Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

I went back home through the cold, silent streets.

  The sky is dark and leaden. A few slanting snowflakes, driven by a bitter wind, whirl in the air. The houses are firmly sealed; I can just make out through obscured windows, a few sleepy, half-witted faces. A sort of angry pity seizes me for these people, lurking there in their dens, condemned by religious and civil laws to wallow eternally like beasts. Are there any passionate, thoughtful young people anywhere, young people who think and are working towards freeing themselves and us from the heavy, criminal, murderous hand of the church, so fatal to human intelligence? Young people who, faced with the moral law set up by priests and the civil law applied by the police, say to themselves resolutely: ‘I will be immoral and I will rebel.’ I wish I knew.

  4th January

  Snow has been falling all night and covers the earth. Idleness kept me in bed till quite late. I did not want to get up. There are times when I feel I could sleep for days, weeks, months, years. However, I did get up and, not knowing what to do, roamed about the house. My father is at the town hall. Old Madame Cébron is sweeping the dining room. My eyes happen upon my mother’s photograph. In our new home she has been restored to her place between the blue vases on the mantelpiece. She is fading more and more and the background is quite yellow. You can no longer make out the pillars, pools and mountains. As for the image of my mother, I can only see the dress, the lace handkerchief and the long loops of hair, framing a face without features or shadows. The rest has almost disappeared. I pick up the photograph and stare at it for a few seconds, without emotion. Then suddenly I ask Madame Cébron:

  ‘Didn’t my father keep anything of hers?’

  ‘Oh, he did. In the attic there’s a trunk full of Madame’s things.’

  ‘I’d like to see them. Come with me, Madame Cébron.’

  We find the trunk, stuffed under a sack of dried beans, the winter supplies. Four woollen dresses, three bonnets, a hat, a few chemises and that’s all. Everything is worm-eaten, faded, mouldering. These thin shreds of fabric and rotting underwear give off a sour, musty odour. Vainly I seek a shape, an indication of habit, something still living of the person who was my mother, something whose heart still beats beneath the rags which fray, disintegrate, shred and stick to my fingers. So I question Madame Cébron.

  ‘She was a good woman, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Good? Of course she was good …’

  The old woman’s tone does not convince me. I persist:

  ‘She can’t have always been happy with my father …’

  ‘Oh, of course she was happy with Monsieur. She did everything she wanted, the dear lady. She more or less led him by the nose. Ah, poor Monsieur … I can assure you there was never a peep from him with Madame …! And then …’

  Madame Cébron had stopped speaking. She didn’t want to say any more. I am intrigued. That ‘And then …’ seems to me full of a mystery which suddenly makes me very interested in my mother. My imagination takes off into unlimited hypotheses. An idea takes hold, atrocious, sacrilegious and beguiling. Did my mother love someone else? And did this other person love her? As the idea takes shape in my mind, I find I love my mother, I love her with an immense love, a hitherto unknown love, which makes my heart swell. I am unable to question Madame Cébron directly so I ask in a roundabout way.

  Did we have many visitors to the house in the past?’

  ‘Oh yes, people used to visit.’

  ‘But did anyone in particular come?’

  ‘No, no one in particular.’

  But Madame Cébron is lying. Someone used to visit, and that person loved my mother and she loved him. So I take the few threadbare rags from the trunk and kiss them almost wildly, a long, horrible, incestuous kiss.

  8th January

  This morning I received a letter from Bolorec.

