Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  ‘Why don’t they teach us all this in school?’ Sébastien asked, a little afraid. ‘Is it a sin?’

  ‘One can learn everything and do everything too when one loves God and the Holy Virgin,’ replied Father de Kern evasively.

  Caressing his pupil with his white hands and long, supple fingers, he added:

  ‘If you’re good, I’ll teach you even lovelier things …’

  These conversations took place in the yard, during recess or on walks, when they paused on the sunny shores or beneath the shade of the pine forests; and every evening, after the other pupils had gone to bed, in the archway of an open window in the dormitory where the two of them stayed until nightfall, the priest speaking in a low voice, Sébastien listening, enraptured. It was June. The evenings evaporated in the dusk, beguiling, dream-like; light scents drifted in from the gardens, the meadows, the woods, and behind the dark mass of the park, where night was slowly falling, the purple and sulphur flames of the sun would disappear, leaving behind only a few mauve clouds, shot through with gold, melting one by one into the immense space gradually filling with stars.

  Then Sébastien would go back to his bed, somewhat unnerved by these tales, his head spinning in a tumult of feverish images and revelatory words. His brow burning, he stayed awake for a long while before sleeping, going over in his mind what he had heard and learned, forcing himself to recreate the triumphant glamour of those men who were more beautiful than gods, the inconceivable splendour of those things more splendid than dreams. His imagination, overstimulated by the racing of his pulse, took off towards distant lands, towards some undefined era, where he saw himself acclaimed by finely dressed, flower-bedecked crowds; or else perched high up on scaffolding in an echoing cathedral or in the hallway of a palace decorated for some feast day, he covered the walls with ecstatic madonnas, suffering Christ figures, beneath the gaze of lovely women offering him their bare arms and their lips, swooning with love.

  One day, his teacher took him to the Jesuits’ library. First of all, he had him admire the glass cases full of books, antique folios bound in old hide, but that did not interest Sébastien, all those lined-up spines of volumes displaying repellent Latin titles. Also the strong smell of glue and old paper hanging in the air dulled his senses. He preferred to look at a Christ on the cross, a poor copy of an Alonso Cano, which occupied the wall at the back of the library between two canvases of the Spanish school, flaking and cracked, the original colours almost consumed by black. He was astonished to learn that these pictures were by Ribera, of whom the priest had spoken with such enthusiasm. A little monk, with sly eyes and a shaven head like a convict, who was sweeping the parquet at the other end of the library, had disappeared discreetly. They were alone, just the two of them, in the vast room. Father de Kern opened a cupboard and pulled out a folder from which he removed the contents and placed them on a table. It was a series of old prints, reproductions of famous Renaissance paintings: an Assumption of the Virgin, a prostrate Mary Magdalene kissing Christ’s feet. The priest commented on each print. Little by little, he had come closer to Sébastien, so close that his breath mingled with the boy’s breath.

  ‘Look, you see this angel,’ he said. ‘He looks like you. He’s beautiful, like you …’

  His voice trembled. As he turned over the prints, his fingers moved jerkily and his face had grown paler still.

  Sébastien felt ill at ease and, saying that the smell was making him unwell, asked to go outside. He had just seen again, with a shudder, the heavy gaze beneath those slanting lids, that gaze which had weighed so heavily on him for so long.

  The following night, he woke up with a start in the middle of a horrible dream: devils were carrying him off in their hairy arms. As he opened his eyes, he saw a shadow bent over his bed, a huge, black shadow. The shadow was Father de Kern. The pale light of the dimmed lamps creeping over the ceiling, barely illuminated him; it cast only the blurred outline of his familiar shape on the partition. He recognised him, though, from that unforgettable look which now blazed in the darkness. The rumpled blankets had been pushed back to the foot of the bed and his legs were bare. Sébastien was afraid and cried out and put his hands protectively in front of him as a shield against an unknown, imminent danger.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my child,’ said the priest, in a sweet murmur. ‘It’s only me. I heard you cry out and feared you were ill. So I came. Were you dreaming? Now then, settle down, see how agitated you are …’

  He pulled the covers up over the boy’s shoulders and tucked him in with a mother’s care.

