SOURCE: "The Sceptical Mode," in The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850-1970, The Catholic University of America Press, 1990, pp. 11-51.

[In the following excerpt, Scott discusses the importance of religion, primarily as an object of ridicule and derision, in several French Realist novels.]

An aim common to most novelists during the second half of the nineteenth century was to depict as fully as possible the physical appearance and social structures of the modern world. Thus churches as buildings and the Church as institution were necessary ingredients of their novels on a purely documentary level. The grander the scale of the social panorama, the truer this was, and it is in the novels of Zola that churches and church ceremonial, as an important aspect of life at all social levels, are the most fully and frequently depicted. Some of Zola's most memorable set-piece descriptions are of church interiors, like that of Notre-Dame-des-Grâces in Passy, decked with flowers for the mois de Marie (Une page d'amour) or Saint-Roch with its sculpted Christ flanked by Virgin and Magdalene (Pot-Bouille). It would be an inhibiting theory of literature that would deny the value of these descriptions for their own sake, providing as they do a concrete link between reality and fiction, between Zola's age and ours. Similarly, the accounts of baptism, first communion, weddings and funerals, as they appeared to nineteenth-century writers, are essential parts of their achievement as social historians, which is how they often defined themselves. The same function is fulfilled by the depiction of the Church's social role, or of popular attitudes towards it, and in such material the novels of Zola are uniquely rich.

The documentary aspect of fiction, although an important one, is not sustained for long in a state of innocence. Zola's famous definition of art reminds us that these particular 'corners of creation' are always seen 'through a temperament'. The novelist's angle of vision asserts itself, satirical intention meets rhetorical device. Underfunded country churches falling on the heads of priests already tortured enough by the attentions of misnamed 'filles de la Vierge', working-class folk turning to the Church only on the occasion of their daughter's wedding—such details, in La Terre or L'Assommoir, reveal as much of the author's viewpoint as they do of historical realities. Maupassant's cameo of the blessing of the boats ceremony in Une vie moves swiftly from reportage to unflattering portraits of provincial clerics:

Les trois vieux chantres, crasseux dans leur blanche vêture, le menton poileux, l'air grave, l'œil sur le livre de plain-chant, détonnaient à pleine gueule dans la claire matinée. [ . . . ] Le prêtre, d'une voix empâteé, gloussa quelques mots latins dont on ne distinguait que les terminaisons sonores.

Such mild irreverence, but escalating from dirty cassocks to incomprehensible and socially irrelevant Latin chants, is typical of Maupassant's presentation of the clergy. His short stories are full of insalubrious priests, or negligent ones, arriving late for their duties or hurrying quickly through them in half-swallowed utterances for which his favourite term, like Flaubert's for the same thing, was 'un marmottement'.

The satire is light and superficial here, but the irony cuts more deeply when religious practice is given a more developed social setting. The Goncourts explore the relationship between the wealthy middle-class world of Renée Mauperin and a certain type of clergy through the character of the abbé Blampoix, 'le prêtre du monde, du beau monde et du grand monde,' self-appointed saviour of the faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, and especially prized in such circles for his talent as marriage-broker. The type is alive nearly two decades later in the form of Zola's abbé Mauduit, who has graced every death-bed in the quartier Saint-Roch and has mastered the art of closing his eyes to the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie (Pot-Bouille). That religion existed merely for the convenience and protection of the middle class is an idea expressed with increasing acerbity from the mocking sketches of Monnier's La Religion des Imbéciles (1846) to the harsher denuciations of Maupassant and Zola, in whose work religious attitudes are often the banners of class warfare. The bien-pensants who accompany Boule-de-Suif on the coach from Rouen to Le Havre and who persuade her to sleep with a Prussian officer in order to ensure their swift passage boast of possessing 'de la Religion et des Principes.' The same facade cloaks middle-class turpitude in Zola's novels, whereas the poor regard religion as an irrelevance in the daily struggle for bread. 'Est-ce que vous avez besoin d'un bon Dieu et de son paradis pour être heureux?' Étienne Lantier asks his fellow miners in Germinal. Empty churches, to Count Muffat's father-in-law in Nana signify imminent revolution; he would have readily agreed with the Goncourts' Monsieur Bourjot that 'il faudrait que toutes ces canailles allassent à la messe.' The brothers, whose interest in the working class was a notoriously dilettante one and who could never have been suspected of harbouring any sympathies for the political left, nevertheless expose through Bourjot the complicity between Catholicism and reaction: 'Il se précipitait vers les doctrines d'ordre, il se retournait vers l'Église comme vers une gendarmerie, vers le droit divin comme vers l'absolu de l'autorité et la garantie providentielle de ses valeurs.' The same alliance is evoked by Maupassant's fanatical abbé Tolbiac, who tells the young châtelaine: 'Il faut que nous soyons unis pour être puissants et respectés. L'église et le château se donnant la main, la chaumière nous craindra et nous obéira.' One of the most powerful images of the exploitation of religion in the interests of repressive authority appears in La Fille Élisa, written by Edmond de Goncourt after Jules' death. In the prison cell where the former prostitute Élisa serves her sentence for the killing of her lover, a crucifix hangs above a sign saying DIEU ME VOIT—'et au-dessous de l'oeil divin [ . . . ] il y avait, au trou imperceptible fait par un clou dans la porte, l'œil d'un inspecteur en tournée dans les corridors.' The eye of God and the eye of the law become indistinguishable from each other, and the nail used to drill the spy-hole seems a mocking image of the nails of the Crucifixion.

