Catholicity Neat: “Gabrielle de Bergerac” (1869)

“Catholicity Neat” denotes a literary work representing Roman Catholicity undiluted either by represented circumambient contextual Protestant-secular matter or personages or significant authorial interference, be it only through manipulations of style and tone (irony, sarcasm, horrendous exaggeration, deliberate contradiction). “De Grey: A Romance” and Guy Domville, although I have chosen to take them in a different category, are other examples of the type. The Golden Bowl is or is not, depending on what you think of the role played by the Assingham couple in isolating and defining the curious Catholicity of the four major personages. “The Altar of the Dead” is probably not, because of Henry James' eccentric albeit “picturesque” misrepresentations of the Catholic world ostensibly delineated. James' first known extant published bit of fiction, “A Tragedy of Error” (1865), is imaginably another such instance of Catholicity Neat if only in the most marginal and peculiar way. All its personages are French. If they are by the reader presumed to be Catholic, they may be so somewhat along the lines suggested by James' essay on Balzac a decade later: “A magnificent action with him is not an action which is remarkable for its high motive, but an action with a great force of will or of desire behind it … a magnificent lie, a magnificent murder, or a magnificent adultery.” James' first tale boasts all three magnificences.

“Gabrielle de Bergerac” is of course James' only fictional treatment of the ancien régime.