“I don’t know, Monsieur l’Abbe. I am almost ashamed to talk to you about such troubles,” and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from all yokes.
The abbé listened without moving, his chin on his hand.
“You are more than forty,” he said, when Durtal was silent; “you have passed the age when without any impulse from thought, the awakening of the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping body than your mind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or children to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy, you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been placed; you try to appease your soul’s hunger in chapels, and as you hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break once and for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange compromise; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for woman only with your bodily senses? When Heaven has given you grace to be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a little effort of will.”
“This is an indulgent priest, ” thought Durtal.
“But,” continued the abbé, “you cannot always sit between two stools, the moment will come when you must stick to the one and push the other away.”
And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering…
“Do you pray? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers, for not all those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake. At break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is the soul as with the body when it is sick. Wien night comes our sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which slept blazes up again, filth revives, and wounds bleed anew, and then it thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray in the evening?”
“Sometimes—and yet it is very difficult; the afternoon is tolerable, but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain; how can anyone be recollected at such moments?”
“If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home, why do you not take refuge in the churches?”
“But they are closed when one has most need of them; clergy put Jesus to bed at nightfall.”
“I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few which remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who visit it are always sure of prayers and Benediction: Notre Dame des Victoires, I think you know it. ” –Joris Karl Huysmans ‘En Route’
