Once I had overcome the numbness of sleep, and as soon as I was able to focus my thoughts, calm returned all at once. The constraints I usually impose on myself in order to control my nerves are doubtless greater than I imagine. That thought is sweet to me after the agony of these last hours, for I know that God takes account of this effort, even though, since I make it almost unwittingly, I cannot myself draw any smug feelings of self-esteem from it.
How little we know of what a human life – our life – really is! Judging us on what we call our actions is perhaps as vain as judging us on our dreams. God chooses, according to His justice, from among this heap of obscure things, and the one He raises towards the Father in the gesture of raising the monstrance bursts out suddenly and glows like the sun.
No matter. I was so exhausted this morning that I would have given anything for a human word of compassion or tenderness. I thought of going all the way to Torcy. But I had to take the children’s catechism class at eleven. Even on my bicycle, I wouldn’t have been able to get back in time.
My best pupil is Sylvestre Galuchet, who isn’t very clean (his mother is dead, and he is being raised by an old grandmother who is quite a drinker) but is nevertheless of unusual beauty, and irresistibly gives an almost heartrending impression of innocence – an innocence from before sin, the innocent purity of a pure animal. When I handed out the prizes, he came to the sacristy to collect his picture, and I thought I saw in his calm, attentive eyes that pity I had been hoping for. My arms closed around him for a moment, and I wept with my head on his shoulder, foolishly.
* * *
First official meeting of our study circle. I had thought of putting Sulpice Mitonnet in charge of it, but his classmates seem to keep their distance from him somewhat. Naturally, I thought it best not to insist.
All we did anyway was set out together the few points of a programme that was inevitably very modest, given our meagre resources. The poor children obviously lack imagination and drive. As Englebert Denisane admitted, they are afraid of ‘being laughed at’. I have the impression that they only came to me out of idleness, out of boredom – just to see …
* * *
Met the curé of Torcy on the Desvres road. He gave me a lift back to the presbytery in his car and even agreed to have a glass of my famous Bordeaux. ‘Do you think it’s good?’ he asked. I replied that I made do with the rough wine bought from the Quatre-Tilleuls grocery. He seemed reassured.
I had the very distinct impression that there was something on his mind, but that he’d already decided to keep it to himself. He listened to me with a distracted air, while despite himself his eyes asked me a question I would have been hard put to answer, since he refused to formulate it. As usual when I feel intimidated, I talked a lot of nonsense. There are some silences that draw you in, fascinate you, so that you want to throw whatever words you can find into them …
‘You’re a strange body,’ he said at last. ‘It would be hard to find a greater simpleton in the whole diocese, that’s for sure! And yet you work like an ox, you work yourself to death. Monseigneur really must be in need of priests to entrust a parish to you! It’s a good thing a parish is basically solid! You might easily break it.’
I was aware that this was something he had thought long and hard about, and meant very sincerely, but that out of pity for me he was making a joke of it. As I thought this, he read it in my eyes.
‘I could bombard you with advice, but what would be the point? When I was teaching mathematics at the school in Saint-Omer, I would come across remarkable pupils who solved complicated problems in spite of the rules, just like that, out of spite. And besides, my boy, you’re not under my orders, I have to let you get on with it, let you realize your potential. It’s not up to me to question the judgement of your superiors. I’ll tell you my system another time.’
‘What system?’
He didn’t give me a direct answer. ‘You see, the superiors are right to advise caution. I’m cautious myself, for want of an alternative. It’s my nature. There’s nothing more stupid than an unthinking priest who plays at being scatterbrained, for no reason, because of the way he is. But all the same, our ways are not those of the world! We don’t offer men the Truth as if it were an insurance policy or a purgative. The Life is the Life. The Truth of the Lord is the Life. We may seem to bear it, but it bears us, my boy.’
‘Where have I gone wrong?’ I asked. (My voice was shaking, I twice had to start the sentence again.)
