Off to the left of the entrance hall was the monastery shop, where you could buy monastic handicrafts — but the shop was closed right now, and there was no one at the reception desk to the right. A small sign instructed visitors to ring for assistance, but asked that they refrain during the daily offices, except in case of emergency. There was a timetable, but it didn’t say how long the offices lasted. After a fairly lengthy calculation involving mealtimes, I concluded that for everything to fit in one day, each office probably couldn’t take longer than half an hour. A shorter calculation revealed that right then we were somewhere between Sext and None, so I could ring.
A few minutes later, a tall monk appeared wearing a black habit. His face lit up when he saw me. He had a high forehead, dark brown curly hair with hardly any grey, and a dark brown beard. He couldn’t have been a day over fifty. ‘I’m Brother Joel,’ he said, and hefted my bag. ‘I’ll take you to your room.’ He stood up very straight and carried my bag easily, although it was heavy. Clearly, he was in excellent shape. ‘It’s good to have you back,’ he went on. ‘It’s been more than twenty years, hasn’t it?’ I must have looked confused. ‘Didn’t you stay with us twenty years ago?’ he asked. ‘You were writing about Huysmans?’ It was true, but I was amazed that he remembered me. I had no memory of him at all.
‘You’re what they call the guest master, aren’t you?’
‘No, no — but I used to be. That job tends to be given to the younger monks, or I should say, the ones who are new to monastic life. The guest master speaks to our guests, he’s still in contact with the world. It’s like a sort of airlock, or a halfway step, before the monk takes the plunge into his vocation of silence. I did it for a little more than a year.’
We were walking alongside a quite beautiful Renaissance building, surrounded by a park. A dazzling winter sun sparkled down on the tree-lined paths, which were strewn with dead leaves. A church stood in the distance, slightly taller than the cloister, late Gothic in style. ‘That’s our old church, the one Huysmans knew,’ said Brother Joel. ‘But our community was dispersed by the Combes laws at the turn of the century, and when we finally managed to reassemble, we couldn’t get the church back, only the cloister buildings. We had to build a new church inside the monastery itself.’ We stopped in front of a small one-storey building in the same Renaissance style. ‘Here’s our guest house,’ he was saying, when all at once a sturdy monk, maybe forty years old and wearing the same black habit, came hurrying down the path. A vigorous man, with a head so bald it practically gleamed in the sun, he projected extreme serenity and competence. He called to mind a finance minister — he even looked a bit liked Pierre Moscovici — or better yet a budget minister, someone, in any case, who inspired automatic and limitless trust. ‘And here is Brother Pierre, our new guest master. He’ll be handling all the logistics of your visit. I just came to welcome you back.’ He bowed, shook my hand and walked off towards the cloister.
‘You came on the TGV,’ asked the guest master; I said I had. ‘It’s fast, all right, the TGV,’ he went on, clearly hoping to start us off on a basis of mutual agreement. Then, taking my bag, he led me to my room. It was roughly three metres square, hung with light grey, textured wallpaper. The carpeting was medium grey and threadbare. The only decoration was a large crucifix of dark wood hanging above a small single bed. I immediately noticed that the sink had separate taps for hot and cold, and that there was a smoke detector on the ceiling. I told Brother Pierre that the room would be fine, but I already knew that wasn’t true. In En route, when Huysmans debates — more or less interminably — whether he can stand monastic life, one of his negative arguments is that, apparently, they wouldn’t let him smoke indoors. Moments like that have always made me love him. There’s another passage where he writes that one of the few pure joys in life is getting into bed with a stack of good books and a packet of tobacco. Huysmans never had to deal with smoke detectors.
There was a fairly rickety wooden desk with a Bible on it, a thin tract by Dom Jean-Pierre Longeat on the meaning of a monastic retreat (it was stamped ‘Do Not Remove’), and an information sheet that basically just listed the schedule of offices and meals. I saw at a glance that it was almost time for None, but I decided to give it a miss, this first day: the symbolism was less than thrilling. The idea behind the offices of Terce, Sext and None was to ‘return us to the presence of God over the course of the day’. Every day there were seven offices, plus Mass. None of that had changed since Huysmans’ time. The one concession to comfort was that Vigils, which had been observed at two in the morning, was now at 10 p.m. During my first visit, I had loved Vigils, with the long meditative psalms chanted in the middle of the night — as distant from Compline, and its farewell to the day, as it was from Lauds, which greeted the new dawn. Vigils was an office of pure waiting, of ultimate hope without any reason for hope. Obviously, in the dead of winter, back when the church wasn’t even heated, it can’t have been easy.
What impressed me most was that Brother Joel had recognised me after more than twenty years. Not much must have happened in his life since he stopped being guest master. He had worked in the monastery workshops, done the daily offices. His life had been peaceful, and probably happy, in stark contrast to my own.
I went for a long walk in the park, smoking numerous cigarettes, as I waited for Vespers, which was what came before the evening meal. The sun grew more and more dazzling. It made the frost sparkle, casting a yellow glow over the buildings, a scarlet glow over the carpet of dead leaves. I no longer knew the meaning of my presence in this place. For a moment it would appear to me, weakly, then just as soon it would disappear. In any case, it clearly had little to do with Huysmans any more.
~ ~ ~
Over the next two days I got used to the litany of prayers, but I never actually managed to love them. Mass was a recognisable element, the one point of contact with religious devotion as we in the outside world might know it. The rest was a matter of reading and chanting the appropriate psalms according to the time of day. Sometimes these were interspersed with a brief sacred text, read aloud by one of the monks — readings also occurred at meals, which were taken in silence. The modern church, constructed within the monastery walls, had a sober ugliness to it. Architecturally, it was reminiscent of the Super-Passy shopping centre in the rue de l’Annonciation, and its stained-glass windows, simple patches of abstract colour, weren’t worth looking at, but none of that bothered me. I wasn’t an aesthete — I had infinitely less aesthetic sense than Huysmans — and for me the uniform ugliness of contemporary religious art was essentially a matter of indifference. The voices of the monks rose up in the freezing air, pure, humble, well-meaning. They were full of sweetness, hope and expectation. The Lord Jesus would return, was about to return, and already the warmth of his presence filled their souls with joy. This was the one real theme of their chants, chants of sweet and organic expectation. That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.
All of this might have suited me fine, but going back to my cell ruined it: the smoke detector glared at me with its little red hostile eye. Sometimes I went and smoked out the window, so I could confirm that here, too, things had gone downhill since Huysmans’ day: the TGV tracks lay just beyond the far edge of the monastery grounds, two hundred metres away as the crow flies. The trains went by at full speed, and their roar shattered the meditative silence several times an hour, every hour. But the cold grew more intense, and after each of these stations at the window I had to warm myself against the radiator for minutes at a time. My mood soured, and the prose of Dom Jean-Pierre Longeat — no doubt an excellent monk, full of love and good intentions — exasperated me more and more. ‘Life should be a continual loving exchange, in tribulations or in joy,’ the good father wrote. ‘So make the most of these few days and exercise your capacity to love and be loved, in word and deed.’ ‘Give it a rest, dickhead,’ I’d snarl, ‘I’m alone in my room.’ ‘You are here to lay down your burdens and take a journey within yourself, to the wellspring where the power of desire is revealed.’ ‘My only fucking desire is to have a fucking cigarette,’ I raged, ‘I’ve reached the fucking wellspring, dickhead, and that’s what’s there.’ I may not have had, like Huysmans, ‘a heart hardened and smoked dry by dissipation’, but lungs hardened and smoked dry by tobacco — those I had.