  The letter is long, in cramped handwriting, full of strange, incomprehensible, disjointed spelling. I don’t understand it all, but what I can’t make out I can guess. It makes my heart leap for joy. Bolorec! In other words, the best of my memories of school. The only aspect of school which was not a disappointment. I can see him in my mind’s eye coming to take his place between Kerral and me when we went for walks. I had disliked him at first, partly on account of his odd ugliness, but then I grew to love him. Despite our separation and the silence between us, I have always felt infinite tenderness towards this strange and uncommunicative companion of my darkest hours, and I can’t really explain it. I feel that this affection grows in proportion to the as yet undeciphered enigma that is his personality and is actually strengthened by the real fear that he inspires in me. What kind of person is Bolorec exactly? I really don’t know. How many times have I asked myself that question? How many times too have I written to him without ever receiving a reply? I thought he had forgotten me, and that hurt. And now at last a letter from him! A letter I read and re-read probably twenty times over. Bolorec is in Paris. How did he end up there? What has he been doing since our separation? He does not tell me. Bolorec writes as if we had last met the day before and as if I’m fully up to date with his life, his ideas, his plans. Every line contains some subtlety which I cannot make sense of, hidden allusions to episodes and situations of which I know nothing. The only thing I can make out at all clearly is that Bolorec is in Paris staying with a sculptor, ‘who lives in a world of his own’. From what he tells me, he hardly does any sculpting himself, nor does this sculptor. It seems neither does any sculpting at all. During the day, they see the ‘leaders’ who gather at the studio and prepare for the ‘great ideal’. In the evenings they go to clubs, where the sculptor talks about ‘the great ideal’. What is this ‘great ideal’? Bolorec does not explain at all but seems completely taken up with it. ‘We’re making progress, good progress.’ When the time comes he will warn me. Finally, and this is what completely confuses me, he has been selected to do some great thing which has nothing to do with the ‘great ideal’, but which will advance the cause of the ‘great ideal’. It has not yet been arranged and will happen later.

  One detail about his letter strikes me: almost every line contains the word Justice, and this word is more clearly written than the others, with firm, upright letters which create a strange and terrible effect amid the scribble surrounding them. There are occasional moments of great poignancy. Bolorec does not like Paris. He misses the Breton moorlands. But he has to stay. When the ‘great ideal’ comes to pass, then he will be able to go back and be happy. Sometimes he goes up onto the ramparts, sits in the grass and dreams of home. One morning, he saw a maidservant passing by with a soldier. She was a girl he knew from home and he hopes one day she’ll pass by again on her own and he can speak to her. She is called Mathurine Gossec. Sadly, she has not passed by since then. Sometimes on a Sunday in the studio, the sculptor plays the Breton bagpipes and Bolorec sings Breton rounds. Poor Bolorec! I search in vain in the letter for some expression of friendship towards me or the desire to know something of my life. There is nothing of the kind. This makes me sad. But he was always like that and didn’t love me any the less for it. At least, I think that’s true. I’m not sure any more.

  As I comb through his words over and over, I imagine his dear, comical features, often inscrutable and always baffling. Today his face seems even more haunting and pervasive because of the sense of some painful and tragic event to come. As I look through the incomprehensible pages where the letters crowd in together, jostle, clamber and heap up one on top of the other, twisted and bristling, but amongst which that word Justice! stands out, flapping like a banner, it seems I can see Bolorec on a barricade, amid the smoke, standing there wild-eyed, black with gunpowder, his hands bloodied. Now the joy at possessing something of Bolorec gives way to an inexpressible sadness. At that moment, I suffer two painful emotions: fear for the future of my friend and shame at my own uselessness and cowardice. Did he ever really care for me?

  8th January, midnight

  Bolorec’s letter sticks in my mind and disturbs me.
It is a curious thing but now the idea of Bolorec is entirely separate from the ideas which his letter has inspired. By dint of a kind of regressive egotism, I am obsessed and tormented by various questions about myself. Am I truly a coward?