In Madame Bovary too there are reflections of the same contract between Church and political regime. One of the newest buildings in Yonville is the church, renovated under Charles X, a symbol of the clericalism of the Restoration period. Above its altar hangs a painting of the Holy Family, a gift from the Minister of the Interior; in exchange, the tricolore flies from the steeple. Flaubert's eye for such detail was matched by Zola's, and it is in the Rougon-Macquart cycle that the Church is most provocatively identified as the accomplice of state power. In the first novel of the series, La Fortune des Rougon, it is the clergy which plots and leads the insurrection in Plassans and wins power for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. In La Conquête de Plassans, the abbé Faujas' usurpation of power in the Mouret household represents in miniature the rape of France by the Emperor; but under the surface, a more fundamental takeover is in process, embodied in the gradual expulsion of the Mourets and the priest from their bourgeois home by Faujas' working-class sister and her husband. Thus does Zola express his view of the Church as a sinister force but, like the regime it supports, an ultimately doomed one.

In the forefront of Realism's presentation of the Catholic Church is a character type of which all the leading novelists create memorable individual examples: the priest; and the manner in which he is depicted is crucial for the interpretation of many a text. Not all Realist priests are negative figures. One can cite to the contrary Maupassant's abbé Picot, 'gai, vrai prêtre campagnard, tolérant, bavard et brave homme' (Une vie), and Zola's well-meaning pro-worker priest Ranvier in Germinal. But the majority of them are shallow and incompetent, figures of fun at best, callous and sinister at their worst. One of the best known examples of clerical bêtise is Flaubert's Bournisien, whose failure to recognise Emma Bovary's problems aggravates her self-induced despair. Maupassant's priests, in their altogether different encounters with the fair sex, rejoin the traditions of the fabliaux, as in the tale of the cleric who visits his supposedly chaste nephew and inadvertently climbs into bed alongside the young man's girlfriend—this in a tale appropriately entitled 'Une Surprise'. The confrontation of religion with sexuality, treated here as farce, has more serious overtones in other Maupassant stories. In 'Clair de lune' (one of two contes bearing this title) the abbé Marignan is shaken to learn that his niece, whom he had hoped to see become a nun, has a lover, but the sight of the couple walking happily in the moonlight causes the priest to question his former mistrust of human love. Perhaps God, he reflects, has made the night specially as a setting for lovers; perhaps love is legitimised, even sanctified. The abbé feels an obscure shame, 'comme s'il eût pénétré dans un temple où il n'avait pas le droit d'entrer,' a shame that recalls that of Adam and Eve though the story implies that human love is a greater paradise than the biblical one. The abbé stops on the brink of denying God and tries instead to reconcile his discovery with his faith in Providence, but the experience has changed for ever his notion of life's priorities. The story is typical of Realist and Naturalist concern with the man beneath the priest's vestments and with the sexual urges which these writers see, much more than religious aspirations, as constituting the prime nature of human beings. Another Maupassant priest, in 'Le Baptême' (again, two stories share this title), holds in his arms a newly baptised infant and sobs in unspoken frustration at his own eternal separation from the joys of paternity. Yet another, in 'Le Champ des oliviers', is so overcome to find that he has a son that he murders the latter and then kills himself: the roles of priest and father are tragically incompatible. A similar fascination with the priest's encounter with sex is shown by Paul Alexis in his story 'Après la bataille', which he contributed to the Naturalist volume Les Soirées de Médan. Here a priest, wounded by the invading Prussians, is picked up by a young widow travelling home with her husband's corpse, and through the mutual comfort they offer each other he recognises his true nature as a sexual being.

The central text on this theme is Zola's novel La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, in which a priest has a love affair with a girl, only to reject her and their unborn child on resuming his priestly function. Although this novel predated the stories by Maupassant and Alexis described above, Zola did not invent the character of the prêtre amoureux, of which there is no shortage of examples in Romantic literature. Lamartine's narrative poem Jocelyn, especially, invites comparison, for it too relates the abandonment of a girl by a priest who has been her lover. Jocelyn is an obvious source of Mouret, but what Zola adds to the original melodrama is a sharpness of anticlerical satire, a questioning of the nature of the man within the priest, a probing of the neuroses common to both sexual and religious experience. No text in the whole of the Rougon-Macquart cycle challenges Christian attitudes and values more radically than this one, although this has not always been recognised. F. W. J. Hemmings sees a neutral Zola at work here, on the grounds that his preparatory notes for the novel reveal no ironical intention, and he supports his judgment by referring to a review by Zola of Ernest Daudet's Le Missionnaire (a novel on a similar theme) in which he objects to the use of novels as weapons for or against Catholicism. Other reviews, however, give different impressions. Writing of Lavalley's novel Aurélieu Zola, as was his custom in incidental writing, pleads his freedom from parti pris, but supports nonetheless the author's opposition to priestly celibacy. The priest, he goes on, is rightly less venerated than of old, acceptable as a human brother but not as the spokesman of the divine. His pretension to chastity denies nature in a way that Zola finds 'repugnant.' This review prefigures very accurately Zola's ironical stance towards the central character of his novel. Serge Mouret is sexually neutered by his priestly calling, and this offence against nature is temporarily righted by his making love to Albine in the overgrown park called Le Paradou, after which 'il se sentait complet.'

