Opening Passage:
For more than eighteeen months now, Durtal had been living in Val-des-Saints. Tired of Chartres, where he had provisionally settled, and plagued by desultory longings for the cloister, he'd left for the abbey of Solesmes.
Recommended to the head of the monastery by Abbé Plomb, one of the curates at Chartres who had known his reverence a number of years, Durtal had been cordially received and had stayed at the monastery on several occasions for more than a fortnight, but he always came back more ill at ease, more uncertain than before. He would meet up again joyfully with his old friends, Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper, Madame Bavoil; he would return to his lodgings with a sigh of relief, and then the same thing would happen: little by little he was seized again by memories of the conventual life at Solesmes, so utterly different from that which he'd experienced at La Trappe. (p. 23)
Summary: His imagination captured by the Benedictine work with plainchant at Solesmes, Durtal is convinced by a Benedictine monk, Dom Felletin, to try smoe time at Val-des-Saints, and settles in so well that he begins to consider becoming an oblate. The oblature is path for those who wish to participate in monastic life with the monks but who for one reason or other require a life that overlaps more with the world than a monk's life; althought, beyond that, exactly what an oblate is, or should be, is not always clear (a recurring theme in the book is discussion of various historical forms the oblature has taken).
Val-des-Saints is not perfect. Durtal is really in many ways a city boy so this small-town provincial life occasionally grates on him. The town is also in a bit of a slow-motion crisis. As a monastic town, it's very difficult to be a parish priest -- you are always having to navigate the monastery having at least as much, and sometimes more, authority and influence than you do, which is a problem because in practice you are always having to mediate, if you can, between the abbot and the bishop. The compromise that has been temporarily accepted as Durtal settles down there is that the monastery is providing all the priestly functions for the parish, including its pastor, until the bishop can find a suitable secular priest. This however, causes tensions in another directions; a monk as parish pastor is very good at many things, but being part of the social life of the town is practically impossible. In particular, the local gentry are pushing hard to have him replaced with a priest they can invite to dinners and the like. For Durtal, however, it means an excellent context. This is especially true as he makes friends with the monks, with Mademoiselle de Garambois, a fellow oblate, and her uncle Monsieur Lampre, a crotchety curmudgeon of a bachelor who has a heart of gold, an enthusiasm for collecting illuminated prayer books, and a complaining but constant support for the Benedictines. When his friend Madame Bavoil comes to stay with him, that only makes it better.
Inevitably, there are clouds on the horizon. The bishop eventually selects a parish priest, Father Barbenton, who immediately begins a power struggle with the monastery, and, to Durtal's astonished horror, decides to do so by picking on plainchant, substituting hymns set to the music of popular showtunes. The local gentry, at first relieved finally to have a priest who can participate in their social life, but begin to be less enthusiastic when they come up against one of the perpetual problems of parish laity, the fact that all the things they want their parish church to do cost time and money. When the parish activities had been part of the work of the monastery, the monastery (which like Benedictine monasteries generally has its own income as well as donations from visitors) had diverted part of its funds to maintaining parish needs. Now that the monastery is no longer in charge of the parish, the monastery is no longer paying for parish resources, and things that were being treated by the locals as free turn out to require funds that can only come from them. It's the old story: Everybody takes for granted good things for which they don't have to pay; but when they have to pay, everybody is also sure that someone else is better positioned to pay for those good things than they are. This does not work to the favor of the monks; the monastery seems to some of the locals to be sitting on a lot of funds, and that they might need such things for the complicated work and many charitable requirements of monastic life is not the sort of thing that the locals would consider.
Far more seriously than the local tensions is the impending Law of Associations, which will strip religious institutions of a number of their protections and require of them things like lists of their members and their personal information and a complete inventory of all the property of the monastery (not always an easy thing when you are a several-centuries-old monastery). The monks and a few of the shrewder locals realize immediately what that means -- the state can only tax what it can see, and it is trying to measure how much stored wealth is available to be skimmed. Up to the very passing of the bill, the monks are hoping that it will go away. When it is passed, it is like a thunderbolt into the city. Religious institutions across France have to assess their options. For monasteries in particular, one of the problems is that the Law of Associations in effect treats bishops as the primary relevant authorities even when canon law does not. A Benedictine monastery, like that at Val-des-Saints, will no longer have its monastic independence if it stays, with the danger of continual infringements on its customs and traditions. The abbot at Val-des-Saints decides that their only real option is to move to Belgium. But what is a monastic town without a monastery? Not much. The monastery, of course, brought in tourists; it also brought in donations which, while paid to the monastery, eventually in one way or another circulated into the local community. All of that begins to dry up almost immediately.
As for Durtal, he looks around him at French Catholics, and he sees little room for hope. French Catholics are mostly supinely passive beneath the law. They will not fight for the things they are losing. Durtal had had a bit of a daydream of a thriving French Catholic community centered on a Benedictine monastery as a great center of religious art of all kinds, taking the success of the Solesmes community and expanding it to all other arts. But French Catholics are apparently willing to accept showtune-hymns and sentimentalist kitsch. Good taste is not necessary for faith or religion, but bad taste weakens the Church. And whether it is cause, effect, or correlate of this, French Catholics are also willing to accept not fighting for the things that have been built over long years. Many of the monks think the Law of Associations is a temporary thing; but Durtal is not so sure. So he returns to Paris with his books, not knowing what the future will be. His hopes are largely in shambles, although he recognizes that many others have it worse than he does in this matters. But there's nothing much to do except put one foot in front of another. Thus the book, and the whole Durtal series, ends:
'Ah, my dear Lord, give us the grace not to haggle like this; to forget ourselves once and for all; to live at last, no matter where, so long as it be far from ourselves, and close to you.' (p. 350)
Favorite Passage:
In the countryside, when a boy is sickly and unable to bear the strain of working on the land or in the vineyards, his mother says: "He's delicate, this little chap; we'll make a priest of him," and that's how Father Barbenton was entered into a seminary, then sent successively to various villages as a curate, and finally appointed as the parish priest of Val-des-Saints.
All the priests to whom Monsignor Triaurault had offered the post had declined, being well aware of the awkward position a parish priest would be in, opposite an abbot and his monastery.
Father Barbenton, however, had accepted, on the assurance that after a certain time he would be transferred to a better parish, which was highly unlikely because it was quite clear that if he succeeded in his conflict with the abbey, the bishop would be in no hurry to move him, and if the opposite was the case, he wouldn't promote him, and if he felt he'd been too compromised wouldn't hesitate to crush him. (p. 197)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended. This is in some ways both a funnier and a sadder book than the previous ones.
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J.-K. Huysmans, The Oblate, Brendan King, tr., Dedalus (Sawtry, Cambridgeshire: 2022).