‘You’re too excitable. You’re like a hornet in a bottle. But I think you have the spirit of prayer.’
I thought he was going to advise me to rush to Solesmes and become a monk. And once again, he guessed what I was thinking. (Not that that’s very difficult.)
‘Monks are craftier than we are, and you don’t have a practical sense, your famous projects don’t stand up. As for your experience of people, let’s not even talk about that. You take the little count for a lord, your catechism kids for poets like you, and your dean for a socialist. In short, faced with your brand new parish, you seem nonplussed. With all due respect, you’re like a foolish young husband who flatters himself he’s “studying his wife” when she’s had him sized up from the start.’
‘And? …’ (I could barely speak, I was so confused.)
‘And? Well, just carry on, what do you want me to say? You haven’t an ounce of pride, and it’s hard to know what to think about your experiments, because you go all the way with them, you commit yourself. Of course, it’s not wrong to act with human caution. Remember the words of the blessed Ruysbroeck, a man of Flanders like me: “Even when you are rapt in God, if a sick man asks you for a cup of broth, come down from seventh heaven and give him what he asks.” It’s a fine precept, yes, but it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for laziness. There’s a spiritual laziness that comes with age, experience and disappointment. Old priests can be so hard! Caution is the worst kind of recklessness if it prepares us gradually to do without God. There are old priests who are terrible that way.’
I report his words as best I can, which is not very well, since I was barely listening to him. I guessed at so much of it! I have no self-confidence, and yet my goodwill is so great that I always imagine it is quite obvious, and that I will be judged on my intentions. How absurd! Even though I thought of myself as being still on the threshold of this little world, I had already gone in much earlier, alone – and the path had closed behind me, there was no turning back. I didn’t know my parish, and it pretended to ignore me. But the image it had formed of me was already too clear, too specific. It would cost me an immense effort to change it now.
The curé of Torcy saw the horror on my ridiculous face, and he must have realized that any attempt to reassure me at that moment would have been futile. He said nothing. I forced myself to smile. I think I did actually smile. It wasn’t easy.
* * *
A bad night. At three in the morning I took my lantern and walked over to the church. It was impossible to find the key to the side door and I had to open the main door. The squeak of the lock made a vast noise beneath the vaults.
I fell asleep on my pew with my head in my hands and slept so deeply that at dawn the rain woke me. It was coming in through the broken stained-glass window. As I left the graveyard I met Arsène Miron, whom I couldn’t make out very well, and who said good morning to me in a mocking tone. I must have looked odd with my eyes still swollen with sleep and my cassock soaked.
I have constantly to fight the temptation to run to Torcy. The stupid haste of the gambler who knows quite well that he has lost, but never tires of hearing people say it. In the nervous state I’m in, I would only get bogged down in pointless apologies anyway. What’s the point of talking about the past? Only the future matters to me, and I don’t yet feel capable of looking it in the face.
The curé of Torcy probably thinks like me. In fact, I’m sure he does. This morning, as I was hanging the draperies for Marie Perdrot’s funeral service, I though
t I recognized his firm, slightly heavy steps on the flagstones. It was only the gravedigger, coming to tell me that he’d finished his work.
My disappointment almost made me fall from the ladder … Oh no, I’m not ready …
* * *
I should have said to Dr Delbende that the Church isn’t only what he imagines, a kind of sovereign State with its laws, its civil service, its armies – a moment, glorious as it might be, in the history of men. No, the Church strides through time like a troop of soldiers marching across unknown lands where any normal supplies are impossible. She lives off successive regimes and societies, just as troops live off the locals from one day to the next.
How could she give the poor, who are God’s rightful heirs, a kingdom that is not of this world? She goes in search of the poor, calls to them on all the paths of the earth. And the poor are always in the same place, at the very peak of the dizzying slope, confronting the Lord of Darkness who has been repeating to them tirelessly for the last twenty centuries, in the voice of an angel, in his sublime voice, his prodigious voice: ‘All this is yours, if you bow down and worship me …’
This may be the metaphysical explanation for the extraordinary resignation of the masses. Power is within reach of the poor, and the poor do not know it, or seem not to know it. They keep their eyes bowed to the ground, and any second the Seducer expects to hear the words that will deliver him our species, but those words will never emerge from the august mouth that God Himself has sealed.