Despite the absolute clarity of what the novel conveys here, its coherence has been questioned. Hemmings objects that because Serge is suffering from amnesia, 'he must be exonerated at least from the fault of consciously rejecting the demands of the religious life he had embraced,' and he implies that this is a flaw in the novel's logic. But this is to take the 'faute' of the title in its conventional moral sense, or even in its special Catholic sense: that is, a sin. The priest's loss of memory, far from being an error on Zola's part, is a deliberate narrative device, used to obliterate Serge's sense of sin and to invalidate Christian interpretation from the outset. A further comparison with Jocelyn is useful here. Lamartine's priest does not set out to seduce the girl Laurence; his love is not premeditated. He believes her to be a boy, left in his care by a dying father, and the relationship that develops only gradually reveals itself as a sexual one. Jocelyn cannot be blamed for his love, but only for abandoning the girl who needs him. Exactly the same is true of Zola's priest. Whereas Hemmings seems to identify Mouret's fault as loving Albine, for Zola, in ironical reversal of Christian morality, it is in not loving her enough. It is in his betrayal of her, in his rejection of life in favour of what is specifically identified as a religion of death.

The novel's challenge to Catholic values is thus undeniable, even though the forces that constitute the other side of the conflict—nature and sex—are not depicted in glorified and unproblematic terms. What Valerie Minogue [in Forum for Modern Language Studies XIV (July 1978)] calls Zola's 'characteristic ambivalence' towards sex is certainly evident in the lovers' postcoital shame; and if nature is supposed to be Man's guiding light, then the fact that only Serge's half-witted sister Désirée relates easily to it (in her relationship with animals) creates an immediate difficulty. Zola here reveals, not confusion, but rather artistic integrity. To depict the discovery of sex as the path to eternal happiness, to pretend that human beings have no difficulty in accepting their condition and earthly environment would have been obvious distortions of the truth he sought to portray. If Le Paradou is the site of conflict between the two lovers, if it is wild and disturbing and tainted with the memories of the tragic love of its former owners, it is because Zola did not want to create a paradise on earth. There are no earthly paradises. Yet earth and life constitute for Zola the only sure reality, and his hope is founded on their eventual improvement. That is why the fault of the abbé Mouret is a crime against life.

Zola also implies that sex, far from belonging to a world remote from religious experience, is part and parcel of it. Serge's special devotion to the Holy Virgin contains unmistakable sexual elements, and Frère Archangias, the lay brother who embodies Catholic misogyny at its fiercest, is not wrong in suspecting this. Serge hides pictures of the Virgin under his pillow. Alternately erotic symbol and mother figure (replacing his own mother, burned alive in her Plassans home), the Virgin is a compound of all that he seeks from the female sex. He imagines himself 'buvant le lait d'amour infini qui tombait goutte à goutte de ce sein virginal.' As he recites his countless Aves he is voicing a declaration of love, 'cette parole sans cesse la même qui revenait, pareille au "Je t'aime" des amants.' His eyes fix on her bodice, on her heart pierced by a sword, and he feels the urge to kiss her breast. As he recites the litany, each appelation is a step towards obscure sexual union, and the end of his prayer leaves Serge 'les genoux cassés, la tête vide, comme après une grande chute,' in anticipation of the pleasurable fatigue he will discover with Albine. Zola's pre-Freudian conviction of the sexual element within Man's spiritual aspirations produces a parody of the cult of the Virgin, which was so strong in Second Empire France.

La Faute de l'abbé Mouret directly influenced Maupassant's treatment of the priest figure, especially in his attitudes to sex and procreation. Frère Archangias' terror at the spectacle of farmyard reproduction, and his killing of a nestful of baby birds, are echoed in the story 'Le Saut du berger' and also in Une vie. In both texts, a priest destroys a litter of puppies, whose birth has been innocently attended by a group of peasant children. The abbé Tolbiac in Une vie is given an ideological opponent in the shape of Baron le Perthuis, father of the heroine Jeanne and direct fictional descendant of Albine's father, the old libertarian Jeanbernat. Seeing nothing but beauty in sex and procreation, he rejects Catholic prudery as an exacerbation of middle-class taste; and of priests he declares: 'Il faut combattre ces hommes-là, c'est notre droit et notre devoir. Ils ne sont pas humains' (Une vie). Less rigorous a thinker than Zola, less reluctant to pronounce a naïve faith in life-giving sex (which ironically, was to kill him, through syphilis), Maupassant's talents were those, not of a creator of philosophies, but of a denouncer of hypocrisy and falsehood. Through the mouth of the Baron, he produces a sort of Realist's Ecce Homo: 'Le voilà, le voilà, l'homme en soutane! L'astu vu maintenant?' This is not just the voice of one character, a cranky and profligate anti-clerical. The entire narrative structure of Une vie maroons the abbé Tolbiac at its negative pole. Increasingly fanatical, he delights in assuring Jeanne that all her troubles have been sent as deserved punishment from God, and refuses to consecrate her father's burial. He is the prime embodiment of an anti-life viewpoint, a foil for the text's humanitarian affirmations. The novel is not quite anti-religious, for the conflicts at its heart are not between religious belief and unbelief, but between a wide-ranging liberal religion and a perverted clerical fanaticism. But there can be no mistaking the view of the Catholic Church which it projects. Jeanne's young son, misunderstanding his great aunt's inarticulate reply to his question: 'Where is God?', tells his grandfather: 'Le bon Dieu, il est partout, mais il n'est pas dans l'Église.' The child's naïve comment carries more than a grain of Maupassant's truth.

