Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  On the fourth day, in the morning, Madame Cébron came into his room. She had just come from the market, out of breath and red-faced, and had not yet had time to put down her basket of vegetables in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, Monsieur Sébastien, Monsieur Sébastien! I really do think your father is mad. He’s off his head, I’m sure. You should have heard him. He was there in the square, drawing a crowd and angry … so angry! He was saying: “I’ll bring him to heel, the wretch! But can I bring him to heel?” We’re really not used to seeing gentlemen in that state. And bless me, but it’s frightening … He was saying: “When I break his bones for him, then he’ll have to do what I say, won’t he?” And he told such horrible tales about you! Horrible! No, it’s not right. I really think he’s mad. Got to be careful though, Monsieur Sébastien, because you never know with mad people. Is it true, Monsieur Sébastien, that you were caught with a little lad like yourself … doing … well, you know what?’

  ‘No, Madame Cébron, it’s not true.’

  ‘I knew it. I’m telling you, Monsieur, he’s mad.’

  Then she added, shrugging her shoulders:

  ‘I mean, even if it was true, it’s hardly something to go shouting about! Oh, by the way, I also met Mademoiselle Marguerite. She’s really grown this last five months, in fact, last Sunday, she started wearing long dresses for the first time. She’s a lovely child. She asked after you … Oh, really, you should have heard her: she asked if you were shaving yet! Can you credit it! No. Now where do little girls like that get such ideas? But to get back to Monsieur, I really think … no, I know he’s mad.’

  At lunch, Sébastien did indeed think that his father seemed more overexcited than usual. He ate with a kind of suppressed rage; his movements were so clumsy that he smashed a glass and cracked two plates, which only made him all the more exasperated. All of a sudden, he said:

  ‘So, I suppose you think I’m going to keep you here doing nothing, and feed you while you do nothing? Do you really imagine such an absurd thing is likely? You must think I’m an idiot?’

  Sébastien did not reply.

  ‘Well, my lad, you’re wrong. Tomorrow I’m taking you to Séez, the little seminary at Séez. You’ll spend the holidays there, you’ll spend your whole life there.’

  He grew animated and, his mouth full of stew, he said over and over again.

  ‘Your whole life, by God, your whole life!’

  Sébastien shuddered. He saw the school again in his mind’s eye: stifling walls, wretched lessons; he saw the hateful pupils, vile teachers, the whole procession of deceit, pain and shame. He was determined not to return to the torment of that existence, on entering which he had glimpsed death and, on leaving, found dishonour and ignominy. He stood up full of courage, looked across the table at his father, whose face was livid and whose voice was hoarse with rage, and said in a calm, firm, definitive tone:

  ‘I won’t go.’

  At these words, Monsieur Roch almost choked. He rolled bloodshot eyes, wide with fury.

  ‘What did you say? What did you say?’

  His words hissed, struggling to emerge from his tight throat.

  Sébastien replied:

  ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘You will, if I have to drag you there by your hair!’

  ‘No, I won’t go.’

  Monsieur Roch lost the ounce of reason left to him. A hideous, murderous brute of violence was unleashed within him, baying for blood. Foaming at the mouth, his features crazed and twisted, he grabbed a knife from the table, hurled himself on his son and, his hand raised, his huge hand in which the steel blade gleamed and glittered, he roared:

  ‘You will go or else!’

  Then Sébastien knelt at his father’s feet. With his head high, his gaze resolute, he presented his chest to the knife and calmly, his face only slightly pale, he said clearly:

  ‘Kill me if you like, but I won’t go.’

  Defeated, quelled by the child’s candid gaze, Monsieur Roch dropped the knife on the floor and fled.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER I

  Early July, 1870: the sky, at first threatening and cloudy, had completely cleared by midday, and bright sunlight flooded the countryside. Sébastien came out of his house, crossed the town and went to the post office to visit Madame Lecautel. The post office was closed from twelve o’clock until two and, when the weather was fine, Madame Lecautel normally took advantage of this daily break to take a brief walk with her daughter. A few minutes later, all three were making their way down the Rue de Paris towards the open fields.