It is an insoluble problem: how to re-establish the poor in their rights, without establishing them in power? And if the impossible happened and a pitiless dictatorship, served by an army of civil servants, experts and statisticians, supported by millions of informers and policemen, managed to keep at bay, everywhere in the world simultaneously, the carnivorous minds, the fierce, cunning beasts, bent on profit, the race of men who live off other men – for their constant desire for money is no doubt merely the hypocritical or perhaps unconscious form of the horrible, shameful hunger that devours them – we would soon grow sick of the aurea mediocritas thus erected as a universal rule and would see voluntary poverty flourish again everywhere like a new spring.
No society will ever defeat the poor. Some live on other people’s stupidity, vanity, vices. The poor live on charity. What sublime words.
* * *
I don’t know what happened last night, I must have been dreaming. About three o’clock in the morning (I had just warmed up a little wine for myself and was crumbling my bread into it as usual), the garden gate started banging so violently that I had to go down. I found it closed, which in a way didn’t unduly surprise me, as I was sure I had closed it the previous evening, as indeed I do every evening. About twenty minutes later, it started banging again, more violently than the first time (there was a lot of wind, a real storm). It’s a ridiculous story …
I’ve started my visits again – let it be in God’s hands! The curé of Torcy’s remarks have made me cautious: I try to keep to a small number of questions which I ask as discreetly as I can, questions that are apparently trivial. Depending on the answer, I try to raise the tone of the debate a little, not too much, until together we encounter a truth, as humble a truth as we can find. But there are no average truths! However cautious I am, and even if I avoid actually uttering it with my own lips, the name of God seems to shine forth suddenly in the thick, stifling air, and faces that were already opening now close again. It would be more accurate to say that they darken, cloud over.
The revolt that wears itself out in insults and blasphemy – is that nothing, perhaps? … The hatred of God always makes me think of possession. ‘Then Satan entered Judas.’ Yes, possession, madness. Whereas a certain insidious fear of the divine, that bleak flight all through Life, as if in the narrow shade of a wall, while the light streams in from all sides … It makes me think of those wretched beasts who drag themselves to their holes after being used by children in their cruel games. The fierce curiosity of demons, their terrible solicitude for man, is so much more mysterious … Oh, if only we could see these mutilated creatures with the eyes of the angel!
* * *
I’m feeling much better, the attacks have become less frequent, and sometimes I think I feel something close to appetite. In any case, I now prepare my meal without feeling sick – always the same menu, bread and wine. Only, I add sugar to the wine and let my bread grow stale for several days, until it is very hard, so hard that I sometimes have to break it rather than cut it – the meat cleaver is very good for that. In this way, it’s a lot easier to digest.
Thanks to this diet, I get through my work without too much fatigue, and am even starting to regain a little self-confidence … I might even go and see the curé of Torcy on Friday. Sulpice Mitonnet comes to see me every day. True, he’s not very intelligent, but he is quite tactful and attentive. I have given him the key to the bakehouse, and he comes in here when I’m away and does all kinds of odd jobs. Thanks to him, my poor abode is looking a lot better. Wine, he says, is bad for his stomach, but he stuffs himself with sugar.
He told me, with tears in his eyes, that his diligence in coming to the presbytery has earned him a lot of snubs and mockery. I think it’s his way of life that disconcerts our hard-working peasants, and I have reprimanded him severely for his laziness. He has promised me he’ll look for work.
Madame Dumouchel came to see me in the sacristy and reproached me for failing her daughter in the end-of-term examination.
