Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  Sébastien left the tree, walked the length of the fence, no longer concerned about the other pupils, who, taken up with other interests, seemed to have forgotten him completely. He was at peace. His muscles felt lighter and more supple, his brain clear, bathed with lapping waves and inebriating mists. Just as when on the brink of a deep sleep, after a tiring day, he felt something inexpressibly sweet, something like physical dispersal, like the disappearance of his whole being, of his awareness of feeling and thinking. How should he kill himself? The idea of a brutal death, a horrible death, with blood, broken limbs, gaping flesh and spattered brains, did not occur to him. He thought of death as an airy flight towards the upper realms or like a slow descent, a pure, gyratory slide into abysses of light. The young priest, he remembered, had spoken of a lake. Where was it, this lake? He looked around and saw only noisy playgrounds. Opposite, the school launched darts of oblique, wild light at him, multiplied by its hateful eyes. To the right of the school building he could see a vast area, bounded by the summits of sombre firs, which stood out harshly like hills against the sky.

  ‘Maybe it’s there,’ he said to himself, imagining already an immense pink surface, where pliant rushes, murmuring reeds marked out bright paths, resplendent avenues of celestial water; a motionless surface, dreamy, beautiful, like that of the pool at La Forge, where he had so often explored the grassy banks and breathed in the delicious, sour scent of the fermenting marsh.

  Beneath the arches of the real tennis court, the teacher on duty strolled back and forth in leisurely fashion, his nose in his prayerbook. Sébastien quickened his step, thought of François Pinchard, of his mother, and left the yard without encountering any obstacle. Quite calm now, he walked on, his eyes trained on the empty space, not knowing whether it represented solid earth or moving water imbued with infinite mystery by the black circle of conifers.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the sea!’ he said to himself, childishly obstinate.

  A vision of the little cobbler preceded him, led him on.

  ‘Hey! Mr Punch!’

  The vision smiled and he smiled at the vision.

  ‘Ironmonger! Hee hee hee!’

  As he walked on, he was no longer aware of the earth beneath his feet. He walked as in a dream, as light as if he were being supported by something, borne along on two huge wings, skimming the ground. A monk crossed his path, wheeling a load of bread along in a small cart; he had a convict’s face, sly and begrimed. He did not notice him at all. Two other monks, thick-lipped, with the eyes of child-molesters, brushed by him. He did not see them either. He no longer noticed anything, just that space, which itself had become confused, fuzzy, transformed into floating white clouds. His entire sensory life was out of kilter and was concentrated solely in his sense of smell. Various odours assailed his nostrils, so strong he nearly fainted. The atmosphere, like in a closed room full of mouldering vegetation, seemed to him full of lingering, poisonous scents. He breathed in the ammoniac breath of leaf mould, the carbonic exhalation of dead leaves, the effervescent aromas of wet grasses, the fermenting bouquet of fruit, all increased tenfold by his morbidly nervous state. Sébastien suddenly had to stop, his throat tight; he was pale, close to fainting. He had gone past the school. To his left were occasional small, low buildings; gardens rose in terraces leading to parkland; to the right, a short avenue of chestnut trees came to an end at some outbuildings protected by a fence; beyond the outbuildings a meadow stretched out, flat, smooth, silvery green. In the middle of the meadow gleamed a great sheet of water, all white, reflecting no light. So Sébastien climbed over the fence, set of down the avenue and started to run. Suddenly, two priests out walking barred his way. He stopped, terrified, and let out a cry.

  ‘Well, well, well. What’s all this now? So we’re playing truant are we?’ said one of them harshly.

  He was already grasping Sébastien’s ears, when, struck by his odd expression, the unusual, mysterious, inebriate glow in his eyes, he spoke again, this time more gently, with reassuringly affectionate gestures.

  ‘Come now, my dear boy, where were you off to like that?’

  Sébastien was touched by the gentleness in this voice which had suddenly softened and become almost prayerful. However, he did not dare reply. The Jesuit persisted:

  ‘Why did you leave the yard? Don’t be afraid, I’m your friend. Tell me, child.’

  Whilst he spoke, he stroked the child’s cheek and looked at him with an air of encouraging kindness. He repeated in a voice of tender pity:

  ‘Why? Let’s see now. You’re sad, aren’t you? You wanted to get away.’

  These simple words finally defeated him, and Sébastien felt a dam break in his chest and a wave of tears flood through him. Choking, convulsed with wrenching sobs, he threw himself into the priest’s arms and wept:

  ‘They … they …’

  He could not say any more. Like a drowning man who panics and blindly clings to the miraculous flotsam borne to him on a wave, he clung to the priest’s robe. His whole body trembled, shaken by spasms, he stood on tiptoe and pressed himself against the priest’s body, in a feverish love of life regained.

  ‘They … they …’

  When he had calmed down a little:

  ‘Now then, don’t cry any more,’ the priest comforted him, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. Come and walk with me. Then I will take you to the classroom.’