It is implied in La Faute de l'abbé Mouret that priestly devotion and even, by extension, all Christian faith betray essentially feminine aspects of character. Albine's view of her former lover in his priestly vestments makes this clear: 'Toute sa virilité séchait sous cette robe de femme qui le laissait sans sexe.' The association between religion and femininity is one of the constants of Realist characterisation, and religious experience one of the principal channels by which it explores female psychology. Misogynism and sexism combine with religious scepticism to produce some of the most markedly ironic portraits of character in the Realist corpus. 'La religion,' quip the Goncourts, 'est une partie du sexe de la femme,' and they add to their own bon mot one of Gavarni's: 'Savez-vous de quoi me fait l'effet une femme qui n'a pas de religion? D'une sorte d'hermaphrodite.' The diary is full of comments on the dubious sensuality of women's religion. Convent girls are described as having their heads stuffed with 'tout ce vaporeux mystique,' which will make them ill suited as wives of brutish husbands. Religion is seen as 'cette grande machine de la femme,' church-going as a chance to show off new dresses; to a woman, 'Dieu lui semble chic' The sanctification of Marie Alacoque, foundress of the cult of the Sacred Heart, is regarded by the brothers as no less than the glorification of 'le paganisme féminin.' Such views abound in their novels too. The attitude of middle-class ladies to religion is summed up simply: 'Les femmes en raffolaient.' The Goncourts are echoed nearly two decades later by Maupassant, whose heroine Jeanne 'était toute de sentiment; elle avait cette foi rêveuse que garde toujours une femme' (Une vie). She shares with another of his female characters, Madame Walter, 'ces idées superstitieuses qui sont souvent toute la raison des femmes.'

The unavowed sexuality of Serge Mouret's love of the Virgin has its counterpart in women's attachment to the masculinity of Christ. 'Les femmes,' says Flaubert's Hilarion as part of his subtle undermining of the hapless Saint-Antoine, 'sont toujours pour Jésus, même les idolâtres.' Passion for the person of Christ, expressed in the language of human love—Jesus as 'l'Époux de son âme, le Roi de son amour, le Bienaimé de son coeur'—underlies the vocation of the Goncourts' sœur Philomène. Sexual and religious awakening, the second as the by-product of the first, are explored in the account of her adolescence; without heavy irony, and indeed with compassion for their character, the Goncourts nevertheless suggest that religious yearnings are the product of imminent puberty. The account of Philomène's first communion, the moment of 'receiving God', is expressed in a blend of the diffuse—'un ineffable sentiment de défaillance'—and of the more suggestively precise—'ravissement,' 'évanouissement'—that hints at sexual initiation, sharply and intimately felt but indescribably unfamiliar. However mildly and undogmatically, the text contrasts that which is undeniably real—the emotion and its unspoken physiological causes—with what is fondly imagined: the encounter with the divine. The former exists not only in Philomène's flesh but also in the authoritative testimony of the narrator; the latter is a strand in the imagination of a simple girl.

Of all the examples of the type to which Philomène belongs, the convent girl unable to disentangle spiritual and amorous impulses, the best known is Emma Bovary. Like Philomène, 'les comparaisons de fiancé, d'époux, d'amant céleste et de mariage éternel qui reviennent dans les sermons lui soulevaient au fond de l'âme des douceurs inattendues.' 'La religion' and 'les délicatesses de cœur' are interlaced in her imagination through the figure of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, royal mistress turned Carmelite, to whose legend her thirteen-year-old eyes are opened by illustrations on dinner plates in the inn next door to the convent. Menacing reality intrudes in the shape of the 'égragnitures' left by past diners' knives, but Emma is sublimely oblivious to reality, preferring instead distorted romantic images which are often the product of religious reverie. Religion itself is not the prime target of Flaubert's irony, but it provides another level on which the portrait of the muddled, self-deceiving woman can be sharpened. It merges with the broader theme of romantic delusion when Emma reads Le Génie du christianisme and when her brain swims with Lamartinian clichés of falling leaves, dying swans and the voice of the Eternal 'discourant dans les vallons.' Emma's direct descendant is Angélique in Zola's Le Rêve, to whom the saints and martyrs of Voragine's Golden Legend are more real than the flesh and blood people around her, and whose adolescent fantasies of handsome young lovers are interchangeable with her longing for Christ. Another Zola heroine, Hélène in Une page d'amour, recognises more clearly that even prayer, far from being a refuge from the temptations of adulterous love, can be a sublimation of erotic yearnings, 'toujours la même passion, traduite par le même mot ou le même signe.'

To less innocent women, churches, in the words of Bel-Ami, 'sont bonnes à tous les usages [ . . . ] Il leur semble tout simple de filer l'amour au pied des autels.' Fewer places are more convenient as sites for amorous rendezvous, away from prying eyes, or more stimulating, the senses quickening as candles flicker in incense-laden darkness. The church of the Trinity is the haunt of Bel-Ami and Madame Walter, he pretending to pray while muttering words of seduction into her ear, she hypocritically imploring heaven's protection from his charms. For Emma and Léon, Rouen cathedral is the preferred meeting-place, and it is here, in the 'boudoir gigantesque' of the church, that takes place the final apotheosis of Emma as perfume-laden sex-object, her face resplendent in the reflections of stained glass.

