Diary of a Country Priest

by Georges Bernanos

  ‘I came back for my prescription,’ I stammered, taking a step towards the table. The paper was no longer on it.

  ‘I must have put it back in my pocket,’ he said. ‘Wait a moment.’

  He pulled out the needle with an abrupt move and stood there motionless, without taking his eyes off me, the syringe still in his hand. He seemed to be defying me. ‘With this, my dear fellow, one can do without God.’

  I think my embarrassment disarmed him.

  ‘Oh, come on, that’s only a medical student’s joke. I respect all opinions, even religious ones. Actually, I don’t have any of my own. For a doctor, there are no opinions, there are only hypotheses.’

  ‘Professor …’

  ‘Why do you call me Professor? Professor of what?’

  I thought he had gone mad.

  ‘Answer me, dammit! You mentioned a colleague whose name I don’t even know, and you call me Professor.’

  ‘Dr Delbende advised me to see Professor Lavigne.’

  ‘Lavigne? Are you pulling my leg? Your Dr Delbende must have been a real idiot. Lavigne died last January, at the age of seventy-eight! Who gave you my address?’

  ‘I found it in the phone book.’

  ‘Really? My name isn’t Lavigne, it’s Laville. Can’t you read?’

  ‘I’m absent-minded,’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon.’

  He placed himself between me and the door. I wondered if I would ever get out of that room: I felt as if I had fallen through a trapdoor and was now confined at the bottom of a hole. Sweat was running down my cheeks, blinding me.

  ‘No, I beg your pardon. If you want, I can give you a note for another professor, Dupetitpré, for example. But between ourselves, I think it’s pointless. I know my job as well as these provincials. I was an intern in Paris hospitals, I even came third in the competitive examination! Forgive me for singing my own praises. In any case there’s nothing tricky about your case, anyone would have handled it like me.’

  I again walked towards the door. His words did not arouse any suspicion in me, but the look in his eyes made me feel extremely embarrassed. They were excessively bright and fixed. ‘I wouldn’t like to take advantage,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not taking advantage.’ He took out his watch. ‘My consultations don’t start until ten. I must confess to you,’ he continued, ‘that this is the first time I’ve ever been alone with one of you – with a priest, I mean, a young priest. Does that surprise you? It is quite odd, I must admit.’

  ‘I only regret that I’ve given you such a bad opinion of all of us,’ I replied. ‘I’m a very ordinary priest.’

  ‘Oh, please! On the contrary, you interest me enormously. You have a very … a very remarkable physiognomy! Haven’t you ever been told that?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I exclaimed. ‘I think you’re making fun of me.’

  He shrugged and turned his back on me. ‘Do you know if there have been many priests in your family?’

  ‘None, monsieur. I don’t know much about my family. Families like mine have no history.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Your family’s history is written all over your face, and it’s quite a history!’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to read it there. What would be the point? Let the dead bury the dead.’

  ‘They bury the living well enough. You think you’re free?’

  ‘I don’t know how much freedom I have, whether it’s large or small. I think only that God has given me enough of it so that one day I can put it back in His hands.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ he resumed after a silence, ‘I must seem coarse to you. The thing is, I myself belong to a family … a family rather like yours, I suppose. When I saw you earlier, I had the unpleasant impression that I was face to face with my … my double. Do you think I’m mad?’ I threw an involuntary glance at the syringe. He burst out laughing. ‘No, morphine doesn’t intoxicate, don’t be afraid. It’s even quite good for the brain. All I ask of it is what you probably ask of prayer: oblivion.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘what one asks of prayer is not oblivion but strength.’

  ‘Strength wouldn’t be any use to me now.’ He picked the rag doll up from the floor and carefully placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Prayer,’ he resumed in a pensive voice. ‘I hope you pray as easily as I plunge this needle into my skin. Nervous people like you don’t pray, or pray badly. Admit rather that what you love in prayer is only the effort, the constraint, it’s an act of violence you commit against yourself without knowing it. A nervous person is always his own executioner.’

