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En Route
1895 · translated from the French · 350 pages
En Route
by J.-K. Huysmans
Huysmans had written the bible of French decadence in À rebours and followed it into occultism and worse. En Route is the autobiographical novel of his return — Durtal, the thinly veiled author, dragging himself between churches in Paris and finally to a Trappist monastery, disgusted with himself and unable to stop. It is not an argument at all. It is the best account in French of what the process is like from inside.
The convert behind the argument
Huysmans was a career civil servant in the French interior ministry and a novelist of the decadent school whose earlier work had made him notorious. His return to Catholicism in the early 1890s ran through exactly the ambivalence the novel describes — aesthetic attraction to liturgy and plainchant well ahead of belief, and a long, unwilling resistance. He later became an oblate of a Benedictine monastery.
Summary
The novel opens with Durtal sitting behind the high altar at Saint-Sulpice in the week within the octave of All Souls, listening to a preacher he despises and examining himself. That is the register of the whole first half: a man in churches for the music and the architecture, contemptuous of the clergy, aware that something has hold of him and furious about it.
The second half moves to a Trappist monastery, where Durtal goes on retreat in a state of near panic, and the book becomes a close record of the days there — the offices, the silence, the poor supper of two eggs and a bowl of rice, the lay oblate who befriends him, and the confession he has been unable to make for months.
Its distinction is the refusal to tidy the process up. There is no argument that convinces Durtal and no moment of illumination; there is aesthetic longing, physical disgust, boredom, terror, and a grudging capitulation. Huysmans's fellow decadents regarded the book as a betrayal, and it made him, unwillingly, the most famous convert in France.
Who was J.-K. Huysmans?
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) was a French novelist of Dutch descent who spent his working life as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. His novel À rebours (1884) became the defining text of literary decadence, and Là-bas (1891) took him into the study of satanism in contemporary Paris.
He returned to the Catholicism of his childhood in the early 1890s, made the retreat at Igny that lies behind En Route, and later lived as an oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Ligugé. En Route (1895) is the second of the four Durtal novels.
Common questions
- Is En Route a novel or a memoir?
- It is an autobiographical novel. The protagonist Durtal is a thin disguise for Huysmans himself, and the events — the churches in Paris, the retreat at a Trappist monastery — follow his own return to Catholicism closely.
- Why is En Route on a list of apologetics?
- It makes no argument, but it does something the arguments cannot: it records what the interior process of conversion actually feels like, including the resistance, the boredom and the disgust. It is included as the best French account of that experience from the inside.
A note on the text. En Route is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
Related reading
The same Paris
From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
Adolphe Retté · 1907
Adolphe Retté's account of the same conversion happening in the same literary milieu a decade later — militant atheist to Catholic, told first-hand.