Often the object of the female's pursuit need not be imported, but is already inside the church: namely, the priest himself. The Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux falls in love with her young confessor, follows him from confessional to vestry and back. When prudently diverted to a less seductive minister of God, she simply stops going to church, and when asked what the priests have done to her to cool her ardour, she answers: 'Rien.' This is clearly meant as a complaint.

Germinie's working-class sisters in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris have more success with priests, at least in the eyes of the malicious gossips who see the charcutière Lisa Quenu going to church with suspicious regularity: 'La grosse donne dans le curés, maintenant. Ça la calmera, cette femme, de se tremper le derrière dans l'eau bénite.' The eroticism of confession is suggested as Lisa, awaiting her turn, sees, under the door of the confessional, the hem of a blue dress lying suggestively at the feet of the priest; the chapel of the Virgin is 'toute moite de silence et d'obscurité'; women recline 'pâmées sur des chaises retournées, abîmées dans cette volupté noire'; stained glass images burn 'comme des flammes d'amour mystique'; Lisa feels 'une indécence dans cette ombre, un jour et un souffle d'alcôve.' The wife of her cousin Mouret, in La Conquête de Plassans, knows no such inhibitions. Confessing to the priest whom she loves is an undisguised sexual experience; it is 'extase,' 'évanouissement,' marked by attraction to the very odour of the priestly garb, rising to the crisis of 'sanglots nerveux' and climaxing in overwhelming fatigue.

Another female character whose slide into religious belief is a preordained hazard of her sex is Madame Gervaisais, the eponymous heroine of the Goncourts' last joint novel. A reader of philosophical works which have led her to reject the supernatural and an aesthete subscribing to 'une religion du Beau, du Vrai, du Bien,' Madame Gervaisais stands aloof from Christian belief when she arrives in Rome with her mentally retarded son Pierre-Charles. What she seeks in visiting churches is not 'l'approche de Dieu dans sa maison,' but simply peace. She possesses nevertheless 'un respect de femme pour la personne du Christ,' and gradually comes to regard him as '[le] patron de son sexe.' When her son falls ill, her identification with the Virgin as the archetype of the suffering mother further erodes her scepticism, and fosters the growth of the religious sensibility which is 'caché [ . . . ] au fond de la femme.' This process is represented as one of decline, as the regression of a sharply intelligent woman to the banality of female religiosity. Under the influence of the atmosphere of Rome, or what the narrator calls '[la] contagion sainte,' and believing her prayers to be responsible for her son's recovery, she becomes a fanatical convert, abandoning friends and artistic pursuits for the company of her austere confessor. Her vision darkens, she sees sin all around, and her devotion takes on the sinisterly sexual overtones of so many other women in the Realist corpus, her thoughts full of lurid images of penetration by God and by Christ. Her son, whose illness had led her to religion in the first place, is now seen as the rival to her divine consort, an obstacle to union with him. In their description of the 'haine sainte' directed by mother against son, of 'cette monstrueuse victoire dénaturée sur le sang, la dernière et suprême victoire de la religion,' the Goncourts express more overtly than in any other of their novels their dismay at the effects of Christian belief on human behaviour. Like Zola and Maupassant they espouse the cause of nature in its eternal struggle with grace: 'La Grâce finissait d'assassiner la Nature. En elle, la femme, l'être terrestre, n'existait plus. [ . . . ] L'humanité s'en était allée d'elle.'

Like Zola too, they identify this life-denying Catholicism as a religion of death. Madame Gervaisais, in her final phase, is 'amoureuse de la mort,' obsessively visiting the Catacombs to stare at the skulls and skeletons, 'prête à dire, avec Job, à la pourriture: "Vous êtes ma mère!" à dire aux vers: "Vous êtes mes frères et mes sœurs!"' Though the novel has its formal ending in Madame Gervaisais' death as she awaits an audience at the door of the Pope, these scenes of horror constitute its real conclusion. It is to this corruption that religious conversion has led the woman, the chosen bride of Christ.

In the portraits of priests and penitents which abound in Realist novels, religious belief is used as a means to artistic ends. Such all-consuming emotions, such fiercely held convictions, are effective delineators of personality, producing psychological types that, with particular colouring and different sets of circumstances, can be turned into sharply etched individual characters. With the added pathos of self-delusion, the vulnerability of the credulous pilgrim embarked on a false track, the novelist has the ingredients of a rich emotional mix as well as a source of powerful irony. Flaubert exploits these possibilities as well as anyone in his account of Emma Bovary's reading. Depicting Emma as she contemplates a pile of pious works supplied by Bournisien, the narrator tells us: 'Madame Bovary n'avait pas encore l'intelligence assez nette pour s'appliquer sérieusement à n'importe quoi . . .' He is caught here in a rare moment of overt judgment of Emma, for this can only be his opinion; it is certainly not hers, and no other witness to her thoughts is present. But despite what he has just said, Emma seems after all to apply a critical sense to this material, seeing it as betraying ignorance of the world. Then comes a further switch: she reads the books despite her low evaluation of them: 'Elle persista pourtant, et, lorsque le volume lui tombait des mains, elle se croyait prise par la plus fine mélancolie catholique qu'une âme éthérée pût concevoir.' Shafts of irony fly in all directions here: against Emma and against the religious literature which she scorns but nevertheless reads, and which she turns into a means of reaching the lofty heights of romantic melancholia where her ego can flourish. It is a strange passage, with apparent contradictions: Emma is unintelligent, yet has critical judgement; she is unable to apply herself seriously to anything, yet she persists in her reading. Such contradictions are deliberate, designed to create a series of disconnected views of this fickle and inconsistent character, unable to make use of what meagre intellectual strength she might possess. A central aspect of Emma's character is illuminated here, and the religious element in her nature has supplied the necessary lighting.

