Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  All of a sudden, a young lad stood squarely in front of him.

  ‘I am Guy de Kerdaniel,’ he said. ‘And you? What’s your name?’

  ‘Sébastien Roch.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Sébastien Roch.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Guy de Kerdaniel screwed up one eye, thought for a moment and, fists on his hips, shoulders thrown back, he demanded imperiously:

  ‘Are you noble?’

  At this unexpected question, Sébastien blushed instinctively, as if he had been guilty of some gross transgression. He did not know exactly what it meant to be noble, but, faced with the dominant manner of his small interrogator, he suspected that not being noble constituted a grave fault, an impropriety, a dishonour.

  ‘No,’ he replied, humbly, almost beseechingly.

  He touched his chest, his sides, his knees, just to check that he had not suddenly developed a hunched back or some other disgusting infirmity. Then he turned his gentle, terrified gaze on this bold fellow pupil, and his evident majesty dazzled him. His cap, perched at an angle right at the back of his head, so that it rested on his collar, his deliberate gestures, his insolent, pale, refined features, his supple, ambiguous grace, like that of a courtesan, and above all, his attractive, frivolous clothes, struck Sébastien as a revelation of something very grand, sacred, inaccessible, of which he had never dreamed until now Sébastien was thoroughly overwhelmed by so much style and became, correspondingly, instantly convinced of his own worthlessness. Without a shadow of a doubt, he had before him one of those superior, august beings of whom his father had spoken with such respect and wonder. This little personage clearly was not at all like himself, constructed of vulgar flesh and crude bones, but was made of precious materials, more valuable than gold and silver. He said to himself ‘Perhaps he’s a prince’s son.’ For a moment, he was stunned. Beneath his cast-off clothes, creased family hand-me-downs, summarily refitted and altered by Madame Cébron and weighing on his shoulders more heavily than sheets of lead, he felt himself to be so gauche, so feeble, fallen so low, that he wished he could disappear into a hole in the ground or evaporate into thin air, like smoke. However, with the vague intention of rehabilitating himself, he stammered, his lips working comically:

  ‘I … I’m from Pervenchères … in the Orne … I’m from Pervenchères.’

  He recalled his father’s exhortations. In order to convince the troubling Guy de Kerdaniel that he too had a right to live alongside him, to breathe the same air, eat the same food, learn the same things as him, he tried to tell him about the church, the columns, his illustrious ancestor Jean Roch, the donkey, how the two of them had died in the street, beaten to death. The words he needed would not come. He did not known where to start, with the donkey or with the church. He stammered all the more, and, hoping to sum up this magnificent history in a single cry, he reiterated:

  ‘I’m from Pervenchères. So there!’

  This laughable rebuff did not seem to impress Guy de Kerdaniel, who was, in turn, examining Sébastien scornfully from head to foot. Astonished, even scandalised to find himself in the presence of someone who, whilst not exactly a peasant, was not a noble either and had not even the tiniest scrap of nobility, the aristocratic lad did not even consider laughing. He had become as serious as a judge; his forehead was creased in a frown. This abnormality shocked him, just as it undermined his inherited ideas concerning the organisation of human hierarchies and the proper order of social contact. Should he shrug his shoulders and leave, or should he administer a couple of slaps to this minuscule insect who admitted to not being noble and who bore that barbaric name: Sébastien Roch, that cynical name: Sébastien Roch. Sébastien Roch? That alone deserved a slap. He hesitated for a few seconds, his hand raised. Finally, gripped by a lofty sense of disgust, more expressive of the inflexible antagonism between the classes than of any actual violence, he asked instead:

  ‘Well, what are you doing here, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sébastien groaned.

  Guy grew impatient and starting tapping his foot.

  ‘And your father, what does he do?’

  ‘Papa?’ murmured Sébastien.

  But he paused, once more disconcerted.

