The star of the fait divers is often a mediocre fellow of below-average intelligence—otherwise he wouldn’t have been caught, or would have found a solution other than killing or stealing to resolve his problems—and he’s the first one surprised and delighted to find himself transformed into a hero. He’s “gotten into the papers.” A waitress in a restaurant in the provinces told me how she collapsed on the street. When she was revived, a bottle of sleeping pills was found in her purse. The reporters concluded that she had wanted to end her life and printed the story in the local paper. As though she were watching a film, she was stupefied to recognize herself in the role of the heroine. Turned into a statue.
In The Man Without Qualities, Musil says of the assassin Moosbrugger, “his flattered vanity regarded these moments as the high points of his life.”
Once their acts, their personalities, are transformed by the media and dissected by the gigantic legal machinery, the defendants, who scarcely recognize themselves, feel as if some transcendent force has taken over their lives. Like Dmitri Karamazov who, at the end of his trial, exclaims: “I feel the right hand of God upon me.”
Like the novel, the fait divers is designed to help readers understand themselves. Or at least show them what they shouldn’t do and which solution is the wrong one. It shows them the destruction of people who believed their situation had no solution other than someone else’s death or their own death, or both. And what abysmal traps life can set for you.
Otherwise, this humble narrative genre obeys the same laws that make literature evolve with our vision of the world. It used to be that insignificant faits divers were referred to as “dogs hit by cars.” Television journalists now call them “trash cans on fire.” I sense in this transition from the dog to the trash can, from the living to the inanimate, a depersonalization typical of our times. Just as, after World War II, at the height of existentialism, the exemplary crime story seems to have been the one that inspired Camus’s play The Misunderstanding. Two innkeepers, mother and daughter, take to killing their guests and robbing them. The son (and brother) comes back from a long stay abroad and they don’t recognize him. They murder him. Then they discover the truth. They kill themselves. There’s not an iota of psychology in the story. Only an absurd situation. (Camus claimed that he was indifferent to “psychology” in the theater, at least as a playwright. And he put the word in scare quotes.)
Comparing the psychological crime story and the situational crime story, it strikes me that the latter was imbued with the postwar spirit. Nathalie Sarraute honored me by disagreeing in the opening page of her book of essays The Age of Suspicion.3
The crude criminal news item, once exploited by the journalist, occasionally benefits from supplementary distillation. Rendered sublime, quintessential, it makes its literary début. Roland Barthes, in his Critical Essays, shows how the fait divers is connected to the short story. In both cases, everything is self-contained: “its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome. . . .” You could go even further and argue that the fait divers is closely tied to the origins of the short story as a literary genre. In 1554, Matteo Bandello, a Dominican priest from Lombardy, published his Novelle [Stories], taken for the most part from real events and inspired by crimes and violent deaths. He was soon imitated in France by Pierre Boaistuau, who published his collection of Histoires tragiques in 1559. They departed from the spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Valois’s Heptameron, generally considered the first short stories. From then on the genre would separate into two branches: light and cheerful stories on the one hand, and sentimental, tragic fait divers on the other. One of the great successes of the early eighteenth century, a book by François de Rosset, has an eloquent title: The Tragic Histories of our Time. Containing the Fatal and Lamentable Deaths of Several People. These short stories in a new style would find abundant primary source material in the occasionals, then the canards—the first versions of sensationalist journalism whose success suggests that the public in those days, as in our own, could never get enough blood and violence. A little later, the success of Le Mercure Galant was based both on faits divers and on short stories sometimes inspired by the former.
In the seventeenth century, newspapers also invented a surprising way of exploiting faits divers. They would recount them in more or less burlesque verse. These rhymes were first written for some rich patron, male or female. Soon, they appeared in print, in weeklies, for public consumption. Scarron, Jean Loret, Charles Robinet, La Gravette de Mayolas, Subligny are the best-known authors. Here is an example:
The other day a peasant lass
Riding by upon an ass,
On her way home, you see
To her place near Montmorency,
Having bought her goods,
Was waylaid by five hoods,
Who first robbed her purse,
And then, to make things worse,
Since she was young and fetching,
Raped the miserable wenchling. . . .
In Japan, in the eighteenth century, several of Chikamatsu’s plays were inspired by real faits divers. Most astonishing is that he would sometimes write them only a few weeks after the event. Figuring out what writers take from real-life dramas is a never-ending task. Take Emma Bovary’s suicide, inspired by the story of Delphine Delamare, whose maiden name was Couturier, and who died and was buried in Ry, Normandy. What else is there to know? How many people know nothing about Dante except the episode where Francesca da Rimini is murdered with her lover by her jealous husband? (Note that Francesca and Paolo were inspired in their adultery by another book, the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife. Thus one fait divers inspires another, as long as it has been consecrated by literature, or at least by the popular press.). It is no accident that the story of Francesca and Paolo has produced so much commentary, not only from the romantically inclined but from Dante scholars, who are, after all, also romantically inclined. A Dante bibliography for the period 1891 to 1900 includes over a hundred studies of Canto V of the Inferno.