Religion does not emerge unscathed from its role as an ironic reflector of character. The cumulative effect of novel after novel in which religion is disguised sexuality, or a prop to establishment values, or a sentimental stimulus, undermines not just the integrity of the character concerned, but the status of religion itself. It appears a purely subjective phenomenon with no external referent. The very concentration of novelists on what is happening within their characters detaches religious emotion from the transcendental world to which it is supposed to relate. The contrast between the imagined world of a character who believes in God and the enveloping world of the novel itself, in which God does not and cannot appear, is a further source of ironic distance between protagonist and narrator which the best of the Realists exploit to great advantage. It is instructive to compare at this point Maupassant's novel Fort comme la mort with the much earlier, pioneering Realist text of Duranty, Le Malheur d'Henriette Gérard. Duranty's universe is ontologically and metaphysically neutral. He describes the surface of social life with no reference to a spiritual dimension. A mildly acerbic anti-clericalism is conveyed through priest characters whose significance is wholly social, involved as they are in the marital schemes of the Gérard family. But on the truth or falsehood of the spiritual beliefs that these priests represent, the text implies no particular view. In Maupassant's novel, however, through a series of apparently trivial references, the philosophical ground rules for the interpretation of the fictional universe are firmly established. The Baron de Corbelle, seeking to justify his taste in social companions, 'le fit avec des arguments inconsistants et irréfutables, de ces arguments qui fondent devant la raison comme la neige au feu, et qu'on ne peut saisir, des arguments absurdes et triomphants de curé de campagne qui démontre Dieu.' In other words, the baselessness of believing in God is taken here as proverbial, as a yardstick of the absurd and the unprovable, not by a character, but by the narrator himself, and it conditions what may or may not happen in the text. Thus, when the reader sees the comtesse de Guilleroy pray for the soul of her dead mother, he knows he has been forewarned of the narrator's detachment from such impulses. When the countess calls for divine intervention, implores 'un secours surnaturel contre les dangers prochains,' he knows that such aid is not only logically but aesthetically impossible in a tale told by this particular teller. Our mode of reading, our strategies for interpreting the text, are thus effectively manipulated.

There are Realist novels in which prayers are answered, in which miracles happen and God manifests his presence in the most visible and audible ways. When this happens, we know that the novelist is displaying his conjuring tricks, enjoying his own ironic devices. At the end of Bel-Ami, for example, Christ arrives in person at the wedding of the caddish hero to the wealthy Suzanne Walter. This is given as a piece of straight narrative: 'L'encens répandait une odeur finie de benjoin, et sur l'autel le sacrifice divin s'accomplissait; l'Homme-Dieu, à l'appel de son prêtre, descendait sur la terre pour consacrer le triomphe du baron Georges Du Roy.' Even more spectacularly, in La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, Jesus converses in familiar fashion with Serge in the young priest's moment of decision:

L'abbé Mouret disait tout à Jésus, comme à un Dieu venu dans l'intimité de sa tendresse et qui peut tout entendre. [ . . . ] Et Jésus répondait que cela ne devait pas l'étonner. [ . . . ] Jésus se montrait tolérant; il expliquait que la faiblesse de l'homme est la continuelle occupation de Dieu. [ . . . ] Là, Jésus avait un léger rire de bienveillance.

Jesus' laugh probably had nothing on Zola's while these words were being written. Neither this passage nor Maupassant's needs much comment, so obviously do both novelists' tongues protrude into their cheeks. The ironic adoption of the character's false standpoint—triumphant in the case of Bel-Ami and his cohorts, hallucinatory in the case of Serge—is kept at a distance by the use of the imperfect tense, placing the 'events' outside the current chronological sequences of the novel, and outside the ontological assumptions on which the narrator bases his story. There are narratives written wholly from within a perspective alien to the novelist. Flaubert's Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier is one. In it the supernatural events are presented straightforwardly, as the tale requires. Reader and author share the same suspension of disbelief. Of Julien's mother, the narrator simply tells us: 'A force de prier Dieu, il lui vint un fils,' but in a story in which stages speak and old men appear out of moonbeams to predict Julien's saintly future, this can hardly be taken as a Flaubertian conversion to belief in Providence. In any event, the final sentence of the text gives the whole work its necessary frame and isolates it from contemporary modes of judgement: 'Et voilà l'histoire de saint Julien l'Hospitalier, telle à peu près qu'on la trouve, sur un vitrail d'église, dans mon pays.' Here—in mediaeval stained glass—are such miraculous events possible. Modern novels have different conventions, but it is a delightful paradox that no Christian novelist would dare depict the intervention of the divine into human lives as freely and as cheerfully as do Maupassant, Zola and Flaubert!