  After the initial shock of this interrogation, he had just distinctly heard the door to an entire world slamming in his face. A brutal shove had expelled him from a realm which was not to be his and where, as an anonymous, puny runt, he had no right to intrude. Now he had no doubt that lacking nobility was an unpardonable fault, the equivalent of committing some infamy, of which one could never be cleansed. He admired Guy de Kerdaniel as much as he envied and detested him. ‘What does your father do?’ The necessity of replying to that question caused him insurmountable embarrassment, a sharper discomfort than any he had hitherto felt. Sébastien experienced a feeling towards his father and his own self that was horribly painful and which he had never known before. It was not anger; it was not pity either, but rather a kind of shame, the particular kind of shame, base and mean, associated with having some kind of physical deformity. In his mind’s eye, with a precision in which every one of his social inferiorities was emphasised, he saw his father in shirtsleeves, the apronstrings of his grey cotton overall tied in the small of his back, rummaging about in a shop that was bursting with ugly, vulgar objects, his rust-stained, work-roughened hands arranging cast-iron pots, tying parcels of nails up with string. It now seemed repellent to him, inadmissible, and more irreparable than if he had been a hunchback or a cripple. Just as he had measured the distance that separated himself and Guy de Kerdaniel, so he measured that which separated his own father from the other boy’s father. He was doubtless a handsome man, with a fine, vigorous beard and very white hands, proudly seated in a carriage driven by a coachman in gold braid down avenues of yellow sand and through lush countryside. In the dizzy second that his hesitation lasted, a thousand thoughts, memories, feelings, sights, forebodings, all raced before him in a jumble. People, objects and ideas took on new contours, new shapes and directions, but all shared the same implacable rigidity and disillusioning brutality. The walls of the courtyard and the shops projected their grimy shadow on his dearest and purest memories. His father, the neighbours, Madame Lecautel, Marguerite, the whole region where he had been born, his native sky and he himself, were all enveloped in this shadow, in a thick, suffocating veil of disgust. At that moment, his agate and coloured glass marbles, his fine compass box, his humming leather tops, of which he had been so proud with his friends at home and which embodied his highest ideal of happiness, luxury and rank, he would have sacrificed them all, immediately and joyfully and with no regrets, in order to have been born of noble, idle parents, in order to be able to shout it out in the face of all the Kerdaniels of this world. In his injured pride, he first considered lying, denying himself, hoisting himself up onto vertiginous, heraldic heights. He could think of nothing plausible, nothing suitably amazing, having no idea what was the right thing to say. Besides, his too short trousers, his baggy jacket like a floating sentry-box, both of which spoke of the modesty of his background, discouraged him, and recalled him to the reality of his condition. Then he realised that it would be base to lie in this way and he remembered the words his father was always repeating: ‘You must always be deferential and respectful towards persons more elevated than yourself, either by fortune or by birth.’

  In a trembling voice, humble and tearful, he admitted in a murmur:

  ‘My father? He’s an ironmonger.’

  There was an instant explosion of laughter and mockery which splashed his face like a jet of mud.

  ‘An ironmonger! Ha! An ironmonger! Did you come here to mend the pots, then? Do tell! Will you sharpen my knife for me? What do you charge per day for cleaning lamps? An ironmonger! Hey, you lot over there! He’s an ironmonger!’

  The laughter died away, emphasised ironically by the sound of two departing feet. Sébastien looked up. Guy de Kerdaniel was no longer there
. He had rejoined a group of pupils, to whom, with suitable gestures, he was already recounting the extraordinary and scandalous tale of an ironmonger who had stumbled amongst young nobles. Shouts of surprise, protest and indignation burst out. An ironmonger! What does an ironmonger eat? An ironmonger! He might be poisonous? Some suggested hounding out this unfamiliar, unclean beast. The laughter began again, reinforced this time by harsher laughter and more insulting jibes. They imitated the barking of dogs, the cracking of whips, the sound of the hunting horn, the gallop of a hunt through thickets.

  ‘Go to it, bow-wows! Hee hee heel!’

  The voices and stares weighed heavy on little Sébastien, inflicting the physical pain of a multitude of needles stuck into his skin. He wished he could launch himself on this band of ferocious children and slap them or kick them, or else soothe them with his gentleness saying:

  ‘You’re mad to laugh at me like that when I’ve done you no harm, when I so want to be friends.’

  If he had had his honey cake and his chocolate with him, he would have shared it out amongst them.

  ‘Look, take it. You see, there’s nothing nasty about me! And I will give you more.’

