Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  Soon, noisy conversations filled the silence that had greeted his arrival. The Jesuit took part in them, his tone playful, friendly and familiar. However, beneath this free and easy manner, he was clearly respectful of the social rank and the money which these young students represented. As they were all older boys, he had known them for some time and showed an interest in their enthusiastic accounts of their holidays. There was talk of horse-riding, hunting, trips away, plays put on at the chateau, coachmen, nannies, dogs, ponies, guns, bishops – an evocation of happy, cherished, elegant lives, in such marked contrast to Sebastien’s own monotonous and vulgar existence, that it only increased his embarrassment, and added to that feeling a bitter, barely conscious tinge of jealousy. There was also news of the school, given by the Reverend Father: improvements to the grounds, the chapel, restored in honour of the magnificent reredos donated by the saintly Marchioness of Kergarec … the pond extended for skating … the theatre rebuilt in what had previously been the junior real tennis courts … a major reform by the Prefect of Studies: the permanent display in the parlour of a tablet showing in engraved gold letters the names of all the pupils accepted at Saint-Cyr. Finally, the acquisition of a yacht, the St Francis Xavier, for sea trips on days out, a white yacht, bearing on its prow the image of the saint, supported by two angels with gilded wings.

  ‘Great! Wonderful!’ said one of the pupils.

  To which the Father added:

  ‘It’s still a secret … but there is going to be a wonderful celebration for the blessing of the Saint Francis Xavier, with a sung mass, a procession, a banquet and a raffled … Father Gargan is going to recite a fine piece of poetry:

  O Saint Francis Xavier, you will sail at last

  With Father Malherbe at the helm as guide,

  And your foaming prow and your conquering mast

  Will cleave the azure waves with ardour and pride …

  And all jigged about joyfully and sang in chorus, with the Jesuit beating time:

  ‘There was a little boat

  Which never never had …’

  This gaiety, so out of keeping with Sébastien’s state of mind, was mortifying to him. It repelled him to think that songs could emerge from lips that were still warm from a last parental kiss. He forced himself not to listen. The train rattled along at top speed. From his corner, where he sat motionless, the child looked out at the night countryside through the half-raised window of the carriage door: the swift passage of shadows, then, above, a fleeting glimpse of sky studded with gold which seemed to reflect the landscape, like snapshots of elusive memories. For a long while, he concentrated dreamily on contemplating that sky, concealed occasionally by the thick smoke from the engine, one moment gilded by the glare of the lamp, the next melting into the night, turn and turn about. The night was beguiling; at ground level, gentle shifting patches of white floated in the darkness; glints of silvery plush flickered over the banks of shadow; the fields were like sleeping lakes, drowned forests, gardens in which flowers turn to vapour; hills rose up clad in vast, jumbled towns, bristling with turrets, belltowers, spires; barbaric towns, magical towns, fading to the very borders of space and to the edges of dream, in the ceaseless metamorphoses worked by the mists.

  Gradually, calm was restored to the carriage, tired faces relaxed into slumber, and the priest announced that it was time to go to sleep; he recited a brief prayer and lowered the shade on the lamp. Everyone wrapped themselves up in the rugs, seeking a comfortable position, usually to the detriment of his neighbour. Sébastien was emboldened by the surrounding silence, more especially by the half-darkness that bathed the carriage in mystery, so that faces appeared to be no more than shivers of light set against patches of intense shadow Glad to be free now of the ironic curiosity of so many alien stares, he ventured to make himself comfortable on the cushions, to stretch his numb limbs, and, propping his head against the padded edge of the armrest, he wrapped the tails of his coat around his knees and closed his eyes. Now, deliciously rocked by the orchestral roll of the carriage, which filled his ears with music, with strains of unknown songs, with the rhythms of forgotten dances, he felt a great sweetness descend upon him, almost a sense of joie de vivre, of pleasure at being carried off somewhere. His embarrassment, fear and pain all vanished, just as the billowing steam had vanished, interposing itself between the sky and him. He listened too with confidence to the clear, pretty, light, metallic tinkling of a rosary as, for a whole hour, the beads slipped through the priest’s fingers. As each turn of the wheels put an ever greater distance between him and everything he so missed, he saw again, without anguish now, but with a resigned, beneficent melancholy, as if in affectionate reverie, the little main street in Pervenchères, the good people in their doorways, greeting him as he left, the station and the yellowing notices, his father holding him tenderly by the hand and the Jesuit smiling and saying: ‘What a delightful child, sir! We will surround him with love.’ With this consoling vision of a multitude of teachers all devoted to ways of loving him, he fell into a deep sleep.

