Aesthetics -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
With the Comte de Falloux, the episcopal style, so stupidly handled by
the prelates, recruited new strength and in a manner recovered its
masculine vigor. Under his guise of moderation, this academician
exuded gall. The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848
was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the
_Correspondant_ and since collected into books, were mordant and
discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceived
as harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and were
astonishing in the intolerance of their convictions.
A dangerous polemist because of his ambuscades, a shrewd logician,
executing flanking movements and attacking unexpectedly, the Comte de
Falloux had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death of
Madame Swetchine, whose tracts he had collected and whom he revered as
a saint.
But the true temperament of the writer was betrayed in the two
brochures which appeared in 1848 and 1880, the latter entitled
_l'Unite nationale_.
Moved by a cold rage, the implacable legitimist this time fought
openly, contrary to his custom, and hurled against the infidels, in
the form of a peroration, such fulminating invectives as these:
"And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of human
nature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds,
emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the
simian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied:
you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the
high-priests of an abominable future!"
The other brochure bore the title _le Parti catholique_ and was
directed against the despotism of the _Univers_ and against Veuillot
whose name he refused to mention. Here the sinuous attacks were
resumed, venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman, clad in
blue answered the sharp physical blows of the fighter with scornful
sarcasms.
These contestants represented the two parties of the Church, the two
factions whose differences were resolved into virulent hatreds. De
Falloux, the more haughty and cunning, belonged to the liberal camp
which already claimed Montalembert and Cochin, Lacordaire and De
Broglie. He subscribed to the principles of the _Correspondant_, a
review which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the Church
with a varnish of tolerance. Veuillot, franker and more open, scorned
such masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultramontaine
doctrines and confessed, with a certain compunction, the pitiless yoke
of the Church's dogma.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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