Before him he saw marching a procession of prelates.  The archimandrites and patriarchs, their white beards waving during the reading of the prayers, lifted golden arms to bless kneeling throngs.  He saw silent files of penitents marching into dim crypts.  Before him rose vast cathedrals where white monks intoned from pulpits.  Just as De Quincey, having taken a dose of opium and uttered the word “Consul Romanus,” evoked entire pages of Livius, and beheld the solemn advance of the consuls and the magnificent, pompous march of the Roman armies, so he, at a theological expression, paused breathless as he viewed the onrush of penitents and the churchly apparitions which detached themselves from the glowing depths of the basilica.  These scenes held him enchanted.  They moved from age to age, culminating in the modern religious ceremonies, bathing his soul in a tender, mournful infinity of music.

On this plane, no reasonings were necessary; there were no further contests to be endured.  He had an indescribable impression of respect and fear.  His artistic sense was conquered by the skillfully calculated Catholic rituals.  His nerves quivered at these memories.  Then, in sudden rebellion, in a sudden reversion, monstrous ideas were born in him, fancies concerning those sacrileges warned against by the manual of the Father confessors, of the scandalous, impure desecration of holy water and sacred oil.  The Demon, a powerful rival, now stood against an omnipotent God.  A frightful grandeur seemed to Des Esseintes to emanate from a crime committed in church by a believer bent, with blasphemously horrible glee and sadistic joy, over such revered objects, covering them with outrages and saturating them in opprobrium.

Before him were conjured up the madnesses of magic, of the black mass, of the witches’ revels, of terrors of possessions and of exorcisms.  He reached the point where he wondered if he were not committing a sacrilege in possessing objects which had once been consecrated:  the Church canons, chasubles and pyx covers.  And this idea of a state of sin imparted to him a mixed sensation of pride and relief.  The pleasures of sacrilege were unravelled from the skein of this idea, but these were debatable sacrileges, in any case, and hardly serious, since he really loved these objects and did not pollute them by misuse.  In this wise he lulled himself with prudent and cowardly thoughts, the caution of his soul forbidding obvious crimes and depriving him of the courage necessary to the consummation of frightful and deliberate sins.

Little by little this tendency to ineffectual quibbling disappeared.  In his mind’s eye he saw the panorama of the Church with its hereditary influence on humanity through the centuries.  He imagined it as imposing and suffering, emphasizing to man the horror of life, the infelicity of man’s destiny; preaching patience, penitence and the spirit of sacrifice; seeking to heal wounds, while it displayed the bleeding wounds of Christ; bespeaking divine privileges; promising the richest part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting humanity to suffer and to render to God, like a holocaust, its trials and offenses, its vicissitudes and pains.  Thus the Church grew truly eloquent, the beneficent mother of the oppressed, the eternal menace of oppressors and despots.