This relationship of the fait divers and literature was understood or at least perceived by the press. Before World War II, Paris-Soir sought to enhance its prestige by hiring writers—members of the French Academy, if possible—as star reporters. Among them were the Tharaud brothers. But Jérôme and Jean were known for being slow. The paper had to send a real journalist with quicker reflexes to accompany them on assignment. André Salmon tells about the time they went to Le Mans to cover the trial of the Papin sisters and sent in their dispatch from the trial four days late.4
Stendhal is probably the all-time champion of the fait divers. He devoured them in Le Publiciste, Le Journal de Paris, Le Journal du soir. He even believed they had medicinal properties. In Lamiel, when the young woman falls ill, Dr. Sansfin gets her a subscription to the Gazette des Tribunaux. “In less than a fortnight her extreme pallor seemed to diminish. . . .” Lamiel, by the way, ends up in love with and in cahoots with a bandit named Valbaire, a character based on Pierre François Lacenaire.5 Stendhal, after reading his favorite newspaper, notes in his diary, on 24 messidor year XII (July 13, 1804):
Still another example of the Othello catastrophe in Italy, near Genoa. A jealous lover kills his fifteen-year-old mistress, a rare beauty; he flees, writes two letters (invaluable testimonials—get them from Plana [a friend from Turin]); returns around midnight to his mistress’s corpse, lying in her father’s oratory, and there he kills himself with a pistol, the same way he killed her.
Seek the truth about this deed.
He adds this strange conclusion: “That’s the sort of thing that makes me realize more and more that mellow Italy is the land where people feel the most deeply, the land of poets.”
Antoine Berthet’s crime inspired The Red and the Black. Old crime tales copied onto manuscripts furnished Stendhal with material for his Three Italian Chronicles and with the set-up for The Charterhouse of Parma. Horrible stories like the one about the conve
nt of Baïano offer, according to Stendhal, “unimpeachable facts about the human heart.”
Starting with his first book, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, each of his works regales us with some tragic fait divers. For his debut he borrowed freely from the history of the tragic love affairs of Stradella, a seventeenth-century singer, as recounted in Choron and Fayolle’s Historical Dictionary of Musicians. Stradella fled Venice with his mistress, a Roman lady named Hortensia, and their lives became an endless flight from the assassins dispatched by Hortensia’s jealous lover—a flight marked by extraordinary adventures. Which was how the assassins, moved to tears by the beauty of the singer’s voice in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, at first spared them. But the passing months and years did not extinguish the Venetian lover’s desire for vengeance, and one day Hortensia and Stradella were found stabbed to death, in Genoa. Stendhal liked this fait divers so much that he embellished it in his Life of Rossini.
There are more faits divers in The History of Painting in Italy and in Rome, Naples, and Florence. The Walks in Rome are overflowing with faits divers. The most surprising is the preposterous appearance, right in the middle of this guidebook, of a very long account of a criminal trial that had just begun in Tarbes, France. Adrien Lafargue, a young man from Bagnères-de-Bigorre, was on trial for the murder of his mistress. A fascinating trial in fact, where the murderer was more sympathetic than his victim, which meant he got away with a five-year prison sentence. Before he was led out of the courtroom, he turned towards the public and exclaimed, “Brave and esteemed citizens of this city, I am aware of the tender interest you have demonstrated towards me; you shall live in my heart!”
Stendhal, or rather the court reporter whom he copied, added, “His weeping altered his voice. He was met with new applause, and the crowd rushed to his side.”
This Lafargue affair would be one of the secondary sources for The Red and the Black. Only this time France, not Italy, was “the land of poets.”
It is tempting to adopt the expression. The fantasized act that someone else dared to commit is transformed by paper and printer’s ink into a notorious, sublimated, and ritualized deed—if only through the rudimentary act of some unknown reporter assigned to cover the police stations. What a trampoline for the imagination! Therein lies the paradox. Committed by a person devoid of imagination, it stimulates ours. The fait divers in its entirety is indeed “the land of poets.”
Waiting and Eternity
I believe that I have experienced waiting in its purest form, by which I mean waiting without waiting for anything. Waiting for nothing. I’m certainly not alone. There are actually millions of us, since this kind of waiting is the essence of military life. You’re a soldier. You hear them shout “Fall in!” You’re lined up, marched to the other end of the barracks. And there you’re told “Wait!” For what? You have no idea, but you really don’t care since you’re indifferent to everything. In the end there may be a chore, or perhaps none at all. The best moment in a soldier’s life is when he is snoozing on his cot, waiting to be called, to line up and hear “Wait!” This is waiting for waiting.
