Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  ‘I’m going to give them back to you, but hide them properly so that I don’t have to take them off you again.’

  Then he considered Sébastien with troubled eyes, in which a flame flickered, only to be extinguished beneath the winking veil of his eyelids. This look embarrassed Sébastien and made him blush as if he had committed some secret sin, but he was unable to say why.

  Sébastien had grown. His features had fined down to a rosy slenderness, his skin was the pale pink of a flower confined to the shadows. His face, in that moment of adolescent indecision, had a woman’s grace and his fine eyes were still melancholy, velvety and profound.

  In Pervenchères there had been many changes. Aunt Rosalie had died intestate. Sébastien learned this in a letter from his father and it caused him only a limited amount of pain. He did not really love his aunt, from whom he had only ever received insults. However, the last time he had seen her, he had been touched. The old spinster had been unrecognisable, lying in bed, motionless, her raised chin garnished with coarse white hairs, her eyes hidden beneath soft, puffy lids like blinkers. She could no longer speak and was unaware of anything going on around her. She could have been dead already, except for a gurgling sound, the regular exhalation of a death rattle which, from time to time, flared her nostrils in a mechanical, localised movement of life. By her bedside, old women leaned over her, greedy and whining, horrible watchers over death. It was that, above all, that had impressed him.

  As for Monsieur Roch, he had not counted on this inheritance and displayed a dignified sorrow, proportionate with the four thousand francs of income which had unexpectedly fallen from the heavens. He now judged the moment right to retire from commerce. He was fortunate enough to sell his ironmongery shop for a good profit and so had a house built in the gardens, which he adorned with artificial grottoes, a goldfish pond and, here and there, on grassy banks, balls of coloured glass. He lived a perfectly bourgeois life and was very bored. Now he was mayor of Pervenchères and a magistrate and nursed a quiet ambition to get himself elected onto the regional council. However, despite the multiplicity and novelty of these occupations, he was not happy in the new house, empty as it was and with no neighbours other than the dead in the graveyard. A residue of commercial habit drew him back to his old shop and, for two hours every day, he sat by the counter, legs apart, his two hands resting on the handle of his long cane. He took a kindly, bossy interest in the progress of the business, giving advice and tirelessly delivering long discourses on everything under the sun.

  One day, he felt the need to create a personal world for himself, to make a life around him, that is to say, to find people to whom he could confide his secret desires, his ambitions and his projects for municipal reform. He thought seriously about remarrying. He liked Madame Lecautel very much. She had elegant manners, a refined education, and he could hope for no better hostess when, for example, he received a government inspector at his table. Also, it was no small achievement to take the place of a brigadier general in a woman’s heart. He weighed up the pros and cons and decided to ask for the hand of his lovely tenant.

  ‘I feel,’ he said to her, ‘that our respectability is absolutely above suspicion. You are a widow, I am a widower. Your first husband was a general, I am a mayor. So it would not be a step down for you. I have a certain fortune, honourably earned in the ironmongery trade, and as for my age,’ he added gallantly, ‘have no fear. I have lived all my life sheltered from the passions, though, of course, I am not a young man, oh dear no … but I have to say, well … well, you will see for yourself.’

  In response to Madame Lecautel’s polite refusals, which he interpreted as embarrassment and modesty, he said:

  ‘It will be a great success, I can assure you. Goodness, I know, at our age, one does not think much about passion any more, but really! Really! A bit of a new lease of life now and again, that can only improve things. I will arrange for you to have a nice little allowance without harming my son’s interests too much. Come now, give it some thought. May I call you Madame Mayoress?’

  Madame Lecautel was obliged to put him off more sharply. He took offence and for several weeks was most annoyed with her.

  ‘If she thinks she’ll have them by the dozen, mayors like me …’ he would mutter. ‘A mayor! A mayor’s a general too, a civilian general …’

  To distract himself, he conceived a heroic, extravagant idea, suggested to him no doubt by the proximity of death. Right in the centre of the cemetery, on the path leading straight from the entrance gate, he bought a vast plot which he first enclosed with low, iron railings, featuring garlands of immortelles and roses. Then he had a deep hole excavated, with room for only one, for, he explained, ‘What is the point in exhuming my wife? She is perfectly happy in her plot. And as for Sébastien, who knows when he will die?’ When the hole was dug and lined with stones and slabs, he had a kind of funeral monument built, a square thing, in granite, in the shape of a great trunk, with a domed lid. He wanted no adornment, no mouldings, no symbolic additions. ‘A glass tomb, like Socrates,’ he said. ‘Comfortable, but not luxurious.’ On one of the sides, at the bottom, was fashioned an opening, like a large ventilation hole, intended for the insertion of the coffin. Monsieur Roch supervised the works, directed them with the imperturbable confidence of an architect and the untroubled serenity of a philosopher; sometimes he would pause in his technical advice to utter an aphorism on death, such as: ‘You see, death is all a question of habit.’ One day, when Madame Lecautel had come to put flowers on a grave, he insisted on showing her the splendours of his monument.

