homilies, the tiresome Christian Cicero; Damasus, the manufacturer of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate; and his adversary Vigilantius of Comminges, who attacks the cult of the saints, the abuse of miracles, the practice of fasting, and already preaches against monastic vows and the celibacy of the priesthood, using arguments that will be repeated down the ages.
Finally, in the fifth century, there comes Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Him Des Esseintes knew only too well, for he was the most revered of all ecclesiastical writers, the founder of Christian orthodoxy, the man whom pious Catholics regard as an oracle,a sovereign authority. The natural consequence was that he never opened his books any more, even though he had proclaimed his loathing for this world in his
Confessions
, and, in his
De Civitate Dei
, to the accompaniment of pious groans, had tried to assuage the appalling distress of his time with sedative promises of better things to come in the afterlife. Even in his younger days, when he was studying theology, Des Esseintes had become sick and tired of Augustineâs sermons and jeremiads, his theories on grace and predestination, his fights against the schismatic sects.
He was much happier dipping into the
Psychomachia
of Prudentius, the inventor of the allegorical poem, a genre destined to enjoy uninterrupted favour in the Middle Ages, or the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, sprinkled with quips and sallies, archaisms and enigmas, captivated him. He always enjoyed rereading the panegyrics in which the good Bishop invokes the pagan deities in support of his pompous praises; and in spite of himself, he had to admit to a weakness for the conceits and innuendoes in these poems, turned out by an ingenious mechanic who takes good care of his machine, keeps its component parts well oiled and if need be can invent new parts which are both intricate and useless.
After Sidonius, he kept up his acquaintance with the panegyrist Merobaudes; with Sedulius, the author of rhymed poems and alphabetical hymns of which the Church has appropriated certain parts for use in her offices; with Marius Victor, whose gloomy treatise
De Perversis Moribus
is lit up here and there by lines that shine like phosphorus; with Paulinus of Pella, who composed that icy poem the
Eucharisticon
; and with Orientius, Bishop of Auch, who in the distichs of his
Monitoria
inveighs against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he declares, bring down disaster upon the peoples of the world.
Des Esseintes lost nothing of his interest in the Latin language now that it was rotten through and through and hung like a decaying carcase, losing its limbs, oozing pus, barely keeping, in the general corruption of its body, a few sound parts, which the Christians removed in order to preserve them in the pickling brine of their new idiom.
The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the awful period when appalling shocks convulsed the world. The barbarians were ravaging Gaul while Rome, sacked by the Visigoths, felt the chill of death invade her paralysed body and saw her extremities, the East and the West, thrashing about in pools of blood and growing weaker day by day.
Amid the universal dissolution, amid the assassinations of Caesars occurring in rapid succession, amid the uproar and carnage covering Europe from end to end, a terrifying hurrah was suddenly heard which stilled every other noise, silenced every other voice. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men wrapped in ratskin cloaks and mounted on little horses, hideous Tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, hairless, jaundiced faces and chins furrowed with gashes and scars, rode hell-for-leather into the territories of the Lower Empire, sweeping all before them in their whirlwind advance.
Civilization disappeared in the dust of their horsesâ hooves, in the smoke of the fires they kindled. Darkness fell upon the world and the peoples trembled
Finally, in the fifth century, there comes Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Him Des Esseintes knew only too well, for he was the most revered of all ecclesiastical writers, the founder of Christian orthodoxy, the man whom pious Catholics regard as an oracle,a sovereign authority. The natural consequence was that he never opened his books any more, even though he had proclaimed his loathing for this world in his
Confessions
, and, in his
De Civitate Dei
, to the accompaniment of pious groans, had tried to assuage the appalling distress of his time with sedative promises of better things to come in the afterlife. Even in his younger days, when he was studying theology, Des Esseintes had become sick and tired of Augustineâs sermons and jeremiads, his theories on grace and predestination, his fights against the schismatic sects.
He was much happier dipping into the
Psychomachia
of Prudentius, the inventor of the allegorical poem, a genre destined to enjoy uninterrupted favour in the Middle Ages, or the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, sprinkled with quips and sallies, archaisms and enigmas, captivated him. He always enjoyed rereading the panegyrics in which the good Bishop invokes the pagan deities in support of his pompous praises; and in spite of himself, he had to admit to a weakness for the conceits and innuendoes in these poems, turned out by an ingenious mechanic who takes good care of his machine, keeps its component parts well oiled and if need be can invent new parts which are both intricate and useless.
After Sidonius, he kept up his acquaintance with the panegyrist Merobaudes; with Sedulius, the author of rhymed poems and alphabetical hymns of which the Church has appropriated certain parts for use in her offices; with Marius Victor, whose gloomy treatise
De Perversis Moribus
is lit up here and there by lines that shine like phosphorus; with Paulinus of Pella, who composed that icy poem the
Eucharisticon
; and with Orientius, Bishop of Auch, who in the distichs of his
Monitoria
inveighs against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he declares, bring down disaster upon the peoples of the world.
Des Esseintes lost nothing of his interest in the Latin language now that it was rotten through and through and hung like a decaying carcase, losing its limbs, oozing pus, barely keeping, in the general corruption of its body, a few sound parts, which the Christians removed in order to preserve them in the pickling brine of their new idiom.
The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the awful period when appalling shocks convulsed the world. The barbarians were ravaging Gaul while Rome, sacked by the Visigoths, felt the chill of death invade her paralysed body and saw her extremities, the East and the West, thrashing about in pools of blood and growing weaker day by day.
Amid the universal dissolution, amid the assassinations of Caesars occurring in rapid succession, amid the uproar and carnage covering Europe from end to end, a terrifying hurrah was suddenly heard which stilled every other noise, silenced every other voice. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men wrapped in ratskin cloaks and mounted on little horses, hideous Tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, hairless, jaundiced faces and chins furrowed with gashes and scars, rode hell-for-leather into the territories of the Lower Empire, sweeping all before them in their whirlwind advance.
Civilization disappeared in the dust of their horsesâ hooves, in the smoke of the fires they kindled. Darkness fell upon the world and the peoples trembled
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