  ‘Now then, my child, settle down and go back to sleep.’

  These two episodes struck Sébastien forcefully and reawakened his dormant mistrust. Why did Father de Kern’s presence cause him such violent embarrassment, a sort of strange, instinctive repugnance, a creeping of the skin, a nauseous fear, something abnormal, rather like the dizzying sensation he felt when he looked down into an abyss from the heights of a clifftop? Why had he come to his bedside at night? Why had he been leaning over him? The reason he gave for his visit did not seem natural to the boy; it rang false. He had come with some undeclared intention, to which perhaps he could not admit. But what? Sébastien had remained chaste, largely ignorant of the impurities of the human soul. Vice had scarcely touched him as it skimmed close by. What he knew, or rather what he guessed, he had acquired at confession, through Father Monsal’s murky questioning, and in his mind, it had taken on an indefinite form, a worrying and dangerous shape, which alarmed him, innocent, virginal and naive as he was. He had heard, here and there, a few dirty words in conversations between pupils, but very rarely, though it was enough to excite his curiosity, which remained unsatisfied, for he did not dare ask anyone for information on this subject, not even Bolorec, fearing he might be doing something wrong and be denounced. Nevertheless, Bolorec’s explanation on the subject of the expulsion of the two pupils had anchored itself in his memory: ‘Dirty things, like when you make children.’ He thought about it often, trying to understand and unable to connect this idea of children to unknown relationships, to the secret, filthy actions of two young boys.

  What he knew, out of simple instinct and merely guessing at the nature of sex, was that there existed between men and women mysterious and necessary connections, which were called love. Love, everlasting love: the poets sang of it, and with what divine fire in their words! Love came up ceaselessly, both doomed and blessed, in those verses which he learned and recited and which he loved as the most adorable of music. They were always mentioning kisses, embraces, tumbling hair, bare arms wrapped about swooning bodies; but those kisses only kissed air, the embraces only embraced disembodied images; that hair transformed itself into intangible rays of light, those arms enfolded only souls. Although the poetry did, in fact, evoke the triumph of happy flesh, in his mind, the idea of love was still at the stage of ethereal joy, cerebral inebriation, heavenly desire. It was the love that brought about the Assumption of the Virgin. Jesus died from that love and on the cross, bleeding and torn, he retained its eternal, incorruptible clarity.

  Love was also that fascinating disquiet, that indescribable emotion which he had felt during Marguerite’s caresses, purified by absence; he felt it at the fugitive vision of the Le Toulic sisters, and it existed in the waves of tenderness he felt for the dead chimeras of which Father de Kern spoke; it was in some sense the generous reaching out of all his faculties and all his sensibilities towards beauty and pain. He had no concept of its physical crudity; despite the ferment of his adolescent years, he knew nothing of the fierce and savage struggle that is sex.

  So, why were his intimacies with Father de Kern mingled with vague fears about another love, an impossible, dirty love, since love was personified by woman? Why could he not in the calm of his heart give himself up to the priest entirely, without this fear of a terrible and definitive catastrophe which his ignorance could not define, but of which his instinct warned him? By what twist of the mind, what corrupt
presentiment, had this idea of some unsuspected, yet inevitable crime entered his imagination and found a foothold there to the extent that he had not the strength to drive it out? He reasoned with himself, told himself that he was the victim of a mistake, of some kind of madness. Nothing in the priest’s behaviour justified such a fear. The man had taken an interest in him and shown affection; he directed his mind along routes of which he had long dreamed. Why should he therefore be resentful of him? The priest found him attractive, was worried if he thought he was ill. What crime was there in that? Was it in that case forbidden to show kindness? To reassure himself further, he remembered that Father de Kern had the reputation of being a pious priest, almost saintly. He wore a hair shirt, it was said, and scourged himself. That was why he was so pale sometimes and why his eyes often blazed with a strange mystical flame, circled by dark rings of pain.

