En Route

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.

C. Kegan Paul’s English translation (credited to “W. Fleming” in the Project Gutenberg transcription) is free at Project Gutenberg, as is the French original. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the English translation.

This is a clean reading edition of En Route, which J.-K. Huysmans published in 1895, in the English translation W. Fleming made the following year. Both are in the public domain and we set the text from the Project Gutenberg transcription.

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) had written À Rebours, the book that taught a generation how to be decadent, and then Là-Bas, which took him through satanism to the edge of something else. En Route is what happened next. Durtal, his double, drags himself to a Trappist monastery, makes a confession he does not believe himself fit to make, and finds he cannot leave the Church alone. It is a conversion narrative by a novelist who distrusted conversion narratives, and it converted a good many of its readers.

A note on what we changed. The transcription kept the line breaks of the printed page, so 2,040 paragraphs arrived as columns of short lines; we joined them back, which is whitespace and nothing else. Italics marked with underscores are set as italics. We broke the longest paragraphs at sentences already ended, and the pass checks chapter by chapter that the words and their order are unaltered. The book is in two parts whose chapter numbers both begin at one, and they are labelled here as Book I and Book II so that a table of contents can tell them apart.

We corrected nothing. A checker offered twenty-three candidates and all of them were Latin or French: luceat read as "luce at", excelsis as "excels is", Christe as a misspelling of Christ, Froc Robert as "From", orgie as "or gie". Huysmans quotes the liturgy constantly and Fleming leaves it in Latin, as he leaves Père and Trinité in French. So does this edition. One word, "indesire", is not English and is not a mistake we are willing to call one: Huysmans coined words for a living and Fleming followed him closely.

The free transcription is linked from this book's page.