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My Journal: 1896-1900
My Journal: 1896-1900 by Léon Bloy (AD 1846-1917) is the second diary in the Ungrateful Beggar series.
Edited for publication, the diary chronicles four and a half years in the tortured, perpetually destitute, but “perfectly adorable”life of the intransigeant Catholic writer and his family. It also recounts seventeen months in voluntary exile in the northern climes of Protestant Denmark where, despite his hopes for a new beginning, misfortune and misery followed him and his circumstances went quickly from bad to worse.
“[January 11, 1899] Journey to Kolding, small neighboring village where we will live as best we can. There is a minuscule Catholic church here, too vast for its parishioners. Emotion to see a humble crèche of the Epiphany with the German magi and camels waiting for us. We are now so far removed from France that it is only here, within these few square meters, on this Catholic islet lost in the middle of Lutherʼs ice floes, that God can speak to us and we can speak to God.”
Despite everything – and perhaps because of it – the writer was able to produce in this time period Je MʼAccuse... and The Son of Louis XVI, while gathering material for what would later become Exegesis of Commonplaces and Blood of the Poor.
Great Men Are Slain Here
Great Men Are Slain Here by Léon Bloy is a biography of sorts on Ernest Hello. Originally published in AD 1895 (under the French title of Ici on assassine les grands hommes), it was meant to provide a necessary corrective to the “official” biography commissioned by Mme. Hello, after her husbandʼs passing.
Léon Bloy was not a fan of Mme. Hello (nor she of him), and he was even less a fan of her husbandʼs biography, in which she had a heavy hand.
Great Men Are Slain Here is part biography (to set the record straight), part criticism (of how Mme. Hello treated her husband, his friend, in life and death), and part satire.
To tell the virtues of the family, of multiple families, the first phrases of the sublime child, the memorable expressions of papas and mamas, the angelic passions of the young man, his marriage plans, the ineffable purity of soul of the fiancés and their union under the watching eyes of seraphim; – things that should have remained in proud obscurity; – to go on and on, finally, about Madame Hello, the divine Mama Zoé, in so many pages, great God!... And all that, from beginning to end, in that rheumy form, runny and cold like scrofula, which characterizes the prospectuses of shirtmakers for clergymen or the sacrilegious instructions of propagation excogitated by some libidinous soutanes....
[The biographer] strikes a dithyrambic match across his backside and declares to us, among other things, that “Hello, if read and understood, would illuminate the modern mind,” that “his glory, which is that of God, would have been the good fortune of a century.” In passing, he compares him to the Sun...
The Ungrateful Beggar
The Ungrateful Beggar (The Authorʼs Journal, 1892-1895), published in 1898, is the first in the Ungrateful Beggar series (or “The Journal”) by Léon Bloy.
Edited for publication by the author, it is a day-by-day account of interactions with friends, artists, wife, children, publishers, landlords, and such events as his hiring on with (and getting sacked from) the Gil Blas, his writing for the Mercure de France, the death of his two boys...; it includes his innermost thoughts, fears, torments, joys, – always in the context of a miserable poverty, and a never-dying Catholic faith, where “all that happens in life is adorable.”
Artists interacted with in this period include Henry de Groux, Émile Zola, François Coppée, Remy de Gourmont, Laurent Tailhade, Auguste Rodin, Paul Bourget, Charles Buet, Georges dʼEsparbès. Works that the author wrote and published during this period include: Salvation Through the Jews, Sueur de Sang [Sweating Blood], Histoires désobligeantes [Disagreeable Tales], Léon Bloy devant les cochons [Léon Bloy Before the Swine], Ici on assassine les grands hommes [Great Men Are Slain Here].
The Desperate Man
The Desperate Man, 2nd Edition, (first published in 1887) is arguably the French decadent novel par excellence of the 19th century. It is also Léon Bloyʼs first novel and a seminal work which, as such, planted the seeds of just about every other important theme or topic that the author would later develop in subsequent works throughout his life and career. Life is rain water for talented writers; and habitual poverty for Bloy acted as the mulch.