  When I think back on it, I can hardly explain to myself the shame into which his words threw me. I no longer dared raise my eyes to look at him.

  ‘Don’t go taking me for an old-fashioned materialist. The instinct for prayer exists deep in each of us, and is no less inexplicable than any other. One of the forms of the obscure struggle of the individual against the race, I suppose. But the race absorbs everything, silently. And the species, in its turn, devours the race, so that the yoke of the dead crushes the living a little more. I don’t think that for centuries any of my ancestors has ever felt the slightest desire to know any more than their parents did. In the village in the lower Maine where we have always lived, it’s common to say: as stubborn as Triquet – Triquet is our nickname, has been from time immemorial. And in our area, stubborn means loutish. Well, I was born with that rage to learn that you call libido sciendi. I worked the way other people eat. When I think of my youth, my little room in Rue Jacob, the nights I spent, I feel a kind of terror, an almost religious terror. And to get to what? To what, I ask you? … That curiosity that my family never had I’m now killing little by little, with morphine. And if it takes too long … Have you never been tempted by suicide? It’s not uncommon, it’s even quite normal in nervous people like you …’

  I couldn’t find anything to say in response, I was fascinated.

  ‘It’s true that an inclination to suicide is a gift, a sixth sense, something like that, we’re born with it. Mind you, I’d do it discreetly, I still hunt. Anyone can cross a hedge, pulling his rifle behind him – bang! And the next morning, dawn finds you with your nose in the grass, all covered in dew, all fresh and quiet, with the first smoke about the trees, the cries of the cockerel and the songs of the birds. Doesn’t that tempt you?’

  God! I thought for a moment that he knew about Dr Delbende’s suicide, and was only pretending he didn’t, for some horrible reason. But no, he seemed sincere enough. And as moved as I was myself, I felt that my presence – for what reason, I don’t know – had upset him, that with every passing second it was more unbearable to him, but that he felt in no fit state to leave me. We were one another’s prisoners.

  ‘People like us should stay behind the cows,’ he resumed, in a muted voice. ‘We don’t spare ourselves, we don’t spare anything. I’d wager you were in the seminary at exactly the same time I was at school in Provins. God or Science, we threw ourselves on it, we had fire in our bellies. And now here we are facing the same …’

  He broke off, I should have understood, I was still only thinking of escaping.

  ‘A man like you,’ I said, ‘doesn’t turn his back on his objective.’

  ‘It’s my objective that has turned its back on me,’ he replied. ‘In six months, I’ll be dead.’ I thought he was still talking about suicide and he probably read that thought in my eyes. ‘I wonder why I’m showing off to you. There’s something about you that makes one want to tell stories, any kind of story. Kill myself? Come, now. That’s a pastime for lords of the manor or poets, a stylish act that’s beyond me – not that I’d want you to take me for a coward either.’

  ‘I don’t take you for a coward,’ I said. ‘I simply allow myself to think that the … that this drug …’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense about morphine. One day, you yourself …’ He was looking at me with real gentleness. ‘Have you ever heard of malignant lymphogranulomatosis? No? Well, it’s not an illnes
s for the general public. I did my student thesis on it, imagine that. So there’s no way I could be mistaken, I didn’t even need to wait for the laboratory test. I give myself another three months, six months at most. You see, I’m not turning my back on the objective. I’m looking it in the face. When the itch becomes too strong, I scratch it, but what can we do? My patients have their demands, and a doctor needs to stay optimistic. On days when I give consultations, I drug myself a little. Lying to patients is the necessity of our state.’