  Sébastien was twenty years old; he had grown a great deal, but was still thin and pale. His posture was slightly stooped, his step slow, even indolent. His eyes still shone with keen intelligence, but that light often grew dull and veiled. The frank gaze he had had as a boy was now mingled with mistrust and covert disquiet, which added a hint of cowardice to his general air of sadness. A few tardy tufts of beard were now evident on his chin and cheeks, and the light down on his upper lip was changing to the golden bristles of a moustache. Anyone seeing him pass by would have thought him always weary, his limbs seemed too long, too heavy to berry and drag along.

  The three of them followed a little path, deeply enclosed by greenery, which led towards the Saint-Jacques hills. Oak trees grew on the high banks on either side, their trunks concealed by clumps of wild viburnum, their branches forming an arch above their heads, shading the path freckled with sunlight.

  ‘So,’ said Madame Lecautel, ‘have you done anything these last few days?’

  ‘I wanted to plant some flowers in the garden,’ replied Sébastien, ‘some flowers that Father Vincent gave me, but my father forbade me. You know how he hates flowers. He says they take up space and serve no purpose. So I went off into the woods instead and daydreamed.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I’d have liked to read but I have no books.’

  ‘You must be so bored.’

  ‘Not really. I look, I think, and time passes. Yesterday, for instance, I watched an ants’ nest all day. You can’t imagine how beautiful and mysterious such a thing is, at least for someone like me who knows nothing about it. There’s the most extraordinary life going on in there, a great social structure that would be far more interesting to learn about than the Athenian Republic. It’s another of the thousands of things they don’t teach you in school.’

  Madame Lecautel rebuked him gently:

  ‘That’s all very well, Sébastien my dear, but you can’t go on living like this. You’re not a child any more, you know. Even here in your home town where you’re well loved, people are beginning to whisper and say bad things about you. Believe me, you must make up your mind to do something with your life.’

  ‘True,’ sighed Sébastien, hanging his head as he walked and striking out at the grassy banks with the end of his stick. ‘But what can I do? There’s nothing that interests me.’

  Madame Lecautel groaned.

  ‘I find it so upsetting. A great big lad like you and so lazy!’

  ‘I’m not lazy, honestly,’ protested Sébastien. ‘I’d like to do something. But what? You tell me. What?’

  ‘How many times have I told you, and I’ll tell you again. I can see only one way out of this situation in which you’re getting more and more bogged down with each day that passes, and that’s the army. With your intelligence, you’d soon get a commission. My husband signed up and at twenty-six, he was a captain, at forty-two a general.’

  Sébastien pulled a wry face.

  ‘A soldier. Oh God, no. I think that’s what I’d hate the most. I’d prefer to beg for my bread on the streets.’

  Somewhat piqued, Madame Lecautel retorted:

  ‘You might well find yourself doing precisely that, my poor Sébastien.’

  They fell silent. The path climbed, stony and steep. Madame Lecautel’s pace slowed.

  Marguerite had not uttered a word. She walked along, slim, supple, svelte,
an utterly charming figure in a simple dress of cream muslin, caught in at the waist with a red sash. Her broad straw hat, also decorated with red ribbon, best a translucent, gilded light onto the warm glow of her complexion. Although she was now a young woman, her eyes still retained the qualities they had had when she was a child: they had a troubling, unhealthy beauty, with a perverse and candid gaze. Surprised, inquisitive, unusually open to sensuality, they glimmered like two burning embers. Her mouth had bloomed, her lips plump and rosy as a poisonous flower. Her nostrils flared and quivered as she eagerly breathed in the perfumes wafted on the breeze as it moved from flower to flower, branch to branch, bearing with it passion and life. Ocbesionally, she stopped and leaned against the bank, plucked flowers to pin on her bodice with her lace-mittened hands, her movements revealing the delicate grace of her shoulders and the exquisite contour of her waist and breast, which was just beginning to reveal a more womanly figure.

  Sébastien realised that he had wounded Madame Lecautel by his disdain for the military and attempted to mend the interrupted conversation.