  He did not wake until Rennes, where they left the train. The cold dawn tinged the glass vault of the station with pale pink. An immense arch at one end opened onto a gloomy sky, smudged with dirty, yellow fog; submerged in the fog was a landscape of black roofs, sooty walls, smoking machinery ands blurred silhouettes. Amid the sounds, the whistles, the rumbling of engines on turntables, in the tarnished clarity of the gas lamps, there stirred a throng of shadows, a jostling mass of indistinct bodies and pale faces. Terrified, Sébastien kept close behind the priest.

  In Rennes, other groups of pupils were waiting, having arrived from different directions. There was an indescribable commotion, a tumultuous muddle of hand-shaking, hugs, impatient confidences, which the supervisors had difficulty in quelling. After a summary meal, served promptly in the station buffet, they crammed into five large horse-drawn cabs, all squashed together, elbowing and kicking so as to secure a better position. Sébastien was still not thinking clearly, his eyes puffy with sleep. Although he was very hungry, he had not dared to eat any of the food provided. Since no one had specifically invited him to, he feared he might not be entitled to it. In the carriage, he let people stamp on his feet, push him from one seat to another, stunned, confused, but trying, in his disarray, not to lose sight of the Jesuit’s soutane, as a lost traveller gazes at a guiding light glimpsed in the darkness. With great difficulty, he managed to install himself between two other boys. The cab set off.

  ‘Are you new?’ asked the boy to his right, a handsome adolescent, wrapped in an ample overcoat with a fur collar.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, trembling, but glad that someone should bother with him. ‘I’m from Pervenchères.’

  ‘Ah, you’re from Pervenchères are you? Really now? And what are you called, Monsieur de Pervenchères?’

  ‘I’m called Sébastien Roch.’

  ‘That’s amazing you know, to be called that. And what about your dog? You’ve forgotten your dog. Where’s your dog? I was just thinking I’d seen you somewhere before, St Roch, old chap. It was above the door of our garden, in a niche … except you were made of stone and you had your dog with you. What do you say?’

  He thumped him hard and elbowed him.

  ‘What do you say, then? There’s no call to sit on my overcoat.’

  As the others started laughing, Sébastien, very red and confused, bent his head.

  ‘Now then, Chateauvieux,’ said the priest in an indulgent almost conspiratorial tone. ‘Leave the child alone.’

  Chateauvieux turned his head away with a look of cheerful disdain. He stroked his fur collar, carefully pulled on his gloves and began telling stories about hunting.

  The journey was long and exhausting. Beneath a grey sky, like a taut canopy of grey cloth, a motionless sky, careft of even a single, wayfaring cloud, a low, undulating landscape passed by, harsh and dry; there was field upon rutted field, enclosed within stone walls, broken at intervals by stunted apple trees
dangling their mops of mossy hair. Occasionally there were hunched, blackened hovels, bathed in mud and ordure, their foundations sunk into the slurry from the stables; here and there the buckled roofs and crumbling chimneys of delapidated houses peeped out from amongst the hills. Then there were squalid villages where a bestial, servile species of humanity swarmed, ashen-faced, clothed in miserable rags and walking with a slow, painful gait. There were woods of squat oaks, then woods of stunted firs, that made the dreary day still drearier, weeping beneath their sombre branches. Beyond, Sébastien could see the bare moorlands consumed by weeds, wretched fever-lands, as far as the eye could see, where nothing living seemed to grow or bloom, where even the grass seemed to emerge from the earth already withered and dead. Skeletal cows and spectral brown horses, with hairy muzzles like goats, wandered grimly past pale, glassy pools of water, grazing on the illusory shoots of reeds. Black sheep, lame, half-starved, strained against their tethers and walked in ceaseless circles. Here and there, like petrified animals, like strange carcasses, stood blocks of granite, evoking previous lives, vanished races, the unfinished, fabulous forms of a prehistoric age. The view was sometimes relieved by little green valleys of lush grass, where, beneath leafy boughs, brooks flowed swiftly and joyously along; but these oases soon passed, soon forgotten, soon lost in the vast sterility. Then death breathed again in the dense air, carrying on it heavy, marshy emanations, whirling cosmic dust and the invisible maggots of eternal decay. At crossroads, at junctions, misshapen crucifixes reared up, stelae loomed and giant stones crouched, guarding the memory of the murderous gods who had once reigned there.