  ‘Perhaps you lie to them rather too much.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ he said. His voice had the same gentleness as his face. ‘Your role is less difficult than mine: you only deal with the dying, I assume. Most death agonies are euphoric. It’s quite another thing to cast down all of a man’s hopes with a single blow, a single word. That’s happened to me once or twice. Oh, I know what you might say in reply, your theologians have made hope into a virtue, that hope of yours has its hands together in prayer. That’s as may be: nobody has ever seen that deity close up. But the hope I’m talking about is a beast, I tell you, a beast inside man, a powerful beast, a fierce one. Better to let it die quite gradually. Or else, don’t miss it! If you miss it, it scratches, it bites. And the sick are so mischievous! However well one knows them, one gets caught out by them eventually. For instance, there was this old colonel, a hard-boiled type from the colonial service, who asked me to tell him the truth, as a comrade … Brr! …’

  ‘One should die little by little,’ I stammered, ‘to get used to it.’

  ‘That’s difficult! Is that the teaching you’ve followed?’

  ‘At least I’ve tried. Besides, I don’t compare myself to lay people, who have their jobs and their families. The life of a poor priest like me doesn’t matter to anyone.’

  ‘That may be so. But if you preach nothing more than the acceptance of destiny, that’s not new.’

  ‘It’s a joyful acceptance,’ I said.

  ‘Enough! Man looks at his own joy as he would look at himself in the mirror, and he doesn’t recognize himself, the fool! One has pleasure only at one’s own expense, at the expense of one’s own substance – joy and pain are one.’

  ‘What you call joy, no doubt. But the mission of the Church is precisely to get back to the source of lost joys.’

  His gaze was as gentle as his voice. I felt an inexpressible weariness, it seemed to me that I had been there for hours.

  ‘Let me leave now,’ I exclaimed.

  He took the prescription from his pocket, but didn’t hold it out to me. And all at once, he put his hand on my shoulder, with his arm outstretched, his head bent, his eyes blinking. His face recalled to me the visions of my childhood! ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose one does owe the truth to people like you.’ He hesitated before continuing. As absurd as it may seem, the words reached my ears without arousing any suspicion. Twenty minutes earlier, I had entered this house resigned, I had been prepared to hear anything. Even though the last week spent in Ambricourt had left me with an inexplicable impression of safety, of confidence, something like a promise of happiness, Monsieur Laville’s initially reassuring words had nevertheless caused me great joy. I realize now that that joy was doubtless much greater than I had thought, much deeper. It was that same feeling of deliverance, of elation that I had known on the road to Mézargues, but mixed with it was the excitement of an extraordinary impatience. I would first of all have liked to flee that house, those walls. And at the exact moment when my gaze seemed to answer the doctor’s silent interrogation, I was barely aware of anything but the vague noise of the street. To escape! To flee! To find again that winter sky, so pure, where this morning I had seen the sunrise through the window of the railway carriage! Monsieur Laville must have been mistaken. The light came on in me, abruptly. Before he had finished his sentence, I was no longer anything but a dead man among the living.

  Cancer … Cancer of the stomach … The word, above all, struck me. I had been expecting another. I had been expecting tuberculosis. It took me a great effort of attention to convince myself that I was going to die of a disease rarely seen in people my age. I must simply have frowned, as if on hearing a difficult problem. I was so absorbed that I don’t think I turned pale. The doctor didn’t take his eyes off mine, and in them I saw trust, sympathy and I don’t know what else. They were the eyes of a friend, a companion. His hand had again come to rest on my shoulder.

  ‘We’ll go and consult Grousset, but to be honest, I don’t think the horrible thing you have is really operable. I’m actually surprised you’ve held out this long. The abdominal mass is voluminous, there is considerable thickening, and I just noticed beneath the left clavicle a sign that’s unfortunately very indicative, what we call Troisier’s sign. Mind you, it may develop slowly, although I have to say that at your age—’

  ‘How long do I have?’

  He must have misunderstood me again because my voice was not trembling. Alas, my composure was only astonishment. I could distinctly hear the rumble of the trams, the ringing of the bells, in my mind I was already leaving that gloomy house and losing myself in the fast-moving crowd … May God forgive me, I wasn’t thinking about Him …

  ‘Hard to say. It mainly depends on how much blood you lose. That’s very rarely fatal, but if it happens too frequently … Who knows? When I advised you earlier to quietly get back to work, I wasn’t pretending. With a little luck, you’ll die standing, like that famous emperor, or almost. It’s a question of morale. Unless …’

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘You’re persistent,’ he said, ‘you would have made a good doctor. And I’d much rather give you all the information now than to let you skim through dictionaries. Well, if at any time you feel a pain on the inside of your left thigh, along with a little fever, go to bed. That kind of phlebitis is quite common in cases like yours, and may lead to an embolism. And now, my dear fellow, you know as much as I do.’

