Là-Bas proved a prophetic weather-vane. En Route in 1895 did not astonish those who had been studying the spiritual fluctuations of Huysmans. Behold the miracle! He is a believing Christian. Wisely the antecedent causes were tacitly avoided. "I believe," said Durtal, simply. Of superior interest is his struggle up the ladder to perfection. This painful feat is slowly accomplished in La Cathédrale (1898), L'Oblat (1903), and Lourdes (1906). And it must be confessed that the more pious grew Huysmans the less artist he--as might have been expected. What is his art to a man who is concerned not with the things of this world? He never lost his acerbity, or his faculty for the phrase magical, though his sense of proportion gradually vanished. Luckily, he is not saccharine like the majority of writers on religious topics. Ferdinand Brunetière complained that Flaubert was unbearably erudite in his three short stories--echoing what Sainte-Beuve had said of Salammbô years before. What must he have thought of that astonishing Cathedral, with its chapters on the symbolism of architecture, sculpture, gems, flowers (Sir Thomas Browne and his quincunxes are fairly beaten from the field), vestments, sacred vessels of the altar, and a multitude of mysterious things, hieroglyphics, and dark liturgical riddles? There are ravishing pages, though none so solemn and moving as the description of the _De profundis_ and _Dies iræ_ in En Route. It may prove profitable for the student after reading La Cathédrale to take up Walter Pater's unfinished story, Gaston De Latour, and read the description therein of the Chartres Cathedral. There are pages of exquisitely felt prose, but Huysmans sees more and tells what he sees in less musical though more lapidary phrases. For anyone except the trailer after strange souls The Oblate is an affliction. Madame Bavoil, with her _notre ami_, is a chattering nuisance, withal a worthy creature. Durtal is always in the dumps. He speaks much of interior peace, but he gives the impression of a man sitting painfully amidst spiritual brambles. Perhaps he felt that for him after his Golgotha are the sweet-singing flames of Purgatory. We are not sorry when he returns to Paris. As for the book on Lourdes, it is like an open wound. A whiff from the operating-room of a hospital comes to you. We are edified by the childlike faith with which Huysmans accepts the report of cures that would stagger the most perfervid Christian Scientist. His Saint-Lydwine is hard reading, written by a man whose mysticism was a matter of rigid definition, a thing to be weighed and felt and verbally proved. Fleming-like, he is less melodist than harmonist--and such acrid harmonies, polyphonic variations, and fuguelike flights to the other side of good and evil.