He began pacing up and down the room, his arms buried in the pockets of his douillette. I tried to stand, too, but with a movement of the head he gestured to me to sit down again. I sensed that he was still hesitating, that he was trying to judge me, to weigh me up one last time before saying what he had perhaps never said to anyone – at least in the same terms. Clearly, he had his doubts about me, and yet there was nothing humiliating about that, I swear. He could never have humiliated anyone anyway. At that moment, the look in his eyes was very kind, very gentle and – this seems ridiculous, speaking of a man so strong, so sturdy, almost vulgar, with such experience of life and people – extraordinarily, indefinably pure.
‘We should think hard before speaking to the rich about poverty. If we don’t, we’d make ourselves unworthy of teaching it to the poor, and how then can we dare present ourselves before the tribunal of Jesus Christ?’
‘Teach it to the poor?’ I said.
‘Yes, to the poor. It is to them that the Lord sends us first, and to announce what? Poverty. They were probably expecting something else! They were expecting the end of their wretched state, and now here is God taking the poor by the hand and saying to them: “Recognize your Queen, swear loyalty to her.” What a blow! When it comes down to it, that’s the story of the Jewish people, with its earthly kingdom. The poor, like the Jews, are a people wandering among the nations, in search of carnal hopes, a disappointed people, disappointed to the bone.’
‘And yet …’
‘Yes, and yet that is the order of things, no other way of slicing it … Oh, doubtless a coward might be able to get round the problem. The poor are an easy audience, a good audience, when you know how to approach them. Talk to a man with cancer about his cure, all he asks is to believe you. There’s nothing easier, when it comes down to it, than to imply that poverty is a kind of shameful disease, unworthy of a civilized nation, and that we’re going to cure it in no time at all. But which of us would dare to talk that way of the poverty of Christ?’
He looked me straight in the eyes, and I still wonder if he distinguished me from the familiar objects, his usual silent confidants. No, he wasn’t seeing me! If he had merely been trying to convince me, his eyes wouldn’t have had such a poignant expression. It was with himself, against a part of himself a hundred times reduced, a hundred times defeated, but still rebellious, that I saw him rise to his full height, his full strength, like a man fighting for his life. How deep the wound was! He seemed to be tearing himself apart.
‘You wouldn’t know it by looking at me,’ he said, ‘but I’d quite like to preach insurrection to the poor. Or rather, I wouldn’t preach anything to them at all. I’d first take one of those “militants”, those phrase merchants, those cobblers-together of revolution, and show them what a man from Flanders is. We Flemish have rebellion in our blood. Remember history! The nobles and the rich have never scared us. Thank heaven, I can confess it now, all powerful as I am, a strong man, the Lord never made me prone to temptations of the flesh. But injustice and misfortune – now they stir my blood. It’s hard these days to imagine how things were in the past … Take Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, for instance. You youngsters read it calmly, through half-closed eyes, like any old Lenten pastoral letter. At the time, my boy, we thought we could feel the earth shaking beneath our feet. What enthusiasm! I was curé of Norenfontes in those days, deep in mining country. The mere idea that work isn’t merchandise, subject to the laws of supply and demand, that you can’t speculate on wages, on men’s lives, like wheat, sugar or coffee – that really knocked people sideways, believe me. Because I explained it in the pulpit to my flock, I was considered a socialist, and the God-fearing peasants had me sent in disgrace to Montreuil. Not that I cared about being in disgrace, mind you. But at the time …’
He fell silent, his body all aquiver, his eyes still on me. I felt ashamed of my own little troubles, and would have liked to kiss his hands. When I dared to raise my eyes, he had his back to me and was looking through the window. After another long silence, he continued in a voice that was more muted, but still as broken:
‘Pity, you see, is a wild beast. A beast you can ask a lot of, but not everything. The best of dogs can go mad. Pity is powerful, and it’s voracious. I don’t know why we always imagine it as rather fretful, rather rash. One of man’s strongest passions, that’s what it is. I tell you now, at that point in my life I thought it was going to eat me up. Pride, envy, wrath, lust even, the seven deadly sins were howling in unison, screaming with pain. You would have thought they were a pack of wolves doused in petrol and set alight.’
I suddenly felt both his hands on my shoulder.
‘In other words, I, too, had my troubles. The hardest thing of all is not being understood by anyone. You feel ridiculous. To the world, you’re just a democratically inclined little priest, a conceited person, a joker. It’s possible that in general democratically inclined priests don’t have much temperament, but I think I have temperament to spare. You know, at the time I understood Luther. He had temperament, too. And in his monks’ den in Erfurt he was certainly eaten up with a hunger and thirst for justice. But the Lord doesn’t like anyone to touch His justice, and His wrath is a little too strong for us poor devils. It makes us drunk, it makes us worse than brutes. So, after striking fear into the cardinals, old Luther ended up throwing in his lot with the German princes, a pleasant bunch … Look at the portrait that was done of him on his deathbed … Nobody would have recognized the former monk in that paunchy, thick-lipped fellow. Even though his anger was theoretically just, it had gradually poisoned him, it had turned to fat, that’s all.’