  He finally handed me the prescription, and I mechanically slipped it into my notebook. Why didn’t I leave at that moment? I don’t know. Perhaps I couldn’t repress an impulse of anger, of rebellion against this stranger who had just calmly disposed of me as if I were his property. Perhaps I was too engrossed in the absurd enterprise of connecting my thoughts, my projects, my memories even, my whole life in a few seconds to the new certainty that turned me into a different man? I think quite simply that I was, as usual, paralysed by shyness and didn’t know how to take my leave. My silence surprised Dr Laville. I realized that from the way his voice shook.

  ‘The fact remains that today, all around the world, there are more and more examples of patients once condemned by doctors who live to be a hundred. There are even cases of the resorption of malignant tumours. Besides, a man like you wouldn’t have been fooled for very long by Grousset’s chatter, which only reassures imbeciles. There’s nothing more humiliating than to gradually wheedle the truth out of these soothsayers, who in any case don’t give a damn about what they’re saying. They recommend taking Scottish showers: enough of them and you lose all self-respect. In the end, even the bravest go off to meet their fate along with the herd. I’ll see you a week tomorrow, and go with you to the hospital. In the meantime, celebrate Mass, hear confessions, don’t change any of your habits. I know your parish very well. I even have a friend in Mézargues.’

  He held out his hand. I was still in the same state of distraction, of absence. Whatever I do, I know I will never understand by what terrible miracle I was able at such a moment to forget even the name of God. I was alone, inexpressibly alone, face to face with my own death, and that death was nothing but the loss of the body, no more than that. The visible world seemed to flow out of me at a terrifying speed and in a chaos of images, not gloomy ones – on the contrary, all of them were bright and dazzling. ‘Is it possible? Have I loved it so much?’ Those mornings, those evenings, those roads. Those changing, mysterious roads, those roads filled with the steps of men. Have I loved the roads so much,
our roads, the roads of the world? What child, raised in their dust, has not confided his dreams to them? They carry them slowly, majestically, towards unknown seas, oh, great rivers of light and shade that carry the dreams of the poor! I think it was the word ‘Mézargues’ that had broken my heart. The thought of Monsieur Olivier, of our excursion, should have been far from my mind, and yet it wasn’t. I couldn’t take my eyes off the doctor’s face, and suddenly it disappeared. I didn’t realize immediately that I was crying.

  Yes, I was crying. I was crying without a sob, without even a sigh, I think. I was crying with my eyes wide open, I was crying as I have seen the dying cry, it was life still coming out of me. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my cassock, and was again able to make out the doctor’s face. He had an indefinable expression of surprise, of compassion. If one can die of self-disgust, I would have died. I should have fled, but didn’t dare. I was waiting for God to inspire a word in me, a priestly word, I would have paid for that word with my life, with what remained of my life. At least I wanted to ask forgiveness, I could only stammer the words, my tears were choking me. I felt them running down my throat, they tasted of blood. What would I not have given for them to actually be blood! Where did they come from? Who could say? It was not for myself that I was crying, I swear! I have never felt so close to hating myself. I was not crying about my death. In my childhood, it sometimes happened that I would wake up like that, sobbing. From what dream had I awakened this time? Alas, I had thought I was going through the world almost without seeing it, the way one walks with one’s eyes lowered amid a brilliant crowd, and sometimes I even imagined that I despised it. But now it was myself I was ashamed of, not the world. I was like a poor man who is in love but doesn’t dare say it or even admit to himself that he is in love. Oh, I don’t deny that those tears might have been cowardly! But I also think they were tears of love …