I will also do my best to start a sports club, like most of my fellow priests. Our young men are passionate about football, boxing, the Tour de France. Am I going to refuse them the pleasure of talking about these things with me on the pretext that such distractions – equally legitimate, of course! – are not to my liking? My state of health exempted me from military service, and it would be ridiculous for me to try and share in their games. But I can keep up to date, if only by reading the sports pages of the Écho de Paris, the newspaper I am lent quite regularly by the count.
Last night, having written these lines, I got down on my knees at the foot of my bed and prayed to Our Lord to bless the resolution I had just made. All at once, I had a sense that the dreams, hopes and ambitions of my youth had collapsed, and I went to bed shivering with fever, and did not get to sleep until dawn.
* * *
This morning, Mademoiselle Louise had her face buried in her hands throughout Mass. When it came to the last Gospel reading, I noticed that she had been crying. It is hard to be alone, and harder still to share one’s solitude with people who are indifferent or ungrateful.
Ever since I had the unfortunate idea of recommending to the count’s steward a former classmate of mine from the junior seminary who’s a travelling salesman for a large manufacturer of chemical fertilizer, the schoolmaster has stopped greeting me. Apparently he himself is a representative for another important manufacturer in Béthune.
* * *
It’s next Saturday that I am going to have lunch at the chateau. Since the main – or perhaps the only – purpose of this diary is to train me to be completely honest with myself, I must confess that I don’t mind. In fact, I am rather flattered, and not embarrassed to feel that way. Lords and ladies of the manor didn’t have, as they say, a good press at the seminary, and it is true that a young priest should keep his independence from high society. But on this point as on so many others, I remain the son of very poor people who have never known the jealousy and resentment felt by the peasant farmer, working an unrewarding soil that wears him down, towards the idler who draws from that same soil nothing but a private income. It’s been a long time since we had to deal with lords of the manor! For centuries we have belonged to that peasant farmer, and there is no master more difficult to please, or harsher.
* * *
Received a very unusual letter from Father Dufréty. Father Dufréty was a classmate of mine at the junior seminary, then completed his studies somewhere else, and the last I heard of him he was the acting priest of a little parish in the diocese of Amiens – the holder of the post, who was sick, having obtained the aid of a deputy. I have a very vivid, almost tender memory of him. In those days, he was held up to us as a model of piety, although I found him to be, like me, much too nervous and sensitive. In our fourth year, his seat was next to mine in the chapel, and I often heard him sobbing, his face buried in his small, pale, constantly ink-stained hands.
His letter is postmarked Lille (where I seem to remember that an uncle of his, a former gendarme, owned a grocer’s shop). I’m surprised to find in it no reference to his ministry, which he has presumably left, no doubt for health reasons. He was said to be predisposed to tuberculosis. His father and mother died of it.
Since I stopped having a housekeeper, the postman has got into the habit of sliding my mail under the door. I found the sealed envelope by chance as I was going to bed. That’s always a very difficult moment for me, and I put it off as long as I can. My stomach pains are generally bearable, but it’s impossible to imagine anything more wearing over a long period. One’s imagination goes to work, one’s head is affected, and it takes a lot of courage not to get up. Not that I often yield to the temptation, because it’s cold.
So I opened the envelope expecting a piece of bad news – worse, a whole string of bad news. That’s an unfortunate tendency, obviously. No matter. I can’t say I like the tone of the letter. I find it falsely cheerful, almost shockingly so, if, as seems likely, my poor friend is no longer able to carry out his duties, at least for the moment. ‘You alone are capable of understanding,’ he says. Why? I remember that, being a much better student than I was, he rather despised me. I only loved him all the more, of course.
Since he is asking me to go and see him urgently, I will soon know what’s what.
* * *
This coming visit to the chateau is much on my mind. The success of great projects that are dear to me, and which the count’s fortune and influence would surely allow me to realize, may depend on this initial contact. As usual, my lack of experience, my stupidity and also a kind of ridiculous bad luck makes even the simplest things complicated. For instance, the fine douillette I had been keeping for special occasions is now too big for me. What’s worse, Madame Pégriot, actually at my request, got the stains out, but so clumsily that the oil made awful rings on it, like those iridescent patches that form on broth that’s too greasy. It’s rather terrible to have to go to the chateau in the one I usually wear and which has been mended frequently, especially at the elbow. I fear I shall look as if I’m showing off my poverty. What might they think?
I would also like to be in a fit state to eat – at least enough not to draw attention to myself. But my stomach is so capricious that it’s impossible to predict what will happen! At the slightest alarm, the same little pain appears on my right side, I sense a kind of click, a spasm, my mouth immediately dries up and I can’t swallow a thing.
These are inconveniences, no more. I bear them well enough, I’m not oversensitive, I’m like my mother. ‘Your mother was tough,’ my uncle Ernest likes to say. In the parlance of the poor, I think that means a housewife who’s tireless, never ill, and doesn’t cost a lot when she dies.