There is in The Desperate Man the seed of satire, which was actually a small tree by the time The Desperate Man came out, the seed having been sprouted earlier in his career, in the articles for newspapers, predominantly the Chat Noir journal, – such satire as to rival Jonathan Swiftʼs; there is also the seed of apocalyptic Catholicism in The Desperate Man, and the nuts of the exegeses of commonplaces, not to mention the germs of the blood of the poor; there is the kernel of the constant attack on contemporaneous clergy and Bloyʼs self-professed fondness for cenobitism. There is the spore of the eulogy for sainthood, and the embryo of the denunciation of the proxenetism of the press, Parisian high-society and the bourgeoisie. There are the negative grains of anti-Republicanism, and anti-German sentiment. There are the positive grains of pro-conservativism, pro-Medievalism, pro-Monarchy, and pro-Merovingian French Dynasty.
Meditations of a Solitary in 1916
Meditations of a Solitary in 1916 was written by Léon Bloy in 1916 in France, during World War I, and published in 1917, the same year that the author passed away. The themes are mostly theological, with sustained meditations on both the Christian soul and the lack of soul of Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany. Indeed, although biographical in nature, one might consider this less a follow up to On the Threshold of the Apocalypse in the Ungrateful Beggar series and more a companion piece to The Soul of Napoleon, but in a Bizarro sort of way, with a candidate alternative title of The Bizarro Soul of Wilhelm II, or Wilhelm IIʼs Lack of Soul, – such was the rage, frustration, contempt, sadness, heart-rending compassion of the author at the time of writing.
“How to accuse Wilhelm alone? That fellow at best is nothing more than an imbecile, as frightening an imbecile as you like, but an imbecile all the same..."
“ʻSo,ʼ someone asks me, ʻwhat remains?ʼ Absolutely nothing but the Eucharist in the Catacombs and waiting for the unknown Liberator whom the Paraclete must dispatch, when the blood of countless torture victims and the tears of some elect will have sufficiently purified the earth... God is preparing to start over again... the fulfillment of that apocalyptic prophecy is near.”
Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne
Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne: 1900-1904 by Léon Bloy (originally Quatre ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne) is the third diary in the Ungrateful Beggar series.
The autobiography, edited for publication, covers four years in the artistʼs life after he and his family moved back to France from Denmark, to Lagny on the Marne, about 40 kilometers outside Paris. It runs the gamut from gut-wrenching grief and sorrow, as the family lives on the edge of utter poverty while constantly being harassed by creditors and landladies; to full outrage against the pettiness, avarice, and hypocrisy of the bourgeois and wealthy; to uplifting praise for God for all that is adorable in life in spite of the suffering; to out-and-out satire and comicalness that will make the reader laugh before he can dry the tears.
“Terrible day! The lack of wine and fortifying alimentation, the threat of a lack of coal, the human certitude of being unable to feed our children tomorrow, the impossibility of continuing to live here and the impossibility of escaping, the apparent abandonment of everyone and the evident hostility of so many people; finally, and above all, that infinitely dolorous expectation of a liberator who never comes; all that together puts us two steps away from despair. While we stiffen our wills, our house is shaken by a tempest and the sky is sad like death without God. For whom then do we suffer thus?”
Constantinople and Byzantium
Constantinople and Byzantium by Léon Bloy (1846-1917) was originally published in book form in 1917, itself a “definitive re-printing of The Byzantine Epic and Gustave Schlumberger, published in 1906 by the Nouvelle Revue.” This book is a summary and interpretation then, à la Bloy, of Schlumbergerʼs “trilogy” with its focus on the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium from the middle of the tenth century to the middle of the eleventh. It covers the rise and fall of such warrior emperors as Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II, the “Bulgar Slayer,” under whom the Eastern Roman Empire experienced a kind of Renaissance, after a long series of wars with Bulgars, Rus (Russians), Saracens, and later Normans, to name only a few peoples, in the years and decades immediately preceding the Crusades. The last chapter treats of the two Porphyrogenita (“born in the purple”) empresses, Zoe and Theodora, “last branches of the Macedonian oak.”
“It is proven that God has no need of anyoneʼs ʻday after,ʼ and that his eternal today satisfies him. Pettiness is no less asked for than Greatness in the laboratory of prodigies. Disparate or desperate successions operate inexpressibly in a mysterious and adored way, in view of compensations or ineffable recuperations. So it is very simple that a series of mediocre or abject emperors should succeed a personage like the great Basil in order to destroy his work. Thirty years after his death, in 1055, his empire was ruined forever.”
