I urge good men everywhere to read “The Woman Who was Poor” by Léon Bloy, a master of the art of darkness, which shows the ugliness of sin and illustrates its destructive consequences. His novel is indeed a masterpiece of the genre.
It is said that all is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. It might also be said that all that’s necessary for a good book to be forgotten is that good men do not tell others about it once they’ve read it. It is in this spirit that I’m going to urge good men everywhere to read The Woman Who was Poor (La Femme Pauvre) by Léon Bloy. Neither the novel, nor the novelist is as well known in the English-speaking world as they deserve to be, so it might be good to start with a little contextual background.
Léon Bloy was a central figure in the French Catholic Literary Revival, which paralleled the similar revival in England. Born in 1846 in southwestern France, Bloy’s unhappy youth was characterized by agnosticism and an intense hatred of the Catholic Church. Moving to Paris, he met Barbey d’Aurevilly, the aging novelist who had converted to Catholicism in the year in which Bloy was born. Under Barbey d’Aurevilly’s influence, Bloy experienced a dramatic religious conversion and was received into the Catholic Church. Thereafter, he would exert a profound influence on French culture. His friendship with the philosophers Jacques and Raïssa Maritain would result in their own conversions to Catholicism, the impact of which is immeasurable considering the role of the Maritains in the Thomistic Revival in the twentieth century. Bloy would also prove instrumental in the conversion of the Decadent novelist, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose own influence on the Catholic Literary Revival would be considerable.
If Bloy had a weakness, it was the occasional shrillness of his vociferous defence of Christianity and Christendom and the vituperative spirit in which he attacked those whom he considered to be the enemies of Christian civilization. Such shrillness and vituperativeness are present in The Woman Who was Poor, bestowing on the novel an edginess which makes for uncomfortable reading on occasion. Such a weakness, if indeed we choose to consider it such, pales beside the sanctity which is present throughout the pages of the story in the form of Clotilde, the eponymous heroine. Such sanctity is made all the more apparent by the sheer diabolical wickedness of the world she is forced to inhabit.
Bloy is best known perhaps for his graphic depiction of the sordid reality of sin and the satanic presence and even demonic possession that accompanies it. As such, those with a squeamish disposition might find The Woman Who was Poor unbearable and therefore unreadable. Those with puritanical sensibilities might even find it offensive. The best response that I can offer is the necessity of knowing the difference between the dark arts and the art of darkness. Evil art makes sin attractive, denying its sinfulness and seducing us with the lie that it is only a pleasure to be grasped when the opportunity presents itself. Such art reduces all morality to mere ambivalence and ambiguity, and replaces the truths of religion with the mere opinions of the relativist. The art of darkness, on the other hand, shows the ugliness of sin and illustrates its destructive consequences. It is not evil art but the realistic portrayal of evil in art. It is not sinful but is full of sin. Once this difference is understood, we should see Léon Bloy as a master of the art of darkness and The Woman Who was Poor as a masterpiece of the genre.
The paradox is that the darker the evil of the backdrop, the more bright does the light of sanctity shine forth. The more that Clotilde suffers, the more does her holiness burst forth epiphanously as the light of Christ in a world which insists on crucifying the saints, even as it crucifies itself in the manner of the blasphemous Bad Thief. And Clotilde is crucified continuously, page after page, from the opening pages to the very end of the book, though she is comforted on the cross, crucially, by the handful of good men who offer her succour.
Clotilde is a young woman when we first meet her. She is living with her wicked mother and her equally wicked stepfather, the latter of whom is physically abusive and would have been sexually abusive also, were it not for Clotilde’s spirited resistance to his advances. Adding insult to injury, these monstrous “guardians” are frustrated by Clotilde’s persistence in virtue and her refusal to bring extra income to the family through the selling of her own body. Forced by the stepfather to accept work as an artist’s model, Clotilde refuses to strip naked, to the artist’s astonishment. Faced with such extraordinary coyness, he is entranced by the transparency of her virtue. Resolved to save her from the defiling clutches of her stepfather, he defies convention and refuses to send her home, putting her up in a boarding house and buying her clothes to replace the threadbare rags she was wearing. Their relationship remains platonic and she models for him, fully clothed, for a painting of Saint Philomena, but that doesn’t stop others from presuming a sinful motive on the part of the artist and an equally sinful acquiescence on the part of Clotilde. Symbolically, therefore, Clotilde is united with the saint she is modeling, who is in turn her own model. She is a virgin martyr.
Such is the wickedness of the world that the innocent are always presumed guilty until such time that they can be crucified. The artist and his model are duly crucified. This scenario put me in mind of Chesterton’s novel, Manalive, in which the aptly named Innocent Smith is so transparently innocent that everyone presumes that he must be guilty. Clotilde is the female prefiguration of Chesterton’s protagonist.
As I followed Clotilde’s progress on her pilgrimage on the via dolorosa, I couldn’t help being reminded of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in 1897, the same year in which The Woman Who was Poor was published. The differences between the fictional heroine and the real-life saint are obvious enough. St. Thérèse was blessed to have two holy parents, both of whom have also been canonized, whereas the hapless Clotilde was much less fortunate. St. Thérèse entered the religious life and was inflicted with sickness, which she embraced with great holiness; Clotilde lived a life of religion without entering the religious life and was inflicted with the sickness of others, which she also embraced with great holiness. Such differences are ultimately superficial. What unites them is their childlike chastity and innocence in the presence of affliction, and the wisdom that is its holy fruit. St. Thérèse is known as the Little Flower. Clotilde also is a little flower, which is all the more beautiful for the squalor of the gutter in which it was planted.
Clotilde’s final words, which also serve as the final words of the novel, could have been spoken by St. Thérèse herself: “There is only one misery and that is not to be saints.”
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The featured image, uploaded by Sailko, is “A Beggar Woman” (1861) by Hugues Merle. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.