He (J.K. Huysmans) had spent much of his leisure at Ligugé working on his projected Life of St. Lydwine of Schiedam. The subject had long been in his mind, for she was one of his favourite saints, and even before his conversion he had been collecting materials. He had turned the pages of Gerlac, Brugman and À Kempis. He had come across a nineteenth-century hymn, preserved by the Bollandists, formerly sung in honour of Lydwine in Holland and Belgium:

Mira patientia
Vixit in hoc tempore,
Nimiæ miseria
Particeps in corpore.
Non murmur resonat,
Non querimonia,
Sed laudem personat
Devota Lydia.

He had even found in a Jansenist breviary of the eighteenth century an Office Propre de la Bienheureuse Lidwine. It was not until 1892 that an Office de Sainte Lidwine was conceded to the churches of Holland by a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites.

His taste always had a bias towards the bizarre, not to say the macabre. He was chiefly interested in saints whose lives had something extraordinary about them, something extra-vagant, the victims of suffering almost beyond human imagination: St. Lydwine, St. Colette, St. Françoise Romaine, the Blessed Jeanne de Maillé: living effigies of the Passion and bearing its marks in their own flesh. He liked his saints to be sick and was fond of repeating the remark of St. Hildegard that ‘God does not inhabit healthy bodies’. On this count at least St. Lydwine was the perfect subject, for she is said to have suffered from every disease known to the Middle Ages except leprosy. She was also particularly dear to Huysmans as a native of those Low Countries for which he had always an atavistic tenderness.

Lydwine was born at Schiedam in the closing years of the fourteenth century. She was very beautiful but lost her good looks through illness at the age of fourteen. Shortly afterwards she fell, while skating on the frozen canals, broke a rib, and for the rest of her life was bed-ridden. The most horrible ills assailed her, her wounds festered and worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Her right arm was eaten away with erysipelas so that only a single muscle held it to her body, her forehead was a gaping scar, she became blind in one eye and with the other could only bear the dimmest of light.

Then the plague ravaged Schiedam, and she was the first victim. Two boils formed on her body, one under her arm, the other over the heart. ‘Two boils, it is well’ she said to the Lord, ‘but three would be better in honour of the Holy Trinity.’ Immediately a third boil broke out on her face. She still thought herself too fortunate and entreated God to allow her to expiate, by her sufferings, the sins of others. Her prayer was answered, and for thirty-five years she endured every imaginable ill, taking no food but the Eucharist, and living in a cellar, fetid in summer and so cold in winter that
her tears were frozen on her cheeks.

But the Lord rewarded her with visions of His glory, sent angels to minister to her and communicated her with His own hand. Her festering sores exhaled delicious perfumes, and when she died her former beauty was miraculously restored to her. Crowds came to see her and all who were sick were healed.

Such was the story which Huysmans set himself to tell in terms of the Naturalism he had learned from Zola; and the result is enough to turn the strongest stomach. And yet the conscientious reader is compelled to admit that the method, in the end, succeeds. For Lydwine becomes, unlike most of the subjects of the hagiographers, a real person. The reader is compelled to accept her as he accepts a character in a realistic novel, to regard her, as Huysmans did, with a growing tenderness, to take part in her sufferings, to share her faith.

The doctrine of mystical substitution fascinated Huysmans as we can see by the conversation which he puts into the mouths of Durtal and the Abbé Gévresin in the early pages of En Route. He calls it ‘that miracle of perfect charity, that superhuman triumph of Mysticism’, and he made it, as he had always intended to do, the central theme of his Life of St. Lydwine. But perhaps he could never have written of it with so much conviction if he had not now begun to suffer the physical agonies which were to be with him, in ever increasing measure, until the day of his death. An author must always, to some extent, identify himself with his principal character, but to have the right to identify himself with St. Lydwine, Huysmans must himself suffer. While he was still unconverted he had complained of neuralgia; when he was at Ligugé he had to make several visits to Poitiers in order, as he imagined, to have his teeth attended to. Now that he had returned to Paris the pain had grown worse, and whether he knew it or not, what he was suffering from was cancer of the mouth.

…not much longer to live. His sufferings were atrocious. ‘It was’, says Dom Dubourg, ‘with a sentiment of religious respect that, in his study on the fifth floor, so far from the earth and so near to the heavens, I discovered our dear friend in his usual surroundings, in the middle of the books he could no longer read, having before him a page of manuscript he could no longer finish. His features were emaciated, deformed by the malady from which he suffered, but illuminated from time to time by the sweet and limpid look which he directed on his crucifix. In the middle of the agonies which were tearing him to pieces… his lips never ceased to murmur their tireless fiat…

************

To the doctors who wanted to give him morphia to ease the pain, he cried: “Ah! You want to prevent me from suffering! You want to change the sufferings of the good God for the evil pleasures of earth! I will not let you.” As Lent drew to its close, he said to me: “I have had a beautiful dream: how I wished it could be realized. I was on the cross with Jesus. Ah! if my good Master would take me, as he did the Penitent Thief, on Good Friday!” His wish was not granted. He had to drink the cup of suffering to the dregs.’

************

He…suffered martyrdom for the last eighteen months; his eyes, his ears, his teeth have, in turn, tortured him. Almost all his teeth had been extracted and his throat and mouth were nothing but a purulent wound.’