  ‘If only you had said yes,’ he said to her, sighing regretfully.

  He showed her the enclosure formed by the iron railings, the little contoured flowerbeds with curved edges, planted with young green trees. On the yellow sand, there were extraordinary hearts bordered with box, chrysanthemum crosses and geranium monstrances. Already, a willow drooped its sad, spindly branches over the empty stone vault.

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it? Very simple. And look at that, read that.’

  Sombrely, he pointed out the inscription carved in red letters on the tombstone:

  HERE

  LIES

  THE BODY OF

  MONSIEUR JOSEPH-HIPPOLYTE-ELPHEGE ROCH

  MAYOR OF PERVENCHERES

  MAGISTRATE ETC ETC

  DECEASED IN HIS … YEAR, IN 18 …

  PRAY FOR HIM!

  ‘I wrote it myself,’ he said. ‘Now all they’ll have to do is fill in the blanks.’

  And coming back to his initial thought, he repeated in an elegiac tone:

  ‘Ah, if only you had said yes. Then there would have been two names and two places.’

  He looked sadly and disdainfully at the neglected tombs, at the little crooked wooden crosses, crumbling and rotting, at the faded flowers, and with a shrug of his shoulders, he murmured:

  ‘Oh well, that wasn’t what you wanted. As for me, I know that my descendants will ensure I have a decent funeral. And that’s something, isn’t it?’

  Monsieur Roch himself built his coffin. He chose all the wood for it meticulously from numerous planks of fine oak, very dry, very solid and very heavily grained. From time to time, he would try it out in front of the mayor’s secretary and old Madame Cébron, who were summoned to give their opinions. His own view was that he felt both contained by it and yet able to move freely and easily. During this period of bizarre activity, Monsieur Roch was very cheerful, almost childishly so. As he planed his wood, he even sang and whistled tunes from his youth, though always careful to avoid macabre jokes or ones in bad taste. His good spirits never failed for a second. In his letters, he no longer lectured his son, but filled them with tales from the council chamber, news of his tomb, maxims about death and a stoical calm. However, when the job was finished, he was gripped by a different mood, which degenerated into genuine distress. The fear of death overtook him. He could not walk round his tomb now without being assailed by terrors. He came home
very pale, interpreted the slightest tremor in his muscles as a sign of illness, sent for the doctor, woke up in the night bathed in a cold sweat, prey to terrifying feelings. He took refuge in his mayorship and, in order to stave off death, he bombarded Pervenchères with new decrees and additional taxes.

  CHAPTER V

  Sébastien had vowed never again to be deceived by the apparent but false benevolence of his teachers. His instinctively distrustful nature combined with this self-imposed rule had at first distanced him from Father de Kern, despite the priest’s undoubted kindness, and despite the excessive freedom he gave him now. Unlike before, he no longer needed to protect himself with books and to immure himself behind dictionaries in order to indulge his growing passion for art and poetry. This passion, which had earned him many and various punishments, was now tolerated by Father de Kern and actively encouraged. Encouragement was what Sébastien had most wanted and he was happy to take advantage of it, but he did not enjoy it with the same sense of utter security and ingenuous pleasure as he might have done with Father de Marel. Instead he felt a permanent, irrational, vague sense of disquiet with regard to Father de Kern, a niggling, persistent feeling, not unlike guilt. But guilt about what? He would have had great difficulty in explaining.

  During study periods, he could not look up from his desk without finding the priest’s gaze resting on him, an extraordinary gaze, a sort of smiling languor, which sometimes made him feel very ill at ease. It was not just that gaze which embarrassed him, it was everything that went with it: the excessively white skin, the languid gestures, the feline body which, as it moved, seemed to rub against the corners of the rostrum or the back of the chair with the slowness of a cat. What exactly was that look? What did that troubling, searing look mean, a look filled with a dubious light that darted out from beneath slightly slanting eyelids surrounded by dark shadows? That look which passed indifferently over the other heads and backs bent over their homework to fix itself uniquely and obstinately on him alone. That look so unlike any other and so charged with unspoken, secret, murky thoughts. Often he would turn his eyes away from that look because it would begin to fascinate him, weaken him, lull him into a heavy somnolence, replacing his own will with alien desires, insinuating troubling ideas into his mind and unfamiliar, almost painful, irritating fevers into his flesh, leaving his reason bewildered. Between this look and himself, he built up walls of textbooks and open notebooks, hoping to block out its magnetism, break its influence. But when he could no longer see it, he was even more aware of it, heavy, bold or flirtatious, prickling his skin with damp shivers, with exasperating ticklings, like those he had experienced when Marguerite touched him. Ah, those hands, with their network of veins and supple, tormenting fingers, casting their spell of ecstasy and torment, whose lacerating touch was fire and ice. He remembered too her ardent breath charged with a sour scent like that of a wild creature, her dark hair that gleamed with all the lure of the abyss, that hair that gave off wild perfumes, bitter poisons! Yes, the priest’s look was like those hands; it evoked the same terrible, forbidden things. But why? It simultaneously frightened and attracted him. At those moments, incapable of concentrating on any piece of school-work or any drawing or verse or book, embarrassed by the idea that this obsessive look might envelop him in a special light which would point him out as a target for the spite of his schoolmates, he would ask to leave the room, thinking he might regain his calm outside. And, sure of his impunity, he sometimes prolonged those absences from study for a full quarter of an hour, wandering in a little neighbouring yard where a magnolia spread its pale petals.

