The Liber Mundi that the monk was contemplating had clear, luminous letters. Each creature was a copy transcribed from the great Koran: the cosmos. Every herb in the cloister found its place on a written page, for “nature has only one script” and all was easily ascribable to that script.⁶⁷⁸ Every book opened on the lectern was in a way the same book, each letter filled Saint Jerome’s cell with a hum of correspondences, while the meek lion lay at his feet, guarding a rugged savanna of parchments. Reading absorbed every other occupation, even those of the liturgy: recognizable in the syllables of the hymns were extracts from a reading of the seasons, records of the celestial cycles. Sainte-Beuve was a young man from the provinces, often gloomy, who had abandoned his medical studies to embark on a literary career. From the outset he had listened to every voice, but couldn’t fully understand the meaning of the verb believe. And yet he realized that dwelling within him, like a duplicitous alien, was a “parasitic religiosity.”⁶⁷⁹ Incapable of any faith, he observed in himself, with a naturalist’s wonder, the vibrations of “Christian sensibility.”⁶⁸⁰ He, too, belonged to that species of men of whom he wrote: “A sober life, an overcast sky, a certain mortification of desire, a pensive and solitary manner, all this penetrates them, softens them, and inclines them imperceptibly toward belief.”⁶⁸¹ But something that inclines toward belief is far removed from something that demands belief. In his case, in fact, it ruled it out. The elegiac Sainte-Beuve, who stared out at the bare courtyard behind his study, soon became the rôdeur who prowled the streets of the great city, racked by the urge for some feminine tenderness; the railleur who cunningly navigated the corridors of newspaper offices; the causeur who was well practiced in dropping a small dose of flattery or poison. And something in him said that this complex of vices formed the core of literary civilization, and would allow nothing to be worshipped but them. With the spontaneous cynicism of the inventor of forms, Sainte-Beuve long made use of his “Christian sensibility” to attune himself to Port-Royal. But it was a question of ear and certainly not of doctrine. He found that he admired Bayle for a certain “basic indifference,” for his ability to move over whatever kind of terrain, provided that it was typographical.⁶⁸² “He’s not afraid of mésalliances; he goes everywhere, through the streets, gathering information, talking to people; curiosity attracts him and he doesn’t say no to the pleasures that offer themselves.”⁶⁸³ A curiosity all the more eager since it was based ultimately on indifference, a case of faith in an irrepressible faithlessness. Was he a skeptic? Or a mystic? Something in those descriptions, however, was relevant to Sainte-Beuve himself. In the end, in both cases, everything depended on one single experience: reading, that subtle mania that no longer sought to find, in the transparency of the page, even the characters of the Liber Mundi but expected a few futile answers from futile and anonymous books: “Can you tell me, please, / In what corner and among what clutter / I might possibly find some trace / Of Monsieur Malherbe’s long stay / At Carpentras, or of Ménage’s expression / when he performed his role Chez Sévigné?⁶⁸⁴ / Did Monsieur Conrart know Latin / Better than Jouy?