* * *
The count is definitely much closer to a peasant like me than any of the industrialists I’ve sometimes dealt with in the course of my curacy. He quickly put me at my ease. How powerful are these members of high society who seem barely distinguishable from other people, and yet don’t do anything like anyone else! Whereas the slightest sign of consideration disconcerts me, they were even able to show me some deference without letting me forget for a moment that this respect was due only to the character with which I am invested. The countess was perfect. She was wearing a very simple house dress, with a kind of mantilla on her grey hair that reminded me of the one my poor mother used to wear on Sundays. I couldn’t help telling her this, although I explained myself so badly that I wonder if she understood.
We all had a good laugh about my cassock. Anywhere else, I think, they would have pretended not to notice, and I would have been in torment. With what freedom, what discretion, what class, these aristocrats talk about money and everything related to it! It even seems that being genuinely poor immediately allows you into their confidence, creates a kind of conspiratorial intimacy between them and you. I particularly felt that when, over coffee, Monsieur and Madame Vergenne (wealthy former millers who bought the chateau of Rouvroy last year) paid a visit. After their departure, the count gave a slightly ironic look which clearly meant: ‘Good riddance, at last we can be alone again!’ And yet there is much talk of Mademoiselle Chantal getting married to the Vergennes’ son … No matter! I think that in the feeling I am analysing so badly there is something more than mere politeness, however genuine. Manners cannot entirely be explained.
Obviously, I would have liked the count to show more enthusiasm for my plans to set up activities for young people, like the sports club. Even if he doesn’t make a personal contribution, why refuse me the small field at Latrillère, or the old barn that isn’t used for anything, which it would be easy to turn into a space for games, lectures, film shows or whatever? I am well aware that I am not much better at asking for things than I am at giving. People like to have time to think things over, while I always expect a cry from the heart, an impulse that responds to mine.
I left the chateau very late, too late. I am not very good at taking my leave either: with
every hour that passes, I content myself with announcing my intention to go, which elicits a polite protest I don’t dare ignore. That could go on for hours! At last, I left, no longer remembering a word of what I had been able to say, but feeling a kind of confidence, a joy, the sense that I had received good news, excellent news that I would have liked to pass on immediately to a friend. On my way back to the presbytery, I could almost have broken into a run.
* * *
Almost every day, I make sure I get back to the presbytery by the Gesvres road. At the top of the slope, whether it’s rainy or windy, I sit down on a poplar trunk that’s been left there for some reason or other over many winters and is starting to rot. The parasitical vegetation gives it a kind of sheath that I find ugly and pretty in turn, depending on the state of my thoughts or the colour of the sky. It was there that the idea for this diary came to me, and I don’t think that could have happened anywhere else. In this land of woods and pastures, interspersed with quickset hedges and planted with apple trees, I wouldn’t find another vantage point from which the village appeared to me in the same way, in its entirety, as if gathered in the palm of my hand. I look at it, and I never have the impression that it’s looking back at me. But nor do I think that it’s ignoring me. It’s as if it’s turning its back on me and giving me a sidelong look, eyes half closed, like a cat.
What does it want of me? Does it want anything of me? From this spot, anyone else, a rich man, for example, would be able to evaluate the price of those cob houses, calculate the exact surface area of those fields and meadows, dream that he has spent the necessary sum and that this village belongs to him. Not me.
Whatever I did, even if I gave it the last drop of my blood (and it’s true that sometimes I imagine it has nailed me up there on a cross and is watching me die), I wouldn’t possess it. However I may see it at this moment, so white and fresh (the walls have been daubed with a mixture of whitewash and washing blue for All Saints), I cannot forget that it has been here for centuries. Its antiquity scares me. Well before the fifteenth century, when the little church I am after all merely passing through was built, it was patiently enduring the heat and the cold, the rain, the wind, the sun, sometimes prosperous, sometimes destitute, clinging to this scrap of soil from which it pumped the juices and to which it gave back its dead. How deep and secret its experience of life must be! It will have me as it has had everyone else, sooner than it has had everyone else surely.
* * *
There are certain thoughts I dare not confide in anyone, and yet they do not strike me as mad, far from it. What would become of me, for example, if I resigned myself to the role in which many Catholics concerned above all with social preservation – in other words, when it comes down to it, their own self-preservation – would happily confine me. Oh, I’m not accusing these gentlemen of hypocrisy, I believe they are sincere. How many people claim to be attached to order, when they are only defending habits, sometimes merely a vocabulary whose words are so well polished, so moulded by use, that they justify everything without ever challenging anything? It is one of the most mystifying misfortunes of man that he must entrust what is most precious in him to something as unstable and malleable, alas, as language. It would take a lot of courage to check the key each time and adapt it to its own lock. We prefer to take the first one we find, force it a little, and if the bolt works, we ask for no more. I admire the revolutionaries who take such trouble to blow up walls with dynamite, when the bunch of keys held by the reactionaries would have allowed them to walk in quietly through the front door without waking anyone.
