old monk's preachings
and jeremiads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combats
against the schisms.

He preferred to thumb the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius, that first
type of the allegorical poem which was later, in the Middle Ages, to
be used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris whose
correspondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaisms
and enigmas, allured him. He willingly re-read the panegyrics in which
this bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of his
vainglorious eulogies; and, in spite of everything, he confessed a
weakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were,
by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheels
and invents intricate and useless parts.

After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the panegyrist; Sedulius, author
of the rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of which
the Church has appropriated for its services; Marius Victorius, whose
gloomy treatise on the _Pervesity of the Times_ is illumed, here and
there, with verses that gleam with phosphorescence; Paulinus of Pella,
poet of the shivering _Eucharisticon_; and Orientius, bishop of Auch,
who, in the distichs of his _Monitories_, inveighs against the
licentiousness of women whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people.

The interest which Des Esseintes felt for the Latin language did not
pause at this period which found it drooping, thoroughly putrid,
losing its members and dropping its pus, and barely preserving through
all the corruption of its body, those still firm elements which the
Christians detached to marinate in the brine of their new language.

The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the horrible epoch
when frightful motions convulsed the earth. The Barbarians sacked
Gaul. Paralyzed Rome, pillaged by the Visigoths, felt its life grow
feeble, perceived its extremities, the occident and the orient, writhe
in blood and grow more exhausted from day to day.

In this general dissolution, in the successive assassination of the
Caesars, in the turmoil of carnage from one end of Europe to another,
there resounded a terrible shout of triumph, stifling all clamors,
silencing all voices. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men
astride on small horses, clad in rat-skin coats, monstrous Tartars
with enormous heads, flat noses, chins gullied with scars and gashes,
and jaundiced faces bare of hair, rushed at full speed to envelop