  ‘Is there anything in the news today?’ he asked. ‘My father as usual has taken the newspaper and I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘Much the same as ever,’ replied Madame Lecautel, ‘but now they’re saying that war is inevitable.’

  Madame Lecautel saw nothing improper in reading whichever newspapers she thought looked interesting before handing them over to the postman for delivery. This meant she was generally very well informed, particularly regarding military affairs, in which, owing to an as yet unbroken habit, she still took an interest.

  ‘Listen, Sébastien,’ she went on, ‘if, as is very likely, we have a war, since it seems to me national honour is now involved, wouldn’t it be better if you had already been a soldier for some while?’

  ‘But Sébastien has already paid for someone to go into the army instead of him, Mother,’ cried Marguerite suddenly.

  ‘Well, and what difference does that make? If there’s a war, he’ll have to join the army anyway.’

  ‘But what about the man he paid?’ said Marguerite, worried now.

  ‘He’ll be sent too.’

  ‘What, both of them? But that’s not fair. That’s like stealing.’

  Suddenly she laughed mischievously and brandished her parasol at her mother.

  ‘Now then, Mama, tell me you’ve only said all that to frighten him.’

  Her expression changed abruptly.

  ‘War must be wonderful. All those men. The wounded to be tended, the wounded, all pale and gentle and weak. Oh, I’d look after them so well …’

  The path led to a broad avenue of old chestnut trees and this, in turn, led to the Saint-Jacques spring which supplied the whole of Pervenchères with water. They followed the avenue and stopped near the spring, on a kind of knoll, from which the town could be glimpsed through the greenery, its crowded buildings bright in the sunlight. Madame Lecautel sat down on the grass in the shade of a tree. Marguerite looked for flowers.

  ‘Sébastien!’ she called out. ‘Help me pick a bunch.’

  There was a wheatfield nearby, with its shafts of ears and swaying stems, the green gilded with bright swirls of golds and, here and there, studded with blue and red flowers. Marguerite plunged in and almost disappeared amid the thick wheat. Only her hat, itself an enormous, whimsical flower, could be seen above the moving tips of the wheat, and her laughter rippled amongst the frail stems like the song of a bullfinch.

  ‘Come on, Sébastien! Come on!’

  Sébastien followed her, but when he was by her side, she stared at him hard, her eyes grave, and she said:

  ‘You will come this evening, won’t you?’

  Her voice was proud, imperious, but then she shuddered.

  ‘Marguerite,’ begged Sébastien, whose face bore an expression of both fear and exasperation.

  ‘I want you to! I want you to! I must talk to you.’

  ‘Marguerite, just think for a moment. What if your mother found out?’ insisted Sébastien.

  ‘I want you to come. You will come, won’t you?’

  ‘All right.’

  She started to pick flowers again. Her hat plunged into the sea of wheat and reappeared, shimmering in the sunlight, like a little mad boat, decked out with red bows. In the wake of her laughter, as she moved about the field, the wheat shifted and flattened and swelled like waves. She went back to her mother with a scented armful of flowers.

  ‘There, Mama, a beautiful bouquet. I picked them all on my own. Sébastien didn’t help at all. He doesn’t know how.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Madame Lecautel, getting up with her daughter’s help. ‘He doubtless wasn’t taught it at school.’

  Sébastien took no offence at her ironical tone. Perhaps he didn’t even notice. His face had darkened and his trouble expression returned, dulling the frank clarity of his gaze. Madame Lecautel, a little tired now, made a few lacklustre comments to which Sébastien barely responded, and they went home in silence. Only Marguerite hummed happily to herself as she arranged her bunch of flowers.

  When Sébastien arrived home, Monsieur Roach was sitting on a bench in his garden near the steps to the house, reading his newspaper. He glanced up automatically at the sound of footsteps, saw his son, and immediately looked back down at the paper.

  ‘Lovely weather,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, lovely weather,’ agreed Sébastien.

  Then he walked up the four steps to the front door and went and shut himself in his room.