  Father de Kern would come out to look for him, he would flatter his opinions, encourage his enthusiasms and Sébastien was soon won over by the sweetness of that voice, its musical timbre and compelling softness. His reservations, which were, in fact, no more than a confused, indeterminate sense of foreboding, dissolved, and despite his resolve to keep a watch on his heart, he gave himself over entirely to Father de Kern, just as he had abandoned himself to all those who had spoken to him kindly in their clear, siren voices. There was not a thought, an action, a word, that Sébastien did not live passionately: the senses and the passions were so strong in him that he experienced them like an illness or a physical imbalance. Everything affected him much more than it did other people and had an impact on all his faculties. It was enough for one of his senses to be stimulated for all the others to participate in the sensation, quadrupling it, prolonging it, each with its own function. Thus it was that a sound could awaken in him not just the usual phenomena associated with sounds but also corresponding ideas of colour, smell, shape and touch, thus entering both his intellectual world and his emotional life. The human voice had a particular power over his intellect – indeed it was omnipotent – and from there it ruled imperiously over his will. Depending on whether he experienced agreeable or disagreeable sensations, he loved or hated, gave himself or withheld himself, a passive act to which his reason offered no counterbalance. So he gave himself to Father de Kern, whose voice had triumphed over his gaze. For a few weeks, he experienced a deep, intense joy, a joy he did not remember ever having felt before, so strong and fine was it. The priest set himself up as the boy’s mentor in the areas he loved. He was full of knowledge, had all the qualities which make learning a delight and make one cling to learning with increased pleasure. He revealed to him the beauties of literature of which his books had only allowed imperfect glimpses and truncated images, and above all, he conferred on him the burning desire to know. Putting to one side the seventeenth-century authors with their icy pomp and controlled solemnity, he introduced him to Sophocles, Dante and Shakespeare and made him love them. With bright, exquisite, passionate charm, he told him the stories of their immortal works and explained them. He recited the poetry of Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier, read out pages from Chateaubriand. In his mouth this poetry and prose had an oppressive music of their own, unimagined, unearthly, penetrating harmonies. As he listened, Sébastien felt himself rocked in strange hammocks, his brow fanned by cooling, perfumed breezes, whilst, unfolding before him, reaching into infinity, lay misty, shimmering dream landscapes, vermilion forests haunted by female figures, provocative shadows, plaintive souls, exquisite flowers, vague, sorrowful, voluptuous images. Unlike Father de Marel, whose robust nature only responded to the brisk and jolly, to broad, side-splitting farce, Father de Kern was inclined to tender melancholy, the intoxication of remorse, airy embraces, tragic mysticism, where love and death were intertwined, where all things were at once immaterial and carnal, and this corresponded to everything in Sébastien’s soul that was uncertain, generous, intense, but that fragile little soul was too delicate to withstand unscathed the electric shock of those visions, and their poisonous, corrupting emanations. The priest did not stop at this. Every day he gave his eager student some poetry to learn, some homework to write out, in which he had to summarise his impressions of everything he had read, explain why a certain thing had seemed beautiful to him. Sébastien abandoned himself to these daily tasks, carried away with a zeal that his teacher was often obliged to restrain; but, reading over those clumsy pages, those awkward sentences, amid the inevitable exaggerations, imitations and obscurities, lit here and there by strange glimmers of a spontaneous spirit which was both unusual and poetic, Father de Kern smiled an enigmatic, possessive smile.

  Knowing how much Sébastien loved art, he spoke to him of the great painters too, excited him by telling of the miraculous lives of Leonardo da Vinci, of Raphael, of Correggio, their close friendships with rulers and popes, their divine triumphs. With every conversation, every chat, one more veil was lifted on some fascinating mystery, some new boldness perpetrated in penetrating further into the domain of forbidden things. Sébastien greedily drank in these stories of that rich, marvellous era, where art, heroism, piety and crime were all embellished with the adorable faces of women, where love dwelt everywhere, beneath the artist’s doublet and beneath the
Papal tiara, where one could die for a smile or be damned for a kiss.