The Biography of Léon Bloy
The Biography of Léon Bloy: Memories of a Friend, published in 1921, is the official biography of Léon Bloy (1846-1917) by his friend, René Martineau. René Martineau and Léon Bloy were good friends for the last eighteen years of the latter writerʼs life.
“The first time I met Léon Bloy was at the train station in Lagny, in 1901.” Lagny or Lagny-sur-Marne or, as Léon Bloy later put it, “Cochons-sur-Marne” (“cochons” meaning “pigs” in French). Bloy goes into day-after-day detail about the struggles he lived through there, in his published journal Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne (Quatre ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)... four grievous years in the artistʼs already grievous life. They were, in René Martineauʼs words, four years of “... unexpected contact of the most vulgar provincial villagers with the least common of French writers.”
The biography continues to follow Bloy, after Lagny, in Montmartre and then Bourg-la-Reine, (outside of Paris), until his passing. It also covers Bloyʼs early years, based on information obtained from the writer himself, and his wife, Mme. Bloy, as well as from letters, and friends.
It is as much a biography as a defense, or apologia, of the great writer, whose reputation had suffered greatly as a result of the “conspiration of silence” during his lifetime, and following it. As René Martineau succinctly puts it, “One will recognize in him [Bloy] an honest, affectionate, solitary man, of a ponderous mind and full of bravery, as neither the injustices nor the poverty that he faced had prevented him from achieving the most original, eloquent, and powerful work of our era... His complete works, while entering into literary history, will be Léon Bloyʼs best defense in the face of posterity.”
The Resurrection of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
The Resurrection of Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam, by Léon Bloy, originally published in 1906, 15 years after Villiersʼ passing, is as much an homage to Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam – his literary corpus and genius – as it is a plea to Thomas Edison to help subscribe monetarily to the statue, sculpted in marble, by Frédéric Brou.
“And now, itʼs to you that I address myself, Thomas Alva Edison. Will you not do anything for him who did so much for you? If you are known in France other than by your inventions, the ʻsorcerer of Menlo Park,ʼ it is because of Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam...”
Villiers had written The Future Eve, whose main character, or protagonist, was Edison.
“The central preoccupation, the umbilicus, of the singular poet that was the author of The Future Eve was, and this is something that must be completely intolerable to imbeciles, his really unprecedented need for a restitution of woman... It has nothing to do with a pleading, with a dithyrambic paranymph, with such and such fawning praise for the dangerous Sex. It has to do with a renewal of earthly Paradise, after the harsh winter of six thousand years. It has to do with rediscovering that famous Garden of Voluptuousness, the symbol and accomplishment of Woman, that all men search gropingly for throughout the centuries.”
“In any case, she lived within him, in what a frothy life! and that is her whom I see pulling off the boards of his coffin!”
The Son of Louis XVI
The Son of Louis XVI (Le Fils de Louis XVI in French), by Léon Bloy, is a monograph on the life of Louis-Charles de France, youngest son of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, both executed by guillotine in 1793 during the French Revolution. The eight-year-old Dauphin, and rightful heir to the throne, was kept in captivity in the Temple Tower where he is said to have died in 1795.
Others contend that he survived, that he escaped the Temple in 1795 through an intrigue instigated by Josephine Beauharnais of all people. He resurfaces in Prussia in 1810 as Charles-William Naundorff, the “pretender.” When he tries to regain contact with his sister, the “saintly” Duchess dʼAngoulême, she will have none of it.
“One did what one could to kill him. The most barbaric imprisonments, knife, fire, poison, calumny, fierce ridicule, dark misery and black chagrin, all were employed. One succeeded in the end, when God had had enough of guarding over him... when he had succeeded in bearing his penance of sixty kings.”
“Louis XVII, universally rejected, reigned however for fifty years, from 1795, year of his supposed death, to 1845. He reigned ʻdemonetized,ʼ invisible, and all-powerful, by the very impossibility of proving that he did not exist.”