Received another letter from my former classmate this morning, this one even stranger than the first. It ends like this:
My health is not good, and it is my one real source of anxiety, because it would pain me to die now that I am within sight of harbour after so many storms. Inveni portum. All the same, I do not resent my illness; it has given me the leisure time I needed, which I would never have known without it. I have just spent eighteen months in a sanatorium. That has allowed me to seriously ponder the problem of life, to dig a little deeper. With a little reflection, I think you would reach the same conclusions as I have. Aurea mediocritas. These two words will provide you with the proof that my pretensions remain modest, that I am not a rebel. On the contrary, I have retained a fond memory of our teachers. The harm comes not from the doctrines, but from the training they received, which they passed on to us for want of knowing any other way of thinking or feeling. This education turned us into individualists, lone wolves. Basically, we had not really emerged from childhood, we were constantly inventing things, our sorrows, our joys, even Life itself, instead of living it. The result is that before we can dare to take a step outside our little world, we have to start all over again from the beginning. It is a painful business which involves some sacrifice of one’s self-esteem, but solitude is more painful still, you will realize that one day.
No point mentioning me to those around you. A hard-working, healthy, basically normal existence [the word normal is underlined three times] should have no secrets for anyone. Alas, our society is built in such a way that happiness always seems suspect. I believe that a certain kind of Christianity, a long way from the spirit of the Gospels, is partly responsible for this common prejudice that we all have, whether believers or unbelievers. Being respectful of other people’s freedom, I have preferred until now to keep silent. But now, having given it a lot of thought, I have made up my mind to break that silence in the best interests of a person who merits the greatest respect. Although my condition has greatly improved in the last few months, I still have some serious worries I will tell you about. Come soon.
Inveni portum … The postman handed me the letter just as I was going out this morning to take my catechism class. I read it in the graveyard, not far from where Arsène was starting to dig a grave for Madame Pinochet, who’s being buried tomorrow. He, too, has been digging away at life …
That ‘come soon!’ brought a pang to my heart. After his terribly studied lecture (I think I can see him scratching his temple with the end of his pen, the way he used to), that childish phrase he can no longer hold back, that just slips out … For a moment, I tried to assume that I was getting worked up over nothing, that he was quite simply being taken care of by someone in his family. Unfortunately, I only know of a sister who works in a tavern in Montreuil. This ‘person who merits the greatest respect’ cannot possibly be her.
No matter, I will definitely go.
* * *
The count came to see me. Very friendly, both deferential and familiar, as usual. He asked me if he could smoke his pipe, and left me two rabbits he had killed in the Sauveline woods. ‘Madame Pégriot will cook them for you tomorrow morning. She’s been told.’
I didn’t dare tell him that my stomach can no longer tolerate anything but stale bread. His rabbit stew will cost me half a day’s worth of the housekeeper’s pay, and she won’t even enjoy it, because the gamekeeper’s whole family have had their fill of rabbit. True, I’ll be able to get the altar boy to take the leftovers to the old woman who rings the bells, but at night, in order not to attract anyone’s attention. My poor health is already the subject of far too much talk.
The count does not greatly approve of my projects. He particularly warns me against the ill-will of the local populace: they’ve been force-fed since the war, he says, and now they need to stew in their own juice. ‘Don’t be too hasty in approaching them, don’t give too much of yourself at once. Let them make the first step.’
He is the nephew of the marquis de la Roche-Macé, whose property is a mere two leagues from my native village. He used to spend part of his holidays there, and he remembers my poor mother very well: she was a maid at the chateau and used to butter huge slices of bread for him out of sight of the late marquis, who was very stingy. I had asked him the question quite rashly, but he immediately replied in a very kind manner, without the slightest hint of embarrassment. Dear Mother! Although
she was still so young, and so pure, she was able to inspire esteem and sympathy. The count doesn’t say: ‘Madame your mother’, which I think might appear a little affected, just: ‘your mother’, emphasizing the ‘your’ with a gravity and respect that brought tears to my eyes.
If someone were to read these lines one day, they would certainly consider me quite naive. And I suppose I am, because there is surely nothing base in the admiration I feel for this man who is so simple in appearance, occasionally even so cheerful that he looks like an eternal schoolboy on an eternal vacation. I don’t consider him any more intelligent than anyone else, and he is said to be quite harsh towards the farmers. Nor is he an exemplary parishioner: although he comes regularly to Low Mass every Sunday, I have yet to see him take communion. I wonder if he even does so at Easter. How is it that he has so quickly taken the place – all too often empty! – of a friend, an ally, a companion? It may be because I think I see in him that naturalness I seek in vain elsewhere. His awareness of his own superiority, his inherited taste for command, even his age, have succeeded in marking him with that funereal gravity, that air of easily offended self-confidence conferred on lesser bourgeois merely by the privilege of money. I believe that the latter are constantly preoccupied with keeping their distance (to use their own language) whereas he keeps his rank. Oh, I know perfectly well that there is a lot of vanity – I am prepared to think it unconscious – in that curt, almost gruff tone, in which there is never a hint of condescension, which never tries to humiliate anyone, and which evokes in the poorest person, less the idea of any kind of constraint as that of a freely accepted military discipline. A lot of vanity, I fear. A lot of pride, too. But I like to listen to him. And whenever I talk to him about the interests of the parish, the local people, the Church, and he says ‘we’ as if he and I could only be serving the same cause, I find it natural and don’t dare pick him up on it.
Diary of a Country Priest Page 4