  Despite this line of reasoning, his ineradicable doubts endured. The day after the night when the priest had appeared at his bedside, he avoided him during recess and sought out Bolorec with childish, obvious ostentation. Bolorec did not speak. He was sculpting a lizard and nodding his head to the internal rhythms of a song. When Sébastien asked him questions, he merely replied in surly monosyllables and shrugs. In the evening, feigning sickness, Sébastien refused to join Father de Kern in the window arch. But, from behind his curtains he watched Father de Kern through a narrow peephole. The priest had taken up his usual place. Leaning his elbows on the window ledge, he was watching night gradually falling over the grounds, over the gardens, drowning the recreation yards in transparent shadow, that beautiful darkness normally filled by sweet words and engrossing stories. It seemed to Sébastien that he looked more serious and even cross, no, not cross exactly, but so very sad! His heart was touched. He accused himself of ingratitude and thought of going over to him and asking forgiveness. When darkness fell completely, the priest closed the window and walked slowly past the row of beds, his soutane swishing. Everyone was sleeping. Sébastien saw his shadow pass back and forth on the curtains; he heard the swish of his soutane and the rattle of his rosary. Then he heard nothing more but the confused sounds of breathing; he saw nothing but the glimmer of the watchful lamps. And he too fell asleep.

  Sébastien soon realised that Bolorec’s company was no longer enough for him. The other pupils seemed boring and vulgar, they made fun of his poetic excesses. A void had suddenly opened up in his life. Something was missing, something essential, irreplaceable, like bread to a starving man. And sadness, a sadness all the more painful to bear because it was heavy with remorse, again overwhelmed him. He was in need of protection, intelligence, a voice that would pour the balm of bewitching, consoling words into his spirit and his heart. This protection, this intelligence and this voice, all of which he had summoned, had come to him, unhoped-for, to him, a person so long disdained by everyone, and see now how he rejected them, encouraged by foolish, guilty fears which were, in any case, very difficult to define. Now that he was in less intimate contact with Father de Kern, he was no longer afraid of him. On the contrary, Sébastien was astonished and touched to see that the priest’s attitude towards him was the same. He could have avenged himself for this rude ingratitude, but he did not. Nothing had changed in the benevolent manner of that admirable, gentle priest. Not one of the special freedoms and gracious liberties which Sébastien enjoyed had been withdrawn by that saintly man; and in his eyes, whose gaze was returning to normal, there was neither severity nor anger; there was only sorrow, the glad, luminous sorrow that shines out from the emaciated faces of martyrs. Sébastien observed him, moved, repentant, his soul aching with remorse. Yes, he must be wearing a hair shirt, torturing himself with mortification, tearing at his body with the iron tips of the scourge. It was clear from the painful slowness of his gait, the painful bend of his back, the painful pallor of his skin. Everything that had worried Sébastien about the priest’s manner, everything that had distanced him from him, he now recognised as nothing more than expressions of pain. In an excess of exalted, penitent gratitude for everything that the Jesuit had so generously given him of his knowledge and his affection, for everything he had awakened in him that was fine, noble and ardent, he wished he could push back the folds of his soutane and dress the red marks on his chest and kiss the bleeding wounds. Finally, a selfish thought oppressed him. If Father de Kern refused to continue with his lessons, if he said to him: ‘You did not trust me, you are unworthy of my favours’, he would fall back into his former state of alienation, the same moral abandon in which he had vegetated, miserably oppressed by his teachers, vanquished by circumstance, prey to that stifling education which engendered such darkness in his brain. One day, whilst the priest was reading his prayerbook during the walk, standing apart from everyone else beneath the trees, Sébastien dared to approach him and, contrite, cheeks red, eyes lowered, he stammered:

  ‘Forgive me, Father. I have been cruel. I won’t do it again.’

  The priest gave Sébastien a sharp stare which pierced him like a gimlet. Then he said simply, his voice sad and smooth as a sigh:

  ‘How sorry I have been for you, my child, my dear child …’

  After a silence, breathing hard, he said:

  ‘But God heard me, because you have repented.’

  He closed his prayerbook and started to walk slowly away, moving aside with a dainty gesture any overhanging branches that barred their way. Sébastien stayed by his side, timid, defeated, his head hanging, staring at the ground on which drops of sunlight trembled.

  ‘Let’s not speak of that any more shall we, my child?’ said the priest. ‘We must forgive trespasses, even love them, as Jesus loved them, since they make repentance more dear and pardon so sweet.’