In most Realist texts, God, when he is invoked, suffers from acute deafness. In a famous scene in L'Assommoir, Gervaise, having prayed for fine weather, is submerged in a snow storm. There are more serious examples than this. Emma Bovary on her death-bed suddenly seems better following the last rites—'comme si le sacrement l'eût guérie.' Charles' hopes of a miraculous recovery are raised . . . and dashed, for this calm is merely the prelude to a horrific death agony. This cruel failure of the miracle in its moment of promise is echoed in Angélique's death scene at the end of Le Rêve. She too has just received extreme unction, and has lapsed into the appearance of death, which moves the bishop to kiss her on the lips. At once she comes to life: has God's mercy restored the girl who has devoted her life to him? No, for this is a temporary reprieve; Angélique dies shortly after. Complaints of God's cruelty abound in these texts, ironic or grave according to the circumstances. 'Il y a un bon Dieu contre moi!' cries Anatole in the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, seeking a scapegoat for hís failure as a painter. Emma too 'exécrait l'injustice de Dieu' as a way of cloaking from herself her own inadequacies. Charles' reaction to Bournisien when Emma dies—'Je l'exécre, votre Dieu!'—is more profoundly moving, except that, because the reader knows that God has played no part in Emma's banal demise, it falls short of the tragic. Flaubert's denial of tragic status to his heroine, his creation of an ironic and anti-tragic novel, depends on the relegation of the metaphysical to the role of just one more delusion in the mind of a hapless character. The Goncourts, by contrast, seeking to raise the lowly to tragic level, allow Germinie to see the lucklessness of her life as a modern equivalent of fate, in which Christian notions of providence are cleverly manipulated:

Elle se sentait dans le courant de quelque chose allant toujours, qu'il était inutile, presque impie, de vouloir arrêter. Cette grande force du monde qui fait souffrir, la puissance mauvaise qui porte le nom d'un dieu sur le marbre des tragédies antiques, et qui s'appelle Pas-de-chance sur le front tatoué des bagnes, la Fatalité l'écrasait, et Germinie baissait le tête sous son pied. [ . . . ] Cette file de douleurs qui avait suivi ses années et grandi avec elles, tout ce qui s'était succédé dans son existence comme une rencontre et un arrangement de misère, sans que jamais elle y eût vu apparaître la main de cette Providence dont on lui avait tant parlé, elle se disait qu'elle était une de ces malheureuses vouées en naissant à une éternité de misères. . . .

Though Germinie invests the adverse currents of life with a religious aura—that is, she feels a sense of impiety because she resents them—it is clear that, whereas Greek tragedy depends on the malice of the gods, nineteenth-century Realist tragedy, as conceived by the Goncourts, depends on God's absence: there is no trace of Providence. The brothers' masterly trompel'œil has it both ways: fate, always a useful literary device, exists, but God, traditional source of solace, remains invisible. Germinie is dwarfed by a force larger than herself, raising her plight to a grander plane, but the force is without spiritual substance, thus protecting the Goncourts' philosophical position.

God's failure to protect men from suffering is a common theme in Realist fiction. It is expressed through the mouth of the young doctor Barnier, who falls in love with sœur Philomène and who spends his days combating disease and pain. 'Vous trouvez,' he asks the nun, 'un père à remercier au bout de tout cela?' Barnier is a sceptic, whose question is a rhetorical device in his argument with Philomène. In Zola's Thérèse Raquin, it is, on the contrary, a life-long believer who rejects God for his non-intervention on behalf of the victims of violence. Madame Raquin, Thérèse's mother-in-law, learns from the mouth of Thérèse that she and Laurent have conspired to drown Thérèse's first husband, the old woman's son Camille; but mute and paralysed, her only recourse is to implore God which she does in vain. What is revealed to her is not God's mercy but the inescapable brutality of human beings, which her faith in heaven's redemptive powers had cloaked from her all through life. Only one conclusion is possible: 'Dieu était mauvais; il aurait dû lui dire la vérité plus tôt, ou la laisser s'en aller avec ses innocences et son aveuglement. Maintenant, il ne lui restait qu'à mourir en niant l'amitié, en niant le dévouement. Rien n'existait que le meurtre et la luxure.' Zola uses here the misguided optimism of a blissful Christian view of life as the revealed untruth on which to found his portrayal of human bestiality. Edmond de Goncourt employs a similar strategy in La Fille Élisa, but adds a further factor. The young soldier who forces his brutal sexual attentions on Élisa, leading her to the act of killing which in turn causes her imprisonment, is a Christian, through whom the text weaves a series of associations between religious ecstasy, eroticism and violence. The fact that the soldier had been, in civilian life, a shepherd, is also significant, allowing the image of the Good Shepherd himself to emerge in sinister light, while Élisa is left echoing the words of the crucified Christ: why has God abandoned her?