She Who Weeps
She Who Weeps (Our Lady of La Salette) by Léon Bloy (Celle qui pleure, in French) was originally published in 1908. This is a new English translation of a work that is arguably a keystone of religious thought in Bloyʼs canon, given the authorʼs strong belief in, and promotion of, not only Mariology but also Millenarianism, both which beliefs permeate his work. Originally begun in 1879, before his articles written as a scatalogical demolitionary pamphleteer for the Chat Noir journal, before his ground-breaking first novel, The Desperate Man, which was, by the authorʼs own admission, the beginning of the “conspiration of silence” against him – She Who Weeps was surprisingly abandoned at first. It was only later when Pierre Termier, a lay “ambassador of Mary,” and close friend of the author in his later years, approached Bloy about the work, that the latter, encouraged, and with rekindled interest, picked it up again and brought it to completion.
It discusses the story of Mélanie Calvat, and also Maximin Giraud, two children-shepherds in the French Alps, witnesses to the Apparition of the Very Holy Virgin Mary on September 19, 1846, – twelve years before the more famous Marian Apparition at Lourdes – and the consequences that the event had on the lives of the two children – particularly Mélanie, who devoted her life to promoting the message.
“Pass it on to all my My People, the Mother of God had said to the Shepherds, having announced to them the Great News...”
On the Threshold of the Apocalypse: 1913-1915
On the Threshold of the Apocalypse: 1913-1915 is the seventh volume from Léon Bloyʼs personal journal begun in 1892. This volume begins one year before World War I began, but ends, like the author (who passed in 1917), before the great war ended. Often prescient when it comes to the European stage, and particularly the imminent threat posed by Prussian Germany, with respect to France, “the Eldest Daughter of the Church,” – Bloy had been predicting a terrible cataclysm as far back as the early 1870s. In fact, Our Lady of Salette, whom Bloy was familiar with, provided the religious explanation for the war, if purely human reasons were not enough.
In this journal, the bloody writing on the wall is seen as early as January, 1913: “When one wants to change a banknote, one is bombarded with one-hundred sous pieces. The Bank has returned all the gold coin to its vaults, in prevision for some dreadful war.” In late July, 1914, he writes, “Universal disquietude caused by the menacing attitude of Austria toward Serbia takes shape all of a sudden. That war being able to have a European conflagration for effect... Are the announced cataclysms close finally?” On July 31, 1914, he writes: “Austria has just begun its war with Serbia which will infallibly unleash everything.”
What follows is a nearly daily account of the war as seen from Paris, Chartres, Rennes. But with all the cataclysm and apocalyptic gloom that one would expect, from a man like Léon Bloy, there is also the optimism, and good faith, in a good God: “All that happens in life is perfectly adorable, because nothing happens that is outside the divine plan.”
Joan of Arc and Germany
Joan of Arc and Germany (originally Jeanne dʼArc et lʼAllemagne), by Léon Bloy, was published in 1915. It is an account of the marvelous and miraculous prodigy, her overnight transformation from simple country girl of Lorraine to master military tactician and strategist, from virgin to general, from nobody to savior of France, putting an abrupt end to the Hundred Years War with England. It is based on historical documents, trial documents, eye witness accounts, modern historical interpretations, as well as generously peppered with the authorʼs own loving enthusiasm for, and unique vision of, the beatified and subsequently canonized Saint Joan of Arc.
With ever an eye on historical symbolism, the author compares Franceʼs war with the Germans of World War I to its war with the English during the Hundred Years War. Léon Bloy says it best when he says:
“The world never stops, it always keeps going. Immemorial, secular progression of the strong and the oppressed, of the iniquitous and the innocent whom they crush down, towards the communal grave of Eternity. History is merely a cry of grief throughout the centuries. It is as if there had not been a Redemption. One would be tempted to believe it if, every now and then, marvelous creatures did not appear who seem to say that the All Powerful is captive for an indeterminate period of time, that Supreme Justice is provisionally enchained, and that men of goodwill must trust in their God. Prefigurative creatures of consolation and hope, by their actions, of an unimaginable magnificence that the Scriptures announced.”
The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification (Part One)
Written and published in 1884, Léon Bloyʼs The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification is an attempt by the author to renew the Cause for Canonization of Christopher Columbus. This is part one of that work. It includes a preface by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly. To read this book today feels sometimes like reading a book written only yesterday. Christopher Columbus represents the West and Western Civilization as no other person before him can or ever will. And everyone else, intra or extra muros, those who do not subscribe to that civilization but inherit all its benefits – they are the angry, ingrateful hordes some of whom, quite clearly, do not know what they do, nor what their actions imply. Léon Bloy says it best when he says:
“The prejudice against Christopher Columbus is so tenacious and so strong that the greatest poet in the world, supposing him inspired by the most magnificent of all indignations, would never succeed in overcoming it.”