  He added in an ineffable tone, which shook Sébastien to the very marrow:

  ‘Oh, little restless soul, which I can read so well!’

  Sébastien did not dare raise his eyes to meet those of the priest. It seemed to him that as they walked, his feet did not touch the blades of grass and that as he moved through the light, he was so tall, so big, so superhuman, that his forehead touched the skies.

  The daily conversations and lessons resumed their interrupted course. Every evening the two of them met again in the window arch, and little Sébastien felt an even sharper pleasure at those customary meetings, to which the night lent a twofold mystery of religious feast and forbidden rendezvous.

  Father de Kern deployed all his graceful inventiveness to make his lessons irrevocably attractive. With persuading, caressing words, with the evocative eloquence of an idea, he knew how to explain and fix in unforgettable images the most abstract of subjects and give the remotest characters of the past a personality of seductive contemporaneity, which made them seem more immediate, more visible, almost familiar. Sébastien was astonished to find himself passionately interested in details of the very history that had so bored him in class, because of its repellent dryness, but which in the priest’s teaching wore the attractive garb of a tale, a beauty dressed in poetry. Everything came alive, everything was animated by his words, which had an incomparable power of suggestion. He was sweetness personified, his mercy was tender and universal. His precise, measured enthusiasms always allowed generous space to the unexpected dream. He was more dangerous for what he did not say and left to guesswork than by what he actually said. However, the words ‘love’ and ‘sin’ occurred again and again on his lips, with slow inflections, as if he liked to linger over them. The word ‘sin’ above all, by the way in which he pronounced it and circled around it, seemed like a strange flower which attracts by the very dangerousness of its scent; and though he expressed his horror of it, with specious disgust, that very horror seemed desirable and beguiling.

  ‘You are now a little man,’ he used to say to Sébastien. ‘You must become accustomed to looking sin in the face. One can avoid it best if one knows it well.’

  He stooped to personal confidences, spoke of a life which, for a long time, had delive
red him up to sin. What remorse and expiation for a few wretched pleasures! Would there ever be enough prayers to erase the traces of his former degradation?

  ‘If I tell you these abominable things,’ he murmured, grasping Sébastien’s hands in a trembling grip, ‘it is because I would like to preserve you from sin. Ah, if you knew how it offers itself to us, arms full of flowers, lips wreathed in smiles. If you knew how it clothes itself in beautiful flesh, intoxicating perfumes, to tempt us, to damn us, if you knew its seductive power. How many times have I trembled for you. When I see you with Kerral or any of your other friends, it torments me. I ask myself: “What are they saying to each other? What do they do together?” If you disappear from sight on the walk, I say to myself: “Where are they?” And I was worried I might surprise you, hidden behind a hedge, or huddled together in the shadow of a rock. How I watched over you in the night, dear child. Ah, the nights are so sad! They grieve me. Passion roams abroad then, sin is rampant. And I know so many little souls whose hearts are gangrenous, children who mutter feverish words that make the Holy Virgin blush and Jesus weep. Trust me, open your heart to me. Do not hide one evil thought from me, not one impure act. If you have committed the ultimate sin, do not be afraid to pour out your heart to me. It is so good to shout out one’s sins. And Jesus is so compassionate and forgiving, he gladly pardons little souls like yours.’

  He pressed him to admit to imaginary temptations, imaginary impurities, making specific questions which, hitherto, had remained tentative and vague. He too had been corrupted at school by a schoolfriend whom he cared for. Oh, what shame! And later … Blushing, in a display of modesty and embarrassment and blessed humility, he recounted the real truth about his family, revealed the intimate, poignant details. A mother who had died abroad, an adulteress, a debauched father, who installed his concubines in his own house, a married sister who received him at her home, half-naked, swathed in scented chiffon and lace and who initiated him into all the perversities of human love. The first thing she did was to compel him into the arms of a woman who completed the work of depravation begun when he was still a schoolboy. Thus he had tumbled down through all the levels of vice, had rolled in the hellish filth of forbidden pleasures. Finally, God took pity on him. One evening, in the midst of an orgy, he had been miraculously touched by grace.