The accusation of God's wickedness is expressed most forcefully of all by Maupassant. His tale 'Moiron' is about a child murderer whose career of killing has been triggered by the deaths of his own children. God, he reasons, could have saved his children; for him murder is simply protest by emulation. 'Je compris que Dieu est méchant,' Moiron tells the narrator. 'Pourquoi avait-il tué mes enfants? J'ouvris les yeux, et je vis qu'il aime tuer. Il n'aime que ça, monsieur. Il ne fait vivre que pour détruire! Dieu, monsieur, c'est un massacreur.' Maupassant's last work, a literary testament which was barely begun before his final decline into madness and death, was designed as an elaboration of this theme of divine cruelty. It was to be called L'Angélus. Although only fragments of it were written, Maupassant's verbal testimony to the poet Auguste Dorchain shows that his aim was to create a bitter parody of the Nativity, the story of a crippled boy born in a stable to a life of unrelenting pain. The first extant fragment introduces the pregnant comtesse de Brémontal, who has prayed to the Virgin Mary, patroness of mothers, for the birth of a daughter. Prussian officers arrive at the house (for Maupassant has returned to the period of his first great success Boule de suif) and eject the young countess into the night. . . . A second brief fragment introduces a young doctor, Paturel; the third is a dialogue between him and a priest, the abbé Marvaux. In this fragment, Paturel says that all gods are monsters, that his experience as a doctor has given him evidence of the crimes of so-called Providence that he could write up in a legal 'dossier de Dieu.' The priest replies that the concept of God is hard to grasp, but that Christ, whom he adores, makes God accessible. But to this exemplary Christian thought he adds that Christ too was a victim of God, that his love of mankind was a reflection of his human, not his divine, self; and that this is why Christ had to be punished more severely than any man has ever been. The fourth and final fragment is a speech by this same troubled priest, and, echoing the words of the killer Moiron, it is perhaps the most ferocious onslaught on the Christian God in the whole of the Realist canon. God is presented as an unrelenting sadist, giving life merely to extinguish it, inventing cholera and typhus as instruments of torture, creating animals whose beauty and vitality cloak with cruel mockery the physical corruption into which they are doomed to fall. This was the final passage Maupassant was ever to write, his message to posterity. The career that had begun with satire of religious bigotry ends in an explosion of fury against God himself.

The spectacle of nature, and especially of animals, links Maupassant's first novel Une vie to this last unfinished text. In both, the opposition of innocent nature to divine cruelty reverses the Christian message of grace redeeming a fallen physical universe. Horses running free in meadows, birds singing in their nests, all unaware of their inevitable fate at the hands of the great destroyer that men call God, are manifestations of life's flawed beauty; despite their inherent pathos, they occupy the positive pole in Maupassant's view of the world, against the stern and life-denying dictates of so-called Providence. Other Realist novelists use animals, especially birds, as emblems of innocent freshness and vitality and as representatives of an eternal natural order, in contrast to which the Christian church appears a mere fleeting expression of one cultural phase in the earth's long history. In the Rome visited by Madame Gervaisais, the lesson of the transience of all civilisations, embodied in the monuments of antiquity and extending by implication to the Church of Rome itself, is underpinned by the encroachment of nature into the ruins, and by the flight of birds around the crumbling stones. 'Des oiseaux volaient familièrement dans le monstrueux nid de pierre,' runs the text; '[ . . . ] La ruine revenait à la nature [ . . . ]—toutes les revendications et toutes les reprises de la nature éternelle sur la Ville éternelle.' In the authors' earlier novel Renée Mauperin, a description of a country church visited by the dying heroine includes the same contrast between nature's animation and dead ecclesiastical stone:

L'église avait comme un murmure de voix éteintes, l'azur jouait dans les vitraux. Des envolées de pigeons partaient à tout instant et couraient se nicher dans le creux des sculptures et les trous des vieilles pierres. La rivière qu'on voyait bruissait; un poulain blanc courait à l'eau fou et tout bondissant.

Was Zola thinking of this passage when describing Serge Mouret's dilapidated church? The elements of the picture are the same, but as usual it is Zola who hones them into the most intense degree of polemical sharpness. As Serge says mass, a veritable invasion is taking place, nature forcing its way into the church, interrupting, deriding, challenging the supremacy of the priest's religion. The sun does not simply play on the stained glass windows as in the Goncourt text; it bursts in, illuminates the previous bleakness of the nave, seems to bring a smile to the face of the plaster Virgin, but leaves in shade the corner where 'le grand christ [ . . . ] mettait la mort.' Birds enter the church via the broken windows, their songs drowning the voice of the priest and the ringing of the bells of the mass; at the supreme moment when 'le corps et le sang d'un Dieu allaient descendre sur l'autel,' Mouret's housekeeper is chasing sparrows from the altar. As Christ comes to redeem 'la nature damnée,' damned nature asserts itself, healthy, free and joyful, needing no redemption. Serge's sister Désirée arrives with a bevy of chicks. The sun beams more brightly, the gold of the holy vessels paling in its rays. 'L'astre demeura seul maître de l'église,' writes Zola; 'les murailles badigeonnées, la grande vierge, le grand christ lui-même, prenaient un frisson de sève, comme si la mort était vaincue par l'éternelle jeunesse de la terre.' Seldom can an allegedly objective Naturalist have written so ambiguously partial an opening scene. When we follow Serge Mouret out of his church, see it from outside, the same testimony to nature's force goes on. The exterior walls are eaten by vegetation. The implacable opposition of nature and church is even expressed in the hostile contact between thistles and the hem of Frère Archangias' robes as he walks across the fields. The natural world has declared war on the usurping Christian deity; and when the priest, lying with Albine in the shade of the Tree of Life, finally follows nature's laws, this is identified as the triumph for which the opening scene of the book was the preparation: 'Et c'était une victoire pour les bêtes, les plantes, les choses, qui avaient voulu l'entrée de ces deux enfants dans l'éternité de la vie. Le parc applaudissait formidablement.' Animais, plants, things. It is matter itself, 'les atomes de la matière', the substance of the physical world, in opposition to the spiritual, that has won the day.