“Doubtless also, he had to believe that that captive world would not be handed over to him without a fight and his heroic soul counted on the God of the oppressed to decide his fortune. But the extraordinary injustice, the unprecedented ingratitude, the indefatigable persistence of misfortunes as he had never seen before and, above all, the supernatural, absolute, implacable insuccess of all his efforts – with the exception of the Discovery, – that there must have strangely astonished his soul, which was unique among the unique!”
Blood of the Poor
Blood of the Poor by Léon Bloy, 1909. Originally Le Sang du pauvre, Blood of the Poor by Catholic writer Léon Bloy is perhaps the hardest to read of Léon Bloyʼs writings, as it goes straight to the heart of the matter of what is wrong in the world. Itʼs hard to read, emotively, because it gives the honest reader no room for cover, no space for shelter, no shadow of a tree to hide under. With avarice as its theme, it is a dark poem in prose, a sermon in the style of Savonarola, with the biting satire of a Jonathan Swift.
“The Blood and the Flesh of the Poor are the only aliments that can nourish, the substance of the rich being a poison and a putrefaction. It is therefore a necessity of hygiene that the poor be devoured by the rich who find that very good, and who ask for it again. Rich children are fortified by the juice of the poorsʼ flesh, and the rich manʼs cuisine is endowed with concentrate of the poor.”
“You believe yourselves to be innocent because you have not slit somebodyʼs throat, as yet, I want to believe; because you have not forced open somebodyʼs door nor scaled his wall in order to despoil him of his possessions; because finally you have not transgressed human laws too visibly. You are so gross, so carnal, for you do not conceive of a crime that cannot be seen. But I say to you, my very dear brother, that you are a plant, and that that assassin is your flower.”
“It is true that there are refuges: drunkenness, prostitution of the body, suicide, or madness. Why would the dance not continue?”
The Soul of Napoleon
The Soul of Napoleon by Léon Bloy, 1912; translated by Richard Robinson, 2021. Lʼâme de Napoléon, in French, is a poem in prose on the great generalʼs achievements and greatness, but it is more than that, it is a re-assessment of his significance from a Catholic and a Catholic eschatological point of view, as perhaps no other writer than Léon Bloy could have put down on paper. Written in 1912, it is also, like many of Léon Bloyʼs writings, prophetic in an eerie way of near-term events to come, a prefiguration of both WWI and beyond.
“The history of Napoleon is quite certainly the most unknown of all histories. Books that claim to recount it are innumerable, and there is no end to documents of every sort. In reality, Napoleon is perhaps less known to us than Alexander and Sennacherib. The more one studies, the more one discovers that he is the man whom nothing resembles and thatʼs all there is. Itʼs the unfathomable gulf. One knows the dates, one knows the deeds, victories or disasters, one knows, a bit or quite a bit, of the famous negotiations that are, today, merely dust. His name alone remains, his prodigious Name, and when it is pronounced by the poorest of all children, it is enough to make a great man blush, no matter whom. Napoleon is the Face of God in darkness.”
“There is, in the humblest churches of France, a poor lamp lit night and day, before the Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The thought crossed my mind, absurd perhaps, that that lamp is something like Napoleonʼs confidence.”
On Huysmans' Tomb
On Huysmans' Tomb by Léon Bloy, 1913; translated by Richard Robinson, 2021. Sur la tombe de Huysmans, originally is a collection of critical essays written by Léon Bloy about his erstwhile friend, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Written between 1884 and 1893, and published in book form in 1913, six years after Huysmansʼ death, it is an appraisal of Huysmans himself and his most important work at that time: À Rebours, En Rade, Là-Bas, – as nobody other than Léon Bloy could have written, with keen psychological insight into Huysmansʼ mind and personality, and providing first-hand information about the inception of those works, particularly Là-Bas, that satanic masterpiece of Huysmans' that originally was intended to look up (Là-Haut), rather than down.