‘Do you pray for Luther?’ I asked.
‘Every day,’ he replied. ‘As it happens, my name’s Martin, too, just like him.’
Then something very surprising happened. He pushed a chair right up against me, sat down and took my hands in his without taking his eyes off me, his magnificent eyes full of tears and yet more imperious than ever, eyes that would make death quite easy, quite simple.
‘I may have called you a beggar,’ he said, ‘but I respect you. Take that word for what it is, it’s a big word. In my opinion, the Lord has called you, no doubt about that. Physically, you’d be taken for a monk in the making. No matter! You may not have broad shoulders, but you have heart, you deserve to be serving in the infantry. But remember what I say: don’t let them replace you. Go down once to the infirmary, and you’ll never get out again. You weren’t built for a war of attrition. See it through and make sure you end up quietly one day in the ditch without having unpacked your bag.’
I know perfectly well I don’t deserve his trust, but now that it has been given to me, I’m pretty sure I shan’t disappoint him. That’s the strength of the weak and of children, my strength.
‘We learn life at different speeds, but we all end up learning it according to our capabilities. Each of us has only his own share of experience, of course. A twenty-centilitre bottle will never contain as much as a litre bottle. But there is the experience of injustice.’
I felt as if my features were going to harden, despite myself, for the word hurts me. I was already opening my mouth to reply.
‘Be quiet! You don’t know what injustice is, but you will. You belong to a breed of men that injustice scents from a distance, that it lies in wait for patiently until the day … You mustn’t let yourself be eaten up. Above all, don’t go thinking that you’d force it to retreat by looking it straight in the eyes, like a lion tamer! You wouldn’t escape its fascination, its intoxication. Only look at it as much as you need to, and never look at it without praying.’
His voice had started shaking a little. What images, what memories were passing before his eyes at that moment? God alone knows.
‘More than once you’ll envy the young nun who sets off happily in the morning to her flea-ridden children, her beggars, her drunkards, and works flat out all day. She doesn’t give two hoots for injustice, you see! She washes
her troop of cripples, wipes them, bandages them, wraps them up warm. It wasn’t to her that the Lord entrusted His word. The word of God! Give me back my Word, He will say on the Day of Judgement. When we think about what some will have to take out of their baggage at that moment, that’s no laughing matter, oh no!’
He stood up again, and again he faced me. I also stood up.
‘Have we kept the word? And even if we have kept it intact, haven’t we swept it under the carpet? Did we give it to the poor as we did to the rich? Obviously, Our Lord speaks tenderly to the poor, but as I was telling you earlier, what He announces to them is poverty. There’s no getting away from that: the Church has care of the poor, of course. It’s the easiest thing. Any compassionate man ensures that protection alongside her. Instead of which she is alone – you hear me – alone, absolutely alone in preserving the honour of poverty. Oh, our enemies get more than their due. “The poor you will always have with you”: those aren’t a demagogue’s words, now, are they? But they are the Word, and we received it. Too bad if the rich pretend to believe that it justifies their selfishness. Too bad for us who thus serve as hostages to the rich and powerful whenever the army of the poor batters against the walls of the city! They are the saddest words in the Gospel, the most laden with sadness. And at first they are addressed to Judas. Judas! Saint Luke tells us that he kept the accounts and that his bookkeeping wasn’t always above board. Maybe not, but he was the banker of the Twelve, and who has ever known a bank’s bookkeeping to be correct? It’s likely he charged too much commission, like everyone else. Judging by his last transaction, he wouldn’t have made a brilliant stockbroker’s clerk! But the Lord takes our poor society as it is, unlike the clowns who dream one up on paper, then reshape it totally, still on paper, of course! In short, Our Lord knew all about the power of money, He set a place beside him for capitalism, He gave it a chance, and even made the first down payment; I can’t help it, I find that phenomenal, truly wonderful! God doesn’t scorn anything. After all, if all had gone well, Judas would probably have subsidized sanatoriums, hospitals, libraries, laboratories. Don’t forget he was already interested in the problem of poverty, just like any millionaire. “The poor you will always have with you,” replies Our Lord, “but me you will not always have.” Which means: “Don’t let the hour for mercy sound in vain. You would do better to give back immediately the money you stole from me, instead of trying to turn the heads of my apostles with your imaginary speculations on your stock of perfumes and your plans for charitable works. In addition, you think that in this way you are flattering my well-known liking for tramps, and you are quite mistaken. I don’t love my poor the way old English ladies love stray cats or fighting bulls. Those are rich people’s manners. I love poverty with a love that’s deep, considered, lucid – in a spirit of equality – like a fertile and faithful wife. I have crowned it with my own hands. Not everyone is able to honour it, nobody can serve it who has not first donned the white linen tunic. Not everyone can break with it the bread of bitterness. I wanted it to be humble and proud, not servile. It does not refuse a glass of water, provided it is offered in my name, and it is in my name that it receives it. If the poor man derived his rights from necessity alone, your selfishness would soon have condemned him to the strict necessities, paid for by eternal gratitude and servitude. So today you lose