  But Sébastien, his head still hidden in the priest’s soutane, groaned:

  ‘No! No! I don’t want that. I want to go back to Pervenchères. I’m from Pervenchères.’

  CHAPTER III

  Gradually Sébastien resigned himself to his new world and found himself caught up in the machinery of day-to-day existence. Life went on without too many serious setbacks, a life based on the monotonous regularity of timetables and a round of identical occupations and events. He forgot the traumatic journey, his painful entry into this grey prison of grey stone, the icy cold that had gripped his heart and made his flesh creep when he saw the long, bleak corridors and the little enclosed yards bathed in sepulchral daylight. He forgot the ferocious shouting, the gloomy lake in the distance, beneath a dismal sky, and the strange, unthinkable folly which, in a moment of madness, had driven him towards death, as if towards a refuge. Eventually, memories of his home blurred into a soft mist; his regrets became less painful and more distant. Far from his father, spared the boredom of his conversation, the emptiness of his advice, he pictured him as handsome, tall, heroic, sublime, and he loved him with a love all the stronger for his having previously blushed at the thought of him and almost denied him. His affection increased with all the insults endured on his behalf, became warmer as a result of his remorse at not having courageously defended him. In order not to worry him and out of a kind of pride, ashamed to detail complaints and recriminations in front of the teachers – because he knew that the Jesuits read both the pupils’ letters and the parents’ – he was determined not to confide any of his torments to his father. He limited his unburdening to naive, warm expressions of affection and repeated promises to behave well and work hard. He also tried his hand at little descriptions of the school, at accounts of walks, in which, despite the primitive literary form and the boy’s as yet only partial awakening to sensation, there was nevertheless already evidence of a lively curiosity and a vibrant imagination. He also felt the need to speak of his home and of his memories and, sometimes with forced cheerfulness, sometimes with anguish, he expressed his desperate longing for the pleasures of home, for familiar caresses, all of which indicated genuine moral distress. Anyone other than Monsieur Roch might have been alarmed by these signs of unusual agitation. Instead he saw it as mere chatter whose uselessness and lack of seriousness shocked him: ‘I am not at all pleased with you,’ he wrote, ‘I see that you are wasting your time on childish business, futile pastimes, which I cannot encourage. I understand that in the early days you will have allowed your head to be turned by a change of environment which is both radical and sedu
ctive. But as a matter of urgency, you must now think about applying yourself seriously. The whole of Pervenchères is thinking about you. People are envious of me. I tell them: “My son will go far, he will reach great heights.” Try not to make a liar of your father. Send me a list of your main classmates, particularly those who bear historic family names. What are your friends called? Who have you chosen to be your particular friends? Does the Reverend Father who accompanied you there speak of me?’

  There was more harassment at school, but each episode grew progressively less violent so that, in the end, it became a kind of intermittent, jovial raillery which made the pain more bearable. However, he felt very keenly the bitterness of the social inequality in which he lived, acknowledged and persistent as it was. To be tolerated as a pauper and not accepted as an equal caused him great sorrow, a wound to his pride which did not heal, and he felt helpless to protect himself. The solitude in which the others left him made him more serious and thoughtful, almost old before his time. The roses in his cheeks faded and paled; his oval face grew thin, his eyes became shadowed, troubled, dull, always veiled by an expression of quiet sorrow and dazed introspection. Faced with the inextricable complications of his new life, every day he discovered something to surprise him. Every day revealed to him habits, names, a whole order of important things, a whole series of people, august and revered, who seemed familiar to everyone else and whom he was mortified to be the only person not to know, and it angered him not to understand. This ignorance earned him frequent snubs. One afternoon, Guy de Kerdaniel asked him point-blank who he was ‘for’, ‘the Count de Chambord or the Usurper’? Not knowing who these characters were, if they actually existed in real life, and how one could be ‘for’ or ‘against’ either, he had not replied. Everyone had laughed at his discomfiture. Sébastien realised that he had just supplied yet further proof of his inferiority. But what could he do? They laughed if he kept quiet and jeered if he spoke. ‘Perhaps they are Jesuit surnames,’ he said to himself. For a long time he felt a deep resentment towards the Count de Chambord and the Usurper for not being known to him, but, convinced that it had to be so and would always be so, he did not dare to find out, fearing a hoax. Besides, who could he have asked?

  Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child’s scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment. Sébastien was completely ignorant of the fact that there are conflicts of interest, rival appetites, which are innate and which cause all human societies to fight amongst themselves, but by observing and making comparisons, he soon determined his precise position in that world, stimulated and motivated as it was by passions and concerns which, up until then, he had never even suspected. He found it deeply demoralising. His position was that of the underdog, a vanquished opponent who, to comfort himself in his defeat, does not harbour any memory of a struggle or hope of revenge. Struggle was hateful to him; vengeance he did not consider even for an instant. He understood that he must rely on himself alone, live a solitary, introverted life, act independently and seal himself off from any surrounding temptation. But he also understood that such a renunciation was beyond his powers. His generous, expansive, enthusiastic nature could not be confined within the narrow psychological limits which he would be obliged to impose on himself. It needed air, warmth, light, a broad expanse of sky. While waiting for this light to shine, for this sky to open up, Sébastien continued to watch life pass him by against a background of blurred images and inexorable darkness.

