Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  25th February

  Bolorec has not written and the paper carried no more news about Father de Kern. I often ask Madame Lecautel about it because she sees all the papers in the post office and is up to date with everything, but she knows no more about it either. That bothers me.

  10th May

  My first secret rendezvous with Marguerite! I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

  Yesterday, as we were walking back home alone along the street, she suddenly said to me, very quickly and quietly.

  ‘This evening, at ten, be here on the road, opposite the Allée des Rouvraies.’

  I was astonished at first, then I replied,

  ‘No, Marguerite, we mustn’t, I won’t do that.’

  ‘Oh do, please.’

  Her voice grew louder and more impatient. I was afraid her mother might hear and that she might have a tantrum for she was very agitated, very excited.

  ‘Very well,’ I said.

  ‘At ten.’

  She closed the door.

  The whole day I wondered whether I should turn up for that rendezvous. I couldn’t leave her alone on the street, I couldn’t. In any case, knowing as I do Marguerite’s uncompromising character, I was worried that if she went out and failed to find me there, she would come to my house to get me. I promised myself to speak to her firmly. However, in my fantasies, as the hours went by, the other distant Marguerite gradually replaced the one I had just left. An awareness of her succeeded my feelings of disgust; an agreeable awareness, the anguish of delicious waiting, a longed-for mystery, which made the hours pass slowly and the minutes seem eternal.

  The night was dark and moonless. The earth exhaled a cool dampness and the air was full of perfumes. I was on the road a half hour early, getting used to the darkness, worried by the slightest noise, filled with a deep, unfocussed anxiety, like the masses of shadow around me, which seemed charged with passion. For, beneath the silent sky, there were areas of confused shadow and errant silhouettes, amongst which the road was a slightly paler line, the road on which Marguerite would appear at any moment, another furtive, shadowy silhouette, lost in the mystery of the night.

  I heard her before I saw her: a fast, rhythmic cadence, urgent as the rustle of an animal escaping into the thicket; then I saw her, a vague shape, barely corporeal, disappearing and reappearing; then suddenly there she was, close to me. She had wrapped herself in a black shawl, so black that her face seemed almost to shine like a star in the darkness.

  ‘I’m late,’ she said, out of breath. ‘I thought my mother would never go to bed.’

  She seized my hand and drew me towards the side of the road.

  ‘Let’s go and sit on the bench in the avenue, shall we?’

  When we were seated on the bench with her pressing against me, trembling and real, the charm evaporated. I violently regretted having kept our appointment and, suddenly horrified to be there, I pulled my hand away from hers sharply.

  ‘We are doing a very wicked thing, Marguerite,’ I said gravely. ‘I should never have …’

  But she interrupted softly:

  ‘Shhh, don’t say that. I’ve wanted so much to … You don’t seem to understand. Be nice to me, don’t tell me off. I’m so happy.’

  She sighed.

  ‘We’re never alone together. I hate that. I’ve nothing to say to you and yet I’ve so much to say to you. Give me your hand.’

  She spoke in a low voice, her head resting on my shoulder, her body leaning against mine, which was rigid and cold. I could feel her trembling, I could feel that young, sinuous, supple body; I could hear her breathing fast, sense her heart beating, feel her pressing against me. My skin crawled. From head to toe, I could feel a nervous itching all over my skin as if I had been forced to touch a filthy animal. I was truly physically disgusted by this female flesh throbbing against me. I could only think of one thing: to force her to go. I pulled away.

  ‘First of all,’ I said sternly, ‘explain to me how you managed to get out of the house, Marguerite.’

  “‘Vous” … he calls me “vous”. Please call me “tu” …’

  ‘Please, Marguerite, tell me.’

  She crept closer to me again and, laughing, child-like, in little fragmented phrases, she told me how for more than a month she had been oiling the hinges and locks of the doors every day. She had already tried it several times and it was easy to get out into the street quietly.

  ‘I managed it without making a sound. I go barefoot for about fifty steps and then I put on my boots and I run.’

  She sprang away and leaped up and in a wild gesture tossed one of her boots into the air and put her bare foot upon my thigh.

  ‘Feel my foot,’ she said, ‘feel it.’

  It was damp and cold and covered in sand.

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said.

  ‘I trod in a puddle. What does it matter? I had to see you. Feel it again. You’re warming me up.’

  I retrieved the boot from the middle of the avenue and put it back on her foot. She let me, happy to have me do something for her, something that felt like tenderness, and she meanwhile babbled on innocently. Perhaps it was this childlike babble which drove other thoughts from my head. My irritation melted away and gradually turned to sorrow and pity, a profound pity for this creature who was so pretty and irresponsible, whose lost future I could already glimpse, her life shadowed by irreparable catastrophes. I tried to make her see reason, spoke to her gently, like a brother. Silent now, she huddled against me, her hand in mine, her eyes turned up to the sky which could be glimpsed between the leaves of the aspens, silvered by a glimmer growing stronger by the minute, the gleam of the moon which was still invisible, hidden behind the hills of Saint-Jacques.

  ‘What if your mother notices you’re gone, Marguerite, think how hurt she’ll be. She’ll die of shame. She loves you so much. When you were ill, remember how she cared for you, how she stayed by your bedside night and day, terrified to lose you. She only has you. You are her only consolation, her only reason for living. I am sure she gets up in the night to check on you, to listen to you breathing and watch you sleeping. Marguerite, you don’t realise, but when she speaks of you, sometimes the poor woman cries. She says, “Yes, Marguerite is better, but she is so peculiar sometimes, so over