“The intensity of a writer like Huysmans is, principally, in his contempt... The well-known author of À Rebours has not at all the ignivomitous allures of an imprecator, and the torrential flux of green bile is, in him, merely the literary illusion of some prickly vanity... Huysmans had finally divested himself of the pedagogic reminiscences of his art education, in order to enter upon certain originality,... The synoptic pessimism of des Esseintes appeared to many as a stopping place or as a refuge, and the agonizing future of that anchorite of analysis excited the emulation of a large group of dreamers...”
“En Rade does not appear to be a work fated to modify the destiny of that reprobate [des Esseintes]. The pessimism of À Rebours has merely been strengthened and consolidated... No counterweight, from now on, to the deep despondency of souls. No pale brightness, no wan glimmer of the skies... Never has hope been so positively dismissed...”
The appendix includes a review by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly on À Rebours.
Je M'Accuse...
Je M'Accuse... by Léon Bloy, 1900; translated by Richard Robinson, 2020. Je M'Accuse... (I Accuse Myself...), written by Léon Bloy and published in 1900, is a blistering, unforgiving, and often hilarious attack on Ėmile Zola, the founder of the Naturalist movement of French literature, famous internationally for his participation in the Dreyfus Affair through an open letter, "J'Accuse...!", which he addressed to Félix Faure, then President of the French Third Republic, and which was published (in 1898) on the front page of Aurore magazine.
Je M'Accuse... is also a scathing attack on, and criticism of, two of Zola's (then) recent novels, Lourdes and Fecundity. Lovers of Zola will find little to appreciate here, but admirers of Bloy will be rolling on the floor laughing. Staunch, satirical, atrabilious, and intransigent Catholic writer, Léon Bloy, always ready for a good (literary) fight, enters the ring punching – against Zola and for Catholicism.
Salvation Through the Jews
Salvation Though the Jews by Léon Bloy, 1892; translated by Richard Robinson, 2020. (Originally Salut par les Juifs.) “In these unprecedented times” (ugh) we need a prophet. But prophets are hard to come by in the flesh and blood, unless we unearth one from the modern or post-modern past, from our own graveyards preferably. If fusty, fetid, fecal, and fiery Léon Bloy cannot fit the bill, we donʼt know who can. Salvation Through the Jews picks up where certain apocalyptic, poetic, eschatological, and prophesying chapters in The Desperate Man left some readers panting for more. It was published 6 years after the latter novel, and one can see in it the sprouting sequel of a germ planted in 1886, if not earlier.
Léon Bloy was a great artist and a genius. Nobody can deny that. And there is artistry in this book; he uses it deftly to make a compelling point. But like all arguments, one needs to hear the major and minor premises first before arriving at the synthesis or conclusion.
This work NEEDS to be read even if one is not a Christian or a Jew because although it is about the Passion and although it is about the so-called "Jewish problem," on another level it is something else, and one can take the Jews and Christians out of the equation altogether, strip them naked, bleach them white, remove their particulars from this book, and replace them rather easily by more modern equivalent cardboard cutouts in the theater of now.
Words of a Demolitions Contractor
Words of a Demolitions Contractor by Léon Bloy, 1884; translated by Richard Robinson, 2020. The Words of a Demolitions Contractor (originally Propos d'un Entrepreneur de Démolitions), published in 1884, is a collection of articles written by French author Léon Bloy, previously published in the columns of various Parisian journals between the years 1882 and 1884 – the Chat Noir journal principally, but also the Gils Blas, the Figaro, the Nouvelle Revue, and Le Petit Caporal. Selected by the author himself, they represent Léon Bloy at his earliest and fiery best as a thunderous, irascible, intransigent Catholic pamphleteer and polemicist. These are the articles that earned him his reputation, and these are the articles that essentially torpedoed his career. So maligned and hated was he from the start, that his reputation as an author still suffers. But as the dust settles after nearly 150 years, in retrospect, Léon Bloy stands out as a beacon of righteousness, a Parisian Diogenes, shedding the light of his genius and rancor on the ills plaguing Paris and France at the time – during the Belle Epoque and the years leading up to the two world wars.
It is hard to discover a writer of such intensity, love and disgust, pathos, anger, and parody – in any language, at any period of time, in the history of Western literature. Imagine the gloom and despair of Dostoevsky, mixed with the prophesy and thunder of an Old Testament prophet, throw in the biting wit of Jonathan Swift – shake it up and let it sit for a minute – and there you have him: Léon Bloy.