  The priest in charge, who was reading his breviary a short distance away, came up and joined the group. The boy felt he was saved: ‘He’s going to make them shut up and punish them,’ he thought. When the Jesuit had been told why everyone was laughing, he too began to laugh, but with a discreet, amused, patronising laugh, whilst his round belly trembled and shook, gaily swelling beneath his black soutane. So, in order not to hear the laughter and those painful voices, to escape those injurious stares, Sébastien bent his head and moved away in despair.

  In the vast yard, surrounded by a high white fence and closed off from the gardens by a row four deep of spindly elms, children of his age ran about and played, some walked arm in arm, serious and talkative; others, seated on the steps of the real tennis court, recounted their holiday adventures. He knew no one amongst them. Not a single friendly face, not a single familiar step, not one hand ready to reach out to console his distress as a newcomer. With a heavy heart, he noted that the new pupils who had arrived like himself the day before and were homesick, lost and foolish, all sought one another out, approached one another, made tentative attempts at friendship, beneath the approving eye of the teachers. He alone stayed on the fringes, not daring to make any approaches, for fear of being rebuffed; he felt the void about him widen irremediably, he felt the unbreachable gulf, the inviolable universe which separated him from Guy de Kerdaniel and from the others, all the others, widen still more. Was it obvious, then, that his father was an ironmonger? Did he wear the visible stamp of that damned condition? Was he more disgusting than a dog with mange? And yet, people had told him many times that he was an attractive boy; people admired his blond curls, his healthy pink cheeks, his eyes which were like his mother’s. Had they lied then? Had they deceived him? Was he ugly, wearing an ugliness so overt that it excited laughter, disgust and hatred? What made him more convinced of this ugliness was that he attributed to all his schoolmates an aura of beauty, heart-breaking beauty, which was assuredly linked to their happy condition as nobles and to which the despicable son of a despicable ironmonger could never hope to aspire! Why, when he was so small, so weak, so ugly, so badly dressed, had they sent him so far away with no protection or defence? Why had they torn him so abruptly from the sweet peace and intimacy of his own home, the quiet, charming place he came from, where everything was familiar and fraternal, and where he was the most handsome, the richest, the most envied of all children, of all his school friends or playmates? Now, in this hour of suffering, everything made him yearn for his home, both the harshness of exile and the feeling of remorse at not having loved enough that land now lost, loved it with a love he only now felt and which engulfed him in bitter regret and savage affection. Here, the air seemed heavy to him; the wind, laden with strange smells, benumbed him; the gaunt trees, stripped of their fragile greenery, oozed grime; and the school buildings, far off in the distance, huge and grey, blotted out the sky width their four gloomy storeys, pierced by black, curtainless windows, windows full of spying eyes and invisible enemies lying in wait. So it was there that he was going to live from now on, in that cloistered chill, in that barrack servitude, in that stifling, prison atmosphere, alone in the midst of a swarming humanity that would always be foreign and hostile to him. Some brushed close by him, indifferent to his mute supplication; others spat at him: ‘Ironmonger! Hee hee heel!’ and that ‘Heed hee hee!’ began to create a kind of hallucination. He thought he could hear that ‘Heed hee hee!’ buzzing in his ears like a dense swarm of insects, rumbling like the distant call of wild beasts. It poured inexorably forth from angry mouths and mocking eyes, it came out of the walls and the ground, fell from the sky; it leaped over walls, circled the other courtyards, filling with spiteful gaiety the sleepy recreation hour of this first day back at school.

  ‘Ironmonger! Hee hee heel!’

  His head swimming, his limbs trembling, Sébastien leaned against a tree and wept. For a moment, his child’s soul, which had met and understood life for the first time, took full measure of the boundlessness of pain, the limitlessness of man’s loneliness.