  Everyone got out of the carriage at the bottom of the hills. Some crowded round the priests, who now behaved in an even more brotherly and playful way; others leaped over the ditches and threw pebbles, gripped by the need to move. Some linked arms and sang hymns. No one spoke a word to Sébastien, who noted, not without some bitterness, that the young priest who was going to ‘surround him with love’ did not pay him the slightest attention. Crushed by the desolation and harshness of the countryside, whose wild and savage beauty he did not yet comprehend, prey once more to fears about the school which was soon to appear out of the depths of the mists, he walked alone along the side of the road, wretched, more alone in the company of his schoolfellows than a beast wandering the infinite silence of the moor. ‘We will surround him with love,’ he kept repeating to himself, in the hope of stifling the involuntary and persistent sense of betrayal which over-whelmed him and which made the inhospitable nature of his surroundings, the indifference of his teachers and the mocking, haughty scorn of his companions seem even crueller. The phrase kept coming back to him and seemed to contain an element of hypocritical mockery, of treacherous irony, and he said to himself, ‘No, they will never love me … how could they, when they love so many others already, boys they know better than me, boys with horses, furs, fine guns, whilst I have nothing?’ He suddenly felt like running away; as they rounded a corner, he slowed his pace. He would wait until the cabs and the band of pupils had disappeared and then he would start to run. But a thought paralysed him. Where could he go? Before him and behind him, everywhere, there was only grim solitude; it was deserted. Not a house, no shelter in this nightmarish space, amidst this spectral, earthly nakedness. On the horizon, where purplish mists now encroached, there was not a single belltower to be seen; above his head was an implacable sky, a sky now leaden, heavy and opaque, across which crows flew ceaselessly back and forth in starving flocks. A small figure, his long frock coat forming ridiculous folds in the small of his back, its ludicrous tails flapping comically about his legs, he rejoined the carriages, following the others, hoping that they might never arrive.

  At Malestroit, near an old bridge, they stopped to change horses and to dine; it was a gloomy meal, in a grimy inn, beneath smoke-stained beams, amid the sickening odours of sour cider and rancid fat. No one spoke, worn out by the journey, and Sébastien ate nothing at all, relegated to one end of the great table, served by women in embroidered bodices and winged headdresses like nuns. Physical exhaustion and a kind of moral prostration replaced his overwrought, nervous state, and he was now quite calm but profoundly tired. His head was empty, his will paralysed. He no longer thought about the past or the present; he felt nothing, neither the pain in his legs, nor his aching back, nor the leaden weight in the pit of his stomach. Dazed, his hands concealed beneath the table, he stared straight ahead, without seeing or hearing anything or understanding why he was there and what he was doing.

  Four hours later, he found himself in a little iron bed, sealed off by wooden partitions and a white curtain. The partitions reached half-way to the ceiling, leaving above them a gap where pools of trembling lamplight glimmered. Next to the bed was a narrow table, bearing a washbasin and a pitcher; against the partition, within reach, stood a stoup for holy water, with a crucifix above it; opposite, against the other partition his clothes hung on a hook, like the skins of a flayed beast.