The grunt in his uniform, appearances notwithstanding, resembles those characters in Piero della Francesca who demonstrate through their very indifference that they live in the eternal present of those with neither a past nor a future. They exist, that’s all.
The limbo of military existence, which includes moments of waiting with no purpose, is itself nothing but a very long wait, one of those typical fragments of life that we consider unworthy of being lived and that we put in brackets, telling ourselves that this isn’t real life, that we’ll begin to live, or to live again, later, or some other time. I can’t remember outside which barracks two of us grunts were assigned to till a flower bed. My partner was a Corsican shepherd, whom we all appreciated because he was so down-to-earth. He had the good sense to stay put, and rested his chin on the handle of his spade. A sergeant came by and asked, “What are you waiting for?”
The shepherd grew indignant to the marrow. He couldn’t have been more eloquent. “What am I waiting for?” he cried out, “He’s asking what I’m waiting for? I’ve been waiting for three years for my goddamn discharge!”
Waiting is what you erase from your existence. That’s where you fool yourself, as a popular tale shows in a striking way. A child gets a bobbin of magic thread. Whenever he wants to advance the course of his life, all he has to do is pull a little on the thread. So as soon as he is sick of waiting, or whenever he is curious about what will happen to him next, he pulls on the thread. At this rate, he ages very quickly and soon finds himself with an empty bobbin, at death’s door. That’s what happens, it seems to me, when you refuse to acknowledge the days without event, the hours of waiting.
Impatience is waiting’s most constant companion. Impatience shadows waiting more often than stage fright dogs an actor before a play or a student before an oral exam, more often than anxiety accompanies anyone, sick or accused, who waits for a medical or legal verdict.
Meursault, in Camus’s novel, shows that he is truly “strange” because, before the verdict, waiting means little more to him than the passing of time. No emotion, no anger. “There we all were, waiting . . . We waited a long time—almost three-quarters of an hour, I think.”
Whereas after Prince Myshkin is condemned to death, waiting is intolerable. His sentencing leads him to advance this paradox: “Just think: if there was torture for example, it would involve suffering and injuries, physical torment and all that would probably distract you from the mental suffering, so that the injuries would be all that you’d suffer, right up to the time you died. For after all, perhaps the worst, most violent pain lies not in injuries, but in the fact that you know for certain that within the space of an hour, then ten minutes, then half a minute, then now, right at this moment—your soul will fly out of your body, and you’ll no longer be a human being, and that this is certain; the main thing is that it’s certain. When you put your head right under the guillotine and hear it sliding over your head, it’s that quarter of a second that’s most terrible of all.”
The prince concludes: “Perhaps somewhere in the world exists a man whose sentence has been read out, who has been allowed to suffer and then been told ‘Off you go, you’ve been pardoned.’ A man like that could tell us perhaps. Such suffering and terror are what Christ spoke of. No, a human being should not be treated like that.”
It’s obvious that you don’t have to look very far to find this man who may exist, “somewhere in the world.” He is none other than Dostoyevsky, sentenced to death on December 22, 1849, and subjected to a full execution ceremony. This is how he described it to his brother Michael: “They took us to Semyonovsky square. There, on the spot, they read us our death sentence, we were given the cross to kiss, they broke our swords over our heads and outfitted us for death (white shirts). Then three of us were put on the scaffold for the execution. They called us by groups of three. I was in the second group and so I had only a minute more to live.”
In The Idiot he describes the last moments of a man condemned to death not once, but twice.
For symmetry’s sake, I can report what an extraordinary fellow once told me in confidence. He had worked as assistant executioner for Deibler, Desfourneaux, and Obrecht—three generations of henchmen in charge of the guillotine in France. He loved the first henchman and the third one, but not the second, about whom he said: “He’s nuts about the guillotine. He can stay home for days at a time, sitting on his chair, clad in his hat and raincoat, waiting for a directive from the Minister of Justice.”
Another death sentence story appeals to my imagination since it took place the day I was born. On September 19, 1919, while D’Annunzio was clowning around in Fiume,6 a spy named Pierre Lenoir was put to death. World War I was over, but traitors were still being executed. Le Journal reported sadistically: “Let us recall that Pierre Lenoir was sentenced to death last May 8. He has been waiting for 139 days.
Pierre Lenoir has believed for some time now that his sentence would be commuted. After a period of intense worry, he suddenly decided his life would be spared and his sleepless nights and nightmares gave way to a peaceful rest. Last night he went to bed calm and fell asleep. Certainly he was still hoping.”
Entire lives are spent under the illusion that nothing has begun. In the last scene of Uncle Vanya, Sonia cries out: “We shall rest! We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see the disappearance of evil and all our pain in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! You have never known what it is to be happy, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall rest.”
All Chekhov had to do was put his characters’ lines in the future tense to make them reek of despair. The creatures in his plays and short stories are the ultimate heroes of waiting. When they can’t stand it any longer, they cry out, “To Moscow!” But few succeed in leaving.
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