Great Men Are Slain Here

<p><em>Great Men Are Slain Here</em> by Léon Bloy is a biography of sorts on Ernest Hello. Originally published in AD 1895 (under the French title of <em>Ici on assassine les grands hommes</em>) it was meant to provide a necessary corrective to the official biography commissioned by Mme. Hello after her husband?s passing.</p><p></p><p>Léon Bloy was not a fan of Mme. Hello (nor she of him) and he was even less a fan of her husband?s biography in which she had a heavy hand. </p><p></p><p><em>Great Men Are Slain Here </em>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. </p><p></p><p><em>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....</em></p><p></p><p><em>[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... </em></p>