“Altar and incense” metaphor

The “Altar and incense” metaphor is a recurring, deliberately blasphemous figure of speech in Justine, where the language of worship is appropriated to describe sexual exploitation, violence, and sacrilege. Its force comes from a persistent contrast: libertines recast the body and abuse as devotional ritual, while Therese treats religion as a source of moral truth and experiences the misuse of sacred objects as an assault on her faith.

Definition and Recurring Language

The metaphor draws on the altar as a place of worship and incense as an offering, but the novel repeatedly applies both terms to scenes of coercion and sexualized violence. The effect is not to sanctify those acts. Instead, the religious vocabulary exposes how the perpetrators turn ritual and devotion into instruments of domination, using the appearance of ceremony to disguise or intensify abuse.

This language appears across distinct settings rather than belonging to a single scene. Rodin’s treatment of students and members of his household is described through the imagery of an altar and offering; the monks’ abuse of Therese likewise adopts the same vocabulary. The recurrence links a private household and a religious institution through a shared pattern: those in power make the victim’s body the object of a staged, self-serving ritual.

Rodin’s Household

Therese witnesses Rodin abuse students under the guise of discipline. When he brings a fifteen-year-old boy from the boys’ class, his alternation between reprimands, threats, and apparent affection gives the abuse the outward shape of a lesson. The altar-and-incense language that follows makes the inversion unmistakable: the instructor’s supposed authority and the vocabulary of worship are pressed into the service of his violence rather than education or moral instruction.

The pattern extends beyond the classroom. Rodin brings his daughter Rosalie and two women of the household into a further episode of abuse, again described with the altar imagery. The recurrence matters: this is not a stray turn of phrase attached to one victim, but a narrative device that connects Rodin’s domestic authority, his treatment of students, and the household’s broader system of exploitation. Therese’s witness to these scenes helps explain her fear for Rosalie and her effort to persuade her to escape the household.

The Monks and the Captive Women

At Saint Mary-in-the-Wood, religious forms provide a particularly sharp contrast with the monks’ conduct. Therese arrives seeking confession and religious consolation. Dom Severino invites her into the church, hears her account, and asks pointed questions about her isolation, lack of relatives or protectors, and whether anyone knows where she has gone. His courteous reception gives way to coercion; the setting and language of religious care have served to draw an unprotected traveler into the monks’ control.

The monks’ abuse of Therese is then framed through imagery that makes the body into an altar and the perpetrators’ acts into offerings. In the account of the episode, the language does not signify a mutual or voluntary devotion: it accompanies her resistance, fear, and inability to refuse the men who hold power over her. The metaphor thus marks the inversion of the monastery’s public religious identity. What should be a site of worship and refuge becomes the setting for the abuse of women whom the monks have isolated.

The institution’s public reputation compounds that inversion. Omphale explains that the monastery has maintained its system for generations and that its superior, Dom Severino, uses the reputation of the Virgin’s miracles to prevent outsiders from scrutinizing what happens inside. Visitors are rare, and the monks’ apparent hospitality and religious austerity leave them content to praise the house. The contrast between its public face and hidden practices makes the altar imagery part of a broader critique of religious authority used to shield exploitation.

The False Apparition and Desecration

The metaphor’s most explicit religious context is the staged Marian apparition during the Notre-Dame d’Août festival. The monks dress the youngest girl, Florette, in the Virgin’s garments and use concealed strings to make her appear to raise her arms as the host is elevated. Threatened with punishment if she speaks or fails in her part, she performs as directed. The visitors interpret the deception as a miracle, leave rich offerings, and depart more convinced of the Virgin’s power.

That public fraud is followed by a private act of sacrilege. The monks bring Florette into an orgy still dressed in the costume that drew the crowd’s reverence; they then strip her and use a sacred image and the Eucharist in an abusive ritual. Therese witnesses the scene, faints, and is herself forced into a further desecration involving the host. She later says that religion is a matter of feeling for her and that this violation continues to make her shudder. Here the metaphor’s religious references are not merely a libertine’s decorative language: their collision with a staged miracle and the misuse of the Eucharist makes the gap between public devotion and secret abuse central to the episode.

Contrast and Narrative Significance

The metaphor should be distinguished from the novel’s competing views of religion. Comte de Bressac attacks belief in a Creator and presents religion as a means by which the powerful enslave the weak. Therese, by contrast, argues that belief in God entails worship and that virtue is the primary basis of that worship; she also helps Rosalie move from deism toward Christianity. The narrative therefore places libertine attacks on religion alongside Therese’s sincere faith rather than making their positions interchangeable.

The repeated altar-and-incense imagery gives that conflict a concrete form. For the perpetrators, religious language can be seized and repurposed to turn abuse into a counterfeit ceremony. For Therese, the sacred remains morally meaningful, which is why its desecration wounds her and why the monks’ conduct appears as more than private misconduct: it is a betrayal of the religious authority they publicly claim. By returning to the same imagery in Rodin’s household and the monastery, the novel connects domestic and institutional power while exposing the distance between ritual appearance and actual conduct.