When the good Father sympathised with him he said: ‘Do not pity me. I am far from being unhappy.’ ‘It was necessary for me to suffer all this in order that those who read my books should know that I was not just “making literature”.” Certainly in his last days his faith was passionately sincere.

‘The First Decadent: J.K. Huysmans’ written by James Laver

‘Ah,’ he (Durtal) cried, ‘the true proof of Catholicism is its art.’ And that art was a unity, a marvellous blend of music, architecture, sculpture, painting, all held together in one unique cluster of thoughts, all serving the same end. Plainchant itself was a kind of architecture now curving in upon itself like sombre Romanesque arches, now mounting skyward in the soaring lines of the Gothic, breaking into flowery tendrils and tracery as fine as lace. What music could compare with the tenderness of the ‘De Profundis’ chanted in unison, the solemnity of the ‘Magnificat’, the warmth and splendour of the ‘Laude Sion’, the enthusiasm of the ‘Salve Regina’, the sorrow of the ‘Miserere’ and the ‘Stabat Mater’, the majestic omnipotence of the ‘Te Deum’?

‘The First Decadant: J.K. Huysmans’ the biography detailing the novel ‘En Route’ written by James Laver

His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew on him. “No to everything …rather than mix myself again with society,” he declared to himself, and then he was silent in despair, for he was not ignorant that he could not, apart from the monastic zone, live in isolation. After a short time would come weariness and a void, therefore why had he reserved nothing for himself, why had he trusted all to the cloister? He had not even known how to arrange the pleasure of entering into himself, he had discovered how to lose the amusement of bric-à-brac, how to extirpate that last satisfaction in the white nakedness of a cell! He no longer held to anything, but lay dismantled, saying, “I have renounced almost all the happiness which might fall to me, and what am I going to put in its place?”

And terrified, he perceived the disquiet of a conscience ready to torment itself, the permanent reproaches of an acquired lukewarmness, the apprehensions of doubts against Faith, fear of furious clamours of the senses…

J.K. Huysmans

“Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,” he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.

“Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,” he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.

He saw himself submitting to the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold his tongue?

In any case peace was for ever lost. How in fact was he to rally and recover when he was obliged to dwell in a place of passage, in a soul open to all winds, visited by a crowd of public thoughts? His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew on him.

“No……….

JK Huysmans ‘Enroute’

“Ah, ha!” she went on, looking at him over her spectacles, “do you suppose that by moving your soul from place to place you can change it? Your trouble is neither in the air nor outside you, but within you. On my word, to hear you talk, one might fancy that by travelling from one spot to another every discord could be avoided, that a man could escape from himself! Nothing can be more false. Ask the Father—”

And when Durtal, smiling awkwardly, was gone, Madame Bavoil questioned her master.

“What is really the matter with him?”

“He is being broken by the ordeal of dryness,” replied the priest. “He is enduring a painful but not dangerous operation. So long as he preserves a love of prayer, and neglects none of his religious exercises, all will be well. That is the touchstone which enables us to discern whether such an attack is sent from Heaven.”

“But, Father, he must at any rate be comforted.”

“I can do nothing but pray for him.”

“Another question: our friend is possessed by the notion of a monastic life; perhaps you ought to send him to a convent.”

The Abbé gave an evasive shrug.

“Dryness of spirit and the dreams to which it gives rise are not the sign of a vocation,” said he. “I might even say that they have a greater chance of thriving than of diminishing in the cloister. From that point of view conventual life might be bad for him. Still, that is not the only question to be considered—there is something else—and besides, who knows?” He was silent, and presently added: “Much may be possible. Give me my hat, Madame Bavoil. I will go and talk over Durtal with the Abbé Plomb.”

JK Huysmans ‘The Cathedral’

…cherished the dream of retiring from the world, of living peacefully as a recluse near to God.

He had, to be sure, only thought of it definitely in the form of impossible longings and regrets, for he knew full well that neither was his body strong enough nor his soul staunch enough for him to bury himself as a Trappist. Still, once started from that spring-board, his imagination flew off at a tangent, over-leaped every obstacle, floated in discursive reveries where he saw himself as a Friar in some easy-going convent under the rule of a merciful Order, devoted to liturgies and adoring art.

He could but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he should find it more attainable.

‘The Cathedral’ by J.K. Huysmans

They were, in my opinion, greater and keener observers, more learned and more skilful, even better painters than Angelico; but their heart was in their craft, they lived in the world, they often could not resist giving their Virgins fine-lady airs, they were hampered by earthly reminiscences, they could not rise in their work above the trammels of daily life; in short, they were and remained men. They were admirable; they gave utterance to the promptings of ardent faith; but they had not had the specific culture which is practiced only in the silence and peace of the cloister. Hence they could not cross the threshold of the seraphic realm where roamed the guileless being who never opened his eyes, closed in prayer, excepting to paint-—the monk who had never looked out on the world, who had seen only within himself.

And what we know of his life is worthy of this work. He was a humble and tender recluse, who always prayed or ever he took up his brush, and could not draw the Crucifixion without melting into tears.

Through the veil of his tears his angelic vision poured itself out in the light of ecstasy, and he created beings that had but the semblance of human creatures, the earthly husk of our existence, beings whose souls soared already far from their prison of flesh. Study his picture attentively, and see how the incomprehensible miracle works of such a sublimated state of mind.

‘The Cathedral’ by J.K. Huysmans