  For a long while, he stayed leaning up against the tree, his arms dangling, inert. In his distress, a strange idea, a child’s stubborn idea, drifted to the surface; he wanted to see the sea. Why could it not be seen? Why could it not be heard? Had the Jesuits not bought a large boat? Where was this large boat? A flock of pigeons flew past, wheeling above the yard. He followed them with his eyes until they disappeared behind the school. Naturally, boats must sail on the sea just as pigeons float on the air; he recalled in a picture book a boat in full sail, the sails all white, like wings. His thoughts drifted from one object to another, attaching themselves mainly to things that float, to the clouds, dissipating mists, leaves carried off by the wind, flecks of foam caught on the drift of the current. But very soon, his reverie returned with a brutal crack of the whip to the implacable reality of his misery. One by one, he called to mind all the details of his journey, from the moment when he left his home. Each episode, exaggerated by his imagination, distorted by the nervous state brought on by his encounter with Guy de Kerdaniel, was a fresh source of despair. Exiled from Pervenchères, he had lost everything; rejected by his fellow pupils, despised by his teachers, condemned to abandonment, he had nowhere to fix his hopes. Oh, how delightful his father’s tedious lectures would seem to his ears now! How he loved the room at the back of the shop, the stinking courtyard, the sweating walls, which now seemed to him to sparkle with gold and precious stones like the fairytale doors of dreams. Forgotten things, heartrending, far-off, pitiful faces, came crowding in on him. He remembered François Pinchard, a sad neighbour, a little hunchback shoemaker, with curly hair and skin darker than his leather hides. Every day on his way to school or in the park, Sébastien would see him bent over his work, hunched up on himself in a painful curve which accentuated the deformity of his torso. The other lads laughed at him, following him through the streets: ‘Hey! Mr Punch!’ And the little hunchback fled on his short legs, his hump rolling, his frizzy head half-hidden by his raised shoulders. Sébastien revelled in evoking the pitiful memory of François Pinchard, moved to discover analogies in their situation, similarities in their suffering, now that he too was an outcast. Poor hunchback! He was not at all unpleasant either! Quite the contrary. He was not spiteful as hunchbacks often were, he thought. So why that relentless assault on his miserable carcass? He was obliging towards everyone, skilled and courageous; he liked to help and please others. He was always ready to lend a hand whenever anyone needed it. People only had to call: ‘Hey there, hunchback, come over here,’ for him to hasten over, happy to offer his help and show himself to be useful and kind. Sébastien paused, filled by an immense pity, to consider François Pinchard’s touching goodness; he exaggerated it, magnified it, sanctified it and, by an inevitable
process of transferral based on natural human egotism, made it his own, just as he made his own all the sufferings of the little hunchback, to the point of confusing himself with him and feeling that he lived within him. The touching memories were set in motion again. So it was that one Sunday, Coudray, the carpenter, a sort of handsome giant, had hit the hunchback for no reason, for a laugh, to amuse the pretty girls, for they enjoyed cruel pranks that made him cry. He was so funny, his hump jolted so comically when he cried. ‘Hey there, Mr Punch!’ And the huge fist of the carpenter, used to sawing up huge oak trunks, landed several blows on the hunchback’s hump. ‘Damn you, Mr Punch!’ Pinchard had shaken himself, like a dog punished by its master and, more astonished by the madness of this attack than indignant at the blows received, he had said, rubbing the painful spot:

  ‘Why are you hitting me? You don’t even know why you’re hitting me. I suppose you think it’s clever, do you?’

  Then, one morning, he had been found hanged in his workshop. When Sébastien had asked why no one saw him around any more, why his house was silent and shut, he had been told that he was dead. In the inviolate innocence of his childish mind, death did not correspond to anything precise or terrible. His mother too was dead, which meant absent and happy. Sometimes, he had contemplated her photograph in the dining room. As he looked at her tranquil face, a little faded by time, her frail waist, her floral dress, her hair looped back, and behind her pretty figure, balustrades, faded visions of pools, woods and mountains, he had said: ‘She is dead,’ without any shock to the heart, without any regret at not having known her, he just felt it had to be thus. He was even happy to see her in such a calm, gentle setting, which was doubtless the paradise where the virtuous dead went. Living, dying: these were vague words, without material substance, enigmas upon which his childish intellect had not lingered, innocent of pain as it was. Now he understood. One hour of suffering in contact with real life had been enough to reveal death to him. Death was when there was no pleasure anywhere, when you were too unhappy, when no one loved you any more. Death was those peaceful open spaces, with pillars draped with fabric and decorated with roses. ‘Hey, Mr Punch!’ Another shout mingling with the cry of ‘Ironmonger! Hee hee hee!’ The two shouts melted together, uttered by the baying mob of the wicked. That was death. He envied François Pinchard, he envied his mother, he envied all the anonymous dead. Since all those dead people were dead, he could die too. And gently, without internal struggle or physical revolt, without any wrench to his little soul, the idea of death descended upon him, soporific and soothing.