your temper with that woman who comes to wash my feet with a very expensive nard, as if my poor should never profit from the industry of perfume-makers. You are indeed of that race of people who, having given a few coins to a tramp, are shocked when he doesn’t immediately rush to the baker and stuff himself with yesterday’s bread, which the merchant would have sold him anyway when it was fresh. In his place, they, too, would go to the wine merchant, because a poor man’s stomach is more in need of illusions than of bread. Wretch! Is the gold you set such store by anything other than an illusion, a dream, sometimes merely the promise of a dream? Poverty weighs heavy in my Heavenly Father’s scales, and all your treasures of smoke will not counterbalance them. The poor will always be with you, for the perfectly good reason that so will the rich, in other words, hard, greedy men who seek not so much possessions as power. Of these men, there are as many among the poor as among the rich, and the poor man who gets over his drunkenness at the stream is perhaps full of the same dreams as Caesar sleeping beneath his purple curtains. So, rich or poor, see yourselves in poverty as in a mirror, for it is the image of your fundamental disappointment, it takes the place on earth of the lost paradise, it is the emptiness in your hearts, in your hands. I have only placed it so high, embraced it, crowned it, because your wickedness is known to me. If I had allowed you to consider it as an enemy, or merely as a stranger, if I’d left you with the hope that one day you might chase it from the world, I would by the same token have condemned the weak. For the weak will always be an intolerable burden to you, a dead weight that your proud civilizations pass to one another with anger and disgust. I have put my mark on their brows, and you no longer dare approach them except on your hands and knees. You may devour the lost sheep, you will no longer dare attack the flock. Let me remove my arm for one moment, and the slavery I hate would be reborn by itself, under one name or another, for your law keeps its accounts in order, and the weak man has nothing to give but his skin.”’
His big hand was shaking on my arm and the tears I thought I could see in his eyes seemed to be gradually swallowed up in that gaze he still kept fixed on mine. I could not weep. Night had come without my realizing it and I could barely make out his face now. It was still, and as noble, pure and peaceful as the face of a dead man. And just then, the first angelus bell rang out, from some vertiginous point in the sky, as if from the summit of the evening.
* * *
Yesterday I saw the dean of Blangermont, who – very paternally but also at very great length – spoke to me of how necessary it was for a young priest to keep a close eye on his accounts. ‘No debts, above all, I won’t allow them!’ he concluded. I was a little surprised, I admit, and I stood up stupidly, to take my leave. It was he who begged me to sit down again (he had presumably thought I was having a fit of temper); I finally grasped the fact that Madame Pamyre had complained that she was still waiting to be paid for the bottles of tonic wine. In addition, it appears I owe 55 francs to Geoffrin the butcher and 118 to Delacour the coal merchant. Monsieur Delacour is a departmental councillor. Not that these gentlemen have made any claims. The dean had to admit to me that he had this information from Madame Pamyre. She can’t forgive me for the fact that I get my groceries from Camus, who is a stranger to the area, and whose daughter, so they say, has just been divorced. My superior is the first to laugh at such gossip, which he considers ridiculous, but showed some irritation when I expressed the intention of never again setting foot in Madame Pamyre’s shop. He reminded me of some words I had spoken in the course of one of our three-monthly lectures at the curé of Verchocq’s house, at which he had not been present. Apparently I had spoken in terms he regards as much too sharp about trade and tradesmen. ‘Get this into your head, my child, the words of an inexperienced young priest like you will always be picked up by his elders, whose duty it is to form an opinion on the new intake. At your age, you can’t allow yourself witticisms. In a little society as closed as ours, this mutual control is legitimate, and it would show a bad disposition not to accept it with good grace. True, commercial honesty is today no longer what it once was – in this respect, our best families demonstrate a lamentable negligence. But this terrible Depression has its rigours, we must admit. I have known a time when this modest, hard-working, thrifty middle class, which is still the wealth and greatness of our dear country, was almost entirely under the influence of the secular press. Today, when it feels the fruits of its labour threatened by elements of disorder, it understands that the era of noble illusions has passed, and that society has no more solid support than the Church. Isn’t the right to property enshrined in the Gospels? Oh, doubtless there are distinctions t
o be made, and in the administration of consciences you must call attention to the obligations corresponding to that right. Nevertheless …’
My small physical miseries have made me terribly nervous. I was unable to restrain the words that came to mind. Worse still, I uttered them in a trembling voice whose tone surprised even me. ‘I don’t often hear a penitent in the confessional accusing himself of making unlawful profits!’
The dean looked me straight in the eyes, and I sustained his gaze. I was thinking of the curé of Torcy. But however justified indignation may be, it is still an emotion too suspect for a priest to indulge in. And I also feel that there is always something in my anger when I am forced to talk about the rich man, the true rich man, the one who only thinks about money even when he has nothing but a silver penny in his pocket – money man!
Diary of a Country Priest Page 6