  I too used to want to devote myself to others, not in the way in which I suspect Bolorec is devoting himself; I wanted to devote myself through pity and reason. I soon realised it was absurd and pointless. Here I know everyone and I can get close to everyone if I wish. Restricted though this small town is, it still contains all the elements of normal society, but everything I see makes me despair and feel sickened. Fundamentally, all these people hate and despise one another. The bourgeoisie hate the workers, the workers hate the tramps: the tramps seek out other tramps more wretched than themselves so that they can have someone to hate and despise. Everyone struggles to maintain the fatal exclusivity of his own class, to make even narrower the prison cell in which he shakes his eternal chains. I am ignorant and guided only by instinct, but I have occasionally tried to point out to the miserable wretches the injustice of their condition and their inalienable right to revolt, tried to direct their hatred not lower but higher, but they only became suspicious and turned their backs on me, taking me for some dangerous madman. There is an inertia, strengthened by centuries and centuries of religious and authoritarian atavism, which it is impossible to overcome. Man would only have to stretch out his arms for his chains to fall away; he would only have to move his legs for his ball and chain to break; but he will never make that gesture towards freedom. He has been softened up, emasculated by the lie of ‘finer feelings’; he is trapped in his moral abjection and slavish submission by the lie of charity. Ah, charity which I loved so much, charity which seemed to me so much more than mere human virtue, the direct and radiant emanation of God’s immense love, charity, the secret of man’s degradation. Through charity, the government and the priests perpetuate poverty instead of relieving it, grinding down the souls of the poor instead of raising them up. The imbeciles feel bound to their suffering by this pernicious good deed, which of all social crimes is the greatest and most monstrous and the most ineradicable. I have said to them: ‘Don’t accept alms, reject charity, just take, take, because everything belongs to you anyway.’ But they didn’t understand. Dare I admit it? They don’t interest me as much as I sometimes try to convince myself that they do. Often their vulgarity shocks and repels me, and certain kinds of wretchedness can arouse feelings of invincible disgust in me. Perhaps it was an artist’s curiosity, and therefore something cruel, which drew me towards them in the first place? I have often enjoyed the terrible expressions and extraordinary deformations and the magnificent patina which suffering and hunger etch on the faces of the poor. Whatever the truth is, I do not feel drawn towards action and I do not envisage myself dying for an idea on the scaffold or on a barricade, not because of any fear of dying, but because of an equally bitter emotion which is taking over my spirit day by day: the feeling of futility. Anyway, these ideas only exist in me in a speculative, intermittent state. They haunt me when I am shut up in my room with nothing to do, or when the weather is gloomy and the skies grey and, above all, during meals because of my father’s presence: he is the total negation of what I feel and dream and of what I believe matters to me. Outside in the sunshine, my ideas evaporate like mist over the sea. Nature takes hold of me completely and speaks another language to me, the language of the mystery it contains and of the love which is in me. I listen to it with delicious pleasure, this superhuman, supernatural language, and, as I listen, I experience again the original, untainted, confused, sublime sensations that I had as a little child, once upon a time.

  These are moments of supreme happiness, when my soul tears itself away from the hateful carcass of my body and launches itself into the impalpable, the invisible, the unrevealed, with the breeze singing and all kinds of shapes wandering the incorruptible expanse of the sky. Ah, my plans, my dreams, the inspirations of a brain gladdened by the light! My reinvigorated will plunges once more into the waves of this purifying dream. I become again a prey to chimeras. I want to embrace and conquer everything I see and hear. I will be a poet, a painter, a musician, a scientist. What do obstacles matter? I will thrust them aside. What does my intellectual solitude matter? I will people it with all the spirits that are in the voice of the wind, the shadows of the river, the dark depths of the woods, the scented breath of flowers, the magic of distant horizons. Sadly, these ecstasies last only a short while. I have no stamina for things which are beautiful or good. When I return from these transports, my arms are even wearier from having tried to embrace the impalpable, my soul is further sickened from having glimpsed the inaccessible path to pure joy and guilt-free happiness. I come crashing painfully down from on high into the dark shame of my incurable solitude.

  Bolorec’s letter is there open on the table. I read it again. Poor Bolorec. Perhaps I envy him though. At least he has a passion that fills his life. He is waiting for the ‘great ideal’, which doubtless will never come, but he waits, while I have nothing to look forward to, nothing at all.

  10th January

  It is now five years since I left school. In that time not one night has passed in which I did not dream about it. They are horribly painful dreams. Occasionally, they have a fantastical side with distortions of things and faces whose unreality seems to attenuate the tormenting nature of that near-reality. But normally I see the school more or less exactly as it was, with its classrooms, yards, hated faces, all the things which I really did endure and suffer. By day, the school maintains its dulling, implacable grip on me, undermining me psychologically. By night, as I sleep, I relive its horrors. One striking phenomenon is that my dream never varies. My father comes into my room. His face is twisted and harsh. He is wearing his formal frock coat and his top hat.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘it’s time.’