  He could not remember exactly what had happened after Malestroit. He had only a sensation of truncated, fleeting, somewhat alarming events, of passing from the bright dazzle of lights to a void of pitch-black shadows. He recalled having journeyed for a long while amid sounds of tinkling harnesses and rattling windowpanes, travelling in a carriage where very pale, sleepy faces jolted about in the dull gleam of a lantern. He thought he could still feel this motion in his body, the jolts, the buffeting. The tinkle of the harnesses still rang in his ears, but the sound was farther off now; the panes still rattled, but more dully now. He saw the steaming bony rumps of the skeletal horses, rising and falling in an aura of vaporous light. Then he saw the confused image of a town, half-glimpsed in the darkness, then a door, in front of which they stopped, a high façade topped by a cross, the arms of which glowed. Then there were long, white corridors, interminable stairs, the footsteps of a large group of people on echoing flagstones; and swift, fleeting soutanes, wan plaster saints, pallid madonnas, their stiff gestures casting shadows on the walls. Beds, more beds, then nothing. His skin burned, a pulse beat in his temples. It felt as though a band of red-hot steel was pressed round his forehead. Where was he? He half rose, pulling aside the covers, and listened. There was a great silence. A great silence in which, little by little, he could make out the constant, hesitant rasp of people asleep and breathing, then suddenly a single terrified cry from within a dream, a hoarse cough, the dull thud of an elbow against the wooden partitions. He thought of his little room at home, his joyful awakening from sleep, of Madame Cébron, who would be in the kitchen every morning toasting bread to have with the coffee, and he sighed. It was all over. He would never see his room again, nor Madame Cébron, nor anything he had loved up till then. From time to time, against the whiteness of the curtains, filled briefly by a furtive breath of air, skulked the vigilant, distorted shadow of a soutane. The hours tolled at vast intervals.

  It was eight o’clock before the bell went for the children to rise. A growing sound of pattering filled the dormitory; the footfalls of a multitude, the hum of a busy hive, above which could be discerned the sharper sound of curtains swishing aside, one by one, on their iron rings, and the splash of water into basins. Sébastien got up mechanically, his head heavy, his thoughts disjointed, feeling ill at ease. A miserly daylight, a prison daylight, replacing the glimmer of the now extinguished lamps, crept across the ceiling, bleaching the shadows in the cubicles. He got dressed hurriedly, awkwardly, not bothering to wash, fearful of being late, and, without quite knowing how, found himself in the middle of a long queue, pushed, jostled and flanked by two fellow pupils, like a criminal between two policemen. The queue set off. Again he saw the stairs, the plaster saints, the corridors pierced by broad windows through which he glimpsed rectangular courtyards and small, sickly gardens, square spaces like cloisters and quadrangles, uniformly enclosed by high buildings which conferred on them a chalky light, unconscionably harsh and gloomy. Distracted, yawning, the pupils heard m
ass in a dark, low, stuffy chapel, in a kind of gallery opening out laterally onto the public nave, which was high and vaulted, and of which one could see only a foreshortened view of part of the choirstalls and the magnificent altar. Next, they went to the refectory, a vast, very bright, whitewashed hall, where, despite the cleanliness of the tables and the newly-decorated walls, there persisted a faint odour, the sickly sweet reek of past meals. Sébastien scarcely touched his breakfast, which was warm milk, served in enormous tin bowls. It was only out in the playground that he was able to regain a little self-possession, recover some notion of where he was, more or less recover his memory of what had happened, the elements of this violent, extraordinary episode in his life. Whatever he suffered at that moment, the pain of abandonment, exile, the trauma of being torn from his daily life, from his pleasures, his freedom to wander, his anguish at being immured from now on in this unfamiliar environment, he nevertheless took a deep, delicious breath of fresh morning air. He stayed there, motionless, watching the other pupils splitting into pairs and groups, watching the other yards, the school buildings coming to life, and marvelling that he could not see the theatre or the boat that they had talked of so much in the carriage, nor the sea, the sea which he so longed to look upon. It was drizzling; a sharp wind blew from the west, driving large, woolly clouds across the sky; and the damp, cool wind did him good, relaxed his tensed muscles and calmed his nerves.