Thomas R. Nevin

I can certainly say that I've never met the subject, but I found the biographer from my own--albeit heathen--point of view, to be something of a mediocrity. In fact, the kindest thing that I can think of to say about him is that he is a long-winded mediocrity. But I must allow myself to indulge in a little controlled viciousness, or restrained savagery...despite my fears of sounding like some class of Protestant as far as Catholicism is concerned. For I must elaborate by saying that I find him to be pompous, snobbish, bogus, and fake, despite all his protestations to the contrary. I must notice that it seems to be some sort of trend or fashion among Catholic scholars who choose to be vitriolic little pricks as well, to crucify long-dead Renan, while embalming and embodying, in their own particular, Popish way, all that is most corrupt and dead, (dead bones wrapped in robes of pedantry), in such disenchanted scholars of the crypt, and scribes of the tomb. I accuse this false biographer of bringing no-one to life, and by stifling life with smothering blankets of non-sense, of irrelevancies which kill the truth as swiftly as any set of lies ever could. I accuse him of abandoning his subject, neglecting the life he was to tend to, while floating away in a hot-air balloon of reveries about Classical clouds, Ancient this, and 19th-century that...a sort of mal-practice.

I think that the only thing that I learned from this book was that I learned nothing from it...and, of course, that I am glad that I do not live in the 19th century--but I suppose even I knew that.

But perhaps I should specify that, when I say that he tells me nothing about her, I mean, more specifically, that he speaks FAR TOO MUCH without saying *anything*. Although it is true that he has a morbid fascination with the illnesses that killed her, but maybe he'd have rather just written a biography of some cancer cells...but perhaps that's revealing too much daylight to the inside of the vampire's cave, where dwell those with *such brittle nerves*.

Comme des enfants.

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