  In Vannes, each recreation yard was divided into distinct groups, each exclusive of the other, representing not a communion of sympathies or compatible personalities, but social categories, which, just as is the case in the real world outside, contained the privileged in one group and those who have only duties to perform in the other. Despite constant contact with one another, the jostling companionship enforced by studying together, being in class, in the chapel, in the refectory, where sharp edges are blunted and resentments fade, where the instinctual feeling of a common struggle against work and teachers momentarily unites the most disparate interests, no genuine mingling of spirit occurred between these groups. During recess, everyone returned to his official place, went back into the narrow compartments imposed by an aristocratic constitution whose strict functioning the priests, without severity and with an apparently benevolent and smiling impartiality, were careful to maintain, actively encouraging prejudices, intending thus to instil deep into the children’s hearts the need for discipline at all levels and the cult of respect for hierarchy. Guy de Kerdaniel was the undisputed lord of the yard, and Sébastien was the scapegoat. The former’s spoilt child’s whims, fickle friendships and capricious hatreds were sovereign law. He knew his own power and abused it freely, particularly when it came to the weak. Pampered by the masters, because of his quasi-illustrious birth, adored by the pupils, because of the special attention and the evident preference given him by the masters, he epitomised for the others all that was most desired and most revered in life. People knew of his parents’ considerable fortune, their prestigious chateau on the banks of the Rame, their magnificent, ostentatious lifestyle. Imaginations were fired by tales of hunts, receptions, of churches rebuilt, convents subsidised, of frequent meetings between the Marquis de Kerdaniel and the Count de Chambord, who had officially appointed him his most intimate confidant, his most trusted friend. All these marvels, this elegance, this royal friendship, bestowed on the magnificent Guy an indestructible aura. Puny of body, unhealthy of complexion, his pallid, withered, already faded brow bore the marks of a species near exhaustion, but he had the self-assurance of a grown man, the brusque gestures, the imperious mouth, the insolent eyes beneath heavy, drooping eyelids. Despite looking like an anaemic groom, he was nonetheless the chosen centre and pivot of that community of children in which, by example and education, every form of servility and tyranny was taken for granted. The vanities, ambitions and aspirations, secret or avowed, of this small, divided people, with its jealous coteries, all focused on his frail, awe-inspiring person, or rather on what it evoked in terms of dazzling riches, revered luxury and people respectfully bending the knee. Sébastien did not attempt to gain his sympathy by cowardly submission, nor to impose himself on him by means of revolt. He disdained him and this disdain combined with pity for his friends back home, making him cherish them all the more, with their ill-kempt hair and ill-fitting clothes; and he loved, above all, those who were lost and poor, whose torn shirts and sad, patched trousers moved him to anguished tears. He decided to keep out of the way of the teachers and he tried neither to seek their approval nor arouse their sympathy. It seemed to him that the transient gentleness of their manner widened rather than narrowed the humiliating and ever greater distance created by the pupils between themselves and him. The priests’ ‘my child’ uttered in an ingratiating tone rang false to him. By their side he felt no sense of protection. They ignored him in class, where his teachers made him recite his lessons mechanically, eventually interrupting with an abrupt ‘fine’, with never a word of encouragement or censure, never prompting him, whilst they applied themselves to awakening the intelligence of the others, guiding them along their preferred paths, arousing their interest by patient explanation; they left him to his own devices in the recreation yard, where no one invited him to take part in the pleasurable activities and noisy play led by the priests who, eager, lithe, youthful, their soutanes hitched up, would instigate rumbustious games, and where he wandered, usually alone and bewildered, wounded by the others’ joy, outraged by the roars of laughter exploding all around him as if to mock him all the more in his abandonment. In any case, he would have needed the equipment that everyone else had, a succession of very expensive toys which the Jesuits sold in a little hut called the quaestura. Oh, that little hut, full of such lovely things, like an unending Christmas, exhaling t
he delicious scents of pine and varnished wood, which recalled for him the magical, dazzling grocer’s shop in Pervenchères in the beguiling days around Christmas and New Year. How his eyes devoured them. How he envied the rich as they emerged from there, arms laden, pockets filled, faces glowing. After long hesitation, he overcame his shyness and went into this tempting quaestura and bought a balloon, which was punctured the following day, two balls, which were stolen from him, and a pair of skates, which broke as soon as he tried them. The five francs his aunt had given him were used up; the regulation ten sous which were dished out to the pupils every Saturday in the yards by the Prefect of Studies went on loans which he dared not refuse. So, with a strength of will far superior to his age, he resolved to bury himself in work and in himself, and thus protect himself from future disappointments. Soon he achieved a kind of peace through work, and in the hours of silence and rest, in his mind, where a new world of thoughts and feelings was already beginning to stir, he achieved a kind of bitter satisfaction which grew as the days went by.