La Cathédrale

Durtal, the protagonist of Là-bas and En route, reappears for a third time in La Cathédrale. Serving as a vehicle for the author’s monologues, he contemplates the splendor, mystery and immensity of Chartres Cathedral. Where Victor Hugo, in Notre-Dame-de-Paris, made the cathedral a mere setting, Huysmans turns it into a place of grace and edification, an active center of study for both soul and mind. Wisely, he retained the novel form: where only scholars would have taken interest in a series of abstract studies, everyone could believe they understood this book, which remains clear and accessible throughout.

Huysmans had not yet finished his great novelistic fresco of conversion: Durtal, a barely disguised portrait of the author himself, reappears a final time in L’Oblat, where he becomes an oblate, reflecting Huysmans’s own experience in the community of Ligugé in 1901. Gardens, light, candles, rites, relics and religious paintings all play a role in the plot, seeming to fade or express the drama of the monks’ abandonment of the monastery, forced into exile in Belgium at the end of the book — a striking parallel with the community of Solesmes, which Huysmans frequented at the same time.

The writer’s sincere conversion belongs, of course, to the context of the period, marked by the expulsion of religious congregations from France. The two texts, La Cathédrale and L’Oblat, form the most intimate part of his work.

A very fine copy bound by Marius Michel, who decorated the front cover with a subtle mosaic depicting a stained-glass window; Roche’s frontispiece has been mounted on the doublure.

Only the deluxe copies (10 on China paper, 21 on Japanese paper and 100 on Holland paper) include the etching and the frontispiece.