  CHAPTER II

  In 1869, Sébastien started to keep a diary, noting down every thought and episode in his life. A few fragments of these fleeting pages are reproduced here, and they will reveal far better than we could hope to his state of mind following his return to his father’s home.

  2nd January, 1869

  Why am I writing this? Is it because I am bored and have no serious occupation? Is it just to use up somehow the slow hours of the slow days, each of which I find such a burden to live through? Is it to try my hand at an art I admire, an attempt to do with literature what I have been unable to do with music or drawing? Is it to try and explain my own feelings to myself, when, in fact, I find them inexplicable? I don’t know In any case, is there any point in wondering? I will start this diary and perhaps never finish it, and I need no reason or excuse since I will write it for myself alone.

  After the terrible scene when my father threatened to kill me, I was completely calm and felt quite liberated. I wonder what effect my cool, resolute resistance had on my father? I cannot say exactly, but I know that, from then on, I noted a change in his manner towards me. Not only did his anger, normally his routine state of mind, disappear, but from then on, he also spared me his lengthy pieces of criticism and advice. I felt he was embarrassed in my presence and that, if he had any feeling to express at all, it would have been stunned respect, a kind of astonishment and admiration, as one experiences sometimes in the face of a great show of physical strength.

  There was no more mention of my going away to school; no more mention of anything. I saw very little of him at all, except at mealtimes, when he hardly ever spoke. He had resumed his normal habits, spending part of his time at the town hall and part in his old shop, now run by his successor, where he compensated for his self-imposed silence at home with exuberant and interminable talk. As for me, I was free to do as I pleased, but for a long time I didn’t dare go out. Shame kept me in my room; I could not steel myself to face the curious stares of my fellow townsfolk. The longest stroll I took was a tour of the paths in the garden; my only distraction was the goldfish pond – the goldfish had turned white. However, one morning, I plucked up courage, went out and nothing unpleasant happened. Everyone greeted me with smiles. Madame Lecautel received me with great affection and Marguerite, when she saw me, cried out:

  ‘Oh, he has no beard! I so much wanted him to have a beard!’

  Then she burst into tears and then s
tarted to laugh. I found her pretty, whimsical and highly-strung, just as before. Despite that, the long dress she was wearing, lilac I remember, in a lightweight fabric, made me feel such respect for her that, from that moment on, I addressed her formally, and spoke to her like an adult.

  I was terribly bored.

  I am going to say something which I suspect is very foolish. I blame the colour of the wallpaper in my room for my current gloom, self-disgust and moodiness. It is horrible paper, a dirty brown colour, the brown of burnt gravy, with floral designs which are not actually flowers but something that defies classification in the realms of interior decoration, a kind of muddy yellow, evoking only abject ideas and ignoble comparisons. This paper has always obsessed me. I see it all the time, since it is between these wallpapered walls that I live, and I have never been able to look at it without feeling an overwhelming, exasperating, annihilating sadness. Of course my experience of school has profoundly disturbed me, a catastrophe really. But if, when I left school, I had been transplanted into some other environment than this, I can’t help thinking that my mind, sick with perfectly curable memories, might, in fact, have healed, and I might have been guided along a better, more normal path. All the décor in the house is similarly gloomy and depressing and my father is very proud of it. The paint on the doors, the skirting boards and the staircase offends the eye and paralyses the brain. All people, especially young people, whose minds are just awakening, have a positive need for joy and gaiety and for things around them to be cheerful. There are certain colours, harmonies and shapes which are as necessary to mental development as bread and meat are to physical development. I do not demand luxurious drapes or gilded furniture or marble staircases, I would merely like to look at bright lights and harmonious shapes, so that I might absorb the healthy good cheer and sense of harmony that is essential to my well-being. Here, everyone is sad, horribly sad. The problem is that they are surrounded by ugliness in dark, grubby houses where nothing has been designed with a view to training the senses. Once they have paid for their food and their clothing and stuffed into padlocked drawers what is left of their money, they think they have fulfilled their social duties. The beautiful side of life, indeed, the intellectual side of life, is deemed superfluous, and it is even considered laudable to deprive oneself of it, when, in fact, it is only the superfluous that makes life worth living!