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.
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...