As much as possible I avoid referring in this diary to certain trials of my life that I would like to forget immediately, but they are not, alas, the kind that I can bear with joy – and what is resignation without joy? Not that I exaggerate their importance, far from it! They are perfectly commonplace, I know that. The shame that I feel, the embarrassment I cannot control, does not do me much honour, but I cannot overcome the physical effect, the revulsion almost, that they arouse in me. What’s the point in denying it? I saw the true face of vice when I was all too young, and although I genuinely feel, deep inside me, a great pity for these poor souls, the image I form despite myself of their misfortune is almost intolerable. In short, lust scares me.
The impurity of children, above all, is something I’m familiar with. Not that I make a tragedy out of it! I think, on the contrary, that we must bear it with a great deal of patience, for the slightest rash act in this respect might have terrible consequences. It is so difficult to distinguish the deepest wounds from the others, and even when we do so it is a perilous task to probe them! Sometimes it is better to let them heal by themselves: one doesn’t torture a growing abscess. But that doesn’t stop me from hating this universal conspiracy, this determination not to see what is nevertheless staring us in the face, this stupid knowing smile of adults faced with certain types of suffering we consider unimportant because they can hardly be explained in our grown-up language. I was familiar with sadness too early in my life not to be revolted by everyone’s stupidity and injustice with regard to the mysterious sadness of children. Alas, experience shows us that children can feel despair. And the demon of anguish is essentially, I believe, an impure demon.
That is why I have not often spoken of Séraphita Dumouchel, even though she has given me a great deal of concern in the last few weeks. Her skill in tormenting me seems so beyond her years that I sometimes wonder if she hates me. The ridiculous teasing that used to seem merely silly and carefree now seems to betray a certain deliberate application which I cannot entirely put down to the unhealthy curiosity common to many of her peers. First of all, she only ever indulges in it in the presence of her classmates, and when she does so she affects towards me an air of complicity, of knowingness, which for a long time made me smile and which I am only now starting to see as dangerous. Whenever I meet her, by chance, on the road – and I meet her a little more often than I should – she greets me calmly, gravely, with perfect simplicity. On one occasion, I was taken in. She waited for me without moving, ey
es bowed, while I advanced towards her, talking to her softly. I must have looked like a bird charmer. For as long as she was out of my reach, she didn’t make a move, but just as I was about to come level with her – her head was bowed so low towards the ground that all I could see now was the back of her stubborn little neck, which she rarely lifted – she leaped away from me, throwing her satchel into the ditch. I had to have it taken back by my altar boy, who was received very rudely.
Madame Dumouchel was polite enough. The gaps in her daughter’s knowledge would probably have sufficed to justify the decision I took, but it would be only a pretext. In any case, Séraphita is too intelligent not to do well in a second test, and I mustn’t run the risk of a humiliating rejection. So, as discreetly as possible, I tried to make it clear to Madame Dumouchel that in my opinion her child was very advanced, very precocious, and that it was advisable to keep her under observation for a few weeks. She would soon catch up, and in any case the lesson would be good for her.
The poor woman listened to me red with anger. I could see the anger rise into her cheeks, into her eyes. The rims of her ears were purple. ‘She’s just as good as the others,’ she said at last. ‘What she wants is to be given what she deserves, no more, no less.’
I replied that Séraphita was indeed an excellent pupil, but that I was unhappy with her conduct, or at least her manner.
‘What manner?’
‘She’s a bit of a flirt,’ I replied.
That made her fly into a temper. ‘A flirt! What do you know of that? It’s none of your business. A flirt! Is that the business of priests these days? With all due respect, Father, I think you’re very young to use a word like that, and about a young girl to boot!’
With that, she left me. Séraphita was waiting quietly for her on a pew in the empty church. Through the half-open door, I could see the faces of her classmates and hear their stifled laughter – they were surely jostling one another to see. Séraphita threw herself into her mother’s arms, sobbing. I fear she was play-acting.
Diary of a Country Priest Page 9