the disciples of Saint Benoit, benedictine;
the friars of Saint Bruno, chartreuse.

Business had invaded the cloisters where, in place of antiphonaries,
heavy ledgers reposed on reading-desks. Like leprosy, the avidity of
the age was ravaging the Church, weighing down the monks with
inventories and invoices.

And yet, in spite of everything, it was only among the ecclesiastics
that Des Esseintes could hope for pleasurable contract. In the society
of well-bred and learned canons, he would have been compelled to share
their faith, to refrain from floating between sceptical ideas and
transports of conviction which rose from time to time on the water,
sustained by recollections of childhood.

He would have had to muster identical opinions and never admit (he
freely did in his ardent moments) a Catholicism charged with a soupcon
of magic, as under Henry the Third, and with a dash of sadism, as at
the end of the last century. This special clericalism, this depraved
and artistically perverse mysticism towards which he wended could not
even be discussed with a priest who would not have understood them or
who would have banished them with horror.

For the twentieth time, this irresolvable problem troubled him. He
would have desired an end to this irresolute state in which he
floundered. Now that he was pursuing a changed life, he would have
liked to possess faith, to incrust it as soon as seized, to screw it
into his soul, to shield it finally from all those reflections which
uprooted and agitated it. But the more he desired it and the less his
emptiness of spirit was evident, the more Christ's visitation receded.
As his religious hunger augmented and he gazed eagerly at this faith
visible but so far off that the distance terrified him, ideas pressed
upon his active mind, driving back his will, rejecting, by common
sense and mathematical proofs, the mysteries and dogmas. He sadly told
himself that he would have to find a way to abstain from
self-discussion. He would have to learn how to close his eyes and let
himself be swept along by the current, forgetting those accursed
discoveries which have destroyed the religious edifice, from top to
bottom, since the last two centuries.

He sighed. It is neither the physiologists nor the infidels that
demolish Catholicism, but the priests, whose stupid works could
exti