  We leave. We travel through a terrible black land where ferocious dogs hunt down peasants. All along the roadside, perched on dolmen stones, immensely tall Jesuits lean towards us, laughing, flapping their soutanes like bats’ wings. Some fly over the flat pools of water, spinning and turning. Then suddenly we’re at the school with its creaking gates and cramped courtyard; in the background is the chapel dominated by the gold cross, then the door to the parlour on the right, guarded by hideous, crouching monks, then there are the corridors, the façade, the recreation yards. I turn around. My father has gone. A great shout goes up in the yards. Pupils, teachers, monks, everyone runs towards me, threatening, furious, brandishing spades, pitchforks, sticks, tripping me up with huge Latin tomes and stones.

  ‘There he is!’

  The Rector, Father de Marel, and Father de Kern lead the cruel mob. Then the hunt begins, ardent, fierce, where everything hateful I have known appears to me in terrifying but quite realistic form. I bump into confessional boxes, bang against chairs, stumble over altar steps, fall onto beds and there I am trampled, attacked, then pushed aside. I wake up, drenched in sweat, my chest heaving and I dare not go back to sleep.

  I have tried everything to rid myself of these dreams which make it impossible to forget what I so long to forget. Before going to bed, I wear out my body and mind; I walk furiously in the countryside or else I seat myself at the table and work at writing down these pointless reminiscences. I have tried to call up other images, pleasant visions, happy, cheerful memories. I have tried to evoke passionate, sensual images, to distract myself entirely in obscene imaginings and so escape the horrible haunting of these dreams. It’s no use. Now I dread sleep and put it off as long as possible. I prefer to endure the boredom of the long hours of the night, but they pass so very slowly.

  Last night my dream was different though, and I make note of it here because its symbolism interested me. We were in the hall at Vannes: on the stage, right in the middle, there was a kind of tub filled to the brim with trembling, brilliantly coloured butterflies. They were the souls of little children. The Rector, his sleeves rolle
d up and wearing a kitchen apron tied tight around his waist, was plunging his hands into the tub and drawing out fistfuls of sweet little souls that trembled and uttered soft, plaintive cries. Then he put them in a mortar, crushed them, and ground them up into a thick red paste which he spread on toast and threw to the dogs, huge, voracious dogs, wearing birettas and sitting up begging all around him.

  Isn’t that exactly what they do?

  24th January

  Today a regiment of dragoons passed through Pervenchères. This is an important event in a little town, a troop of soldiers passing through. People start talking about it a week in advance and everyone looks forward to it in a way I can scarcely understand and which it is impossible to share, but which is no less strong for all that it resides in the vulgar heart of the multitude. It is curious how the people respond to only two stimuli: religion and war, the two greatest enemies of moral development. Our house has been turned upside down and my father, in his role as magistrate, is very agitated. He is counting on receiving the colonel and offering him hospitality, so they are preparing a room for him. They have had to shift the furniture around, clean the staircase, polish the dining room furniture, rake the paths in the garden. From dawn onwards, my father goes back and forth between the town hall – where he is billeting the soldiers and checking on the stocks of bread – and the house, where he supervises Madame Cébron’s tasks. He has taken the good dinner service out of the cupboard and ordered a lavish meal to be prepared. I did the same as every other layabout: I went to the outskirts of town and waited on the road to Bellême for the soldiers to come. There were lots of people there. Monsieur Champier was giving a speech to a group of people and gesticulating madly.

  He had come straight from the house, wearing his slippers and a velvet cap. He declared:

  ‘Soldiers always cheer me up. When I hear drums or bugles, believe me, it brings tears to my eyes. The army, ah, the army! There is nothing better. And France, what a wonderful thing … Monsieur Gambetta and his revolutionaries can say what they like and do what they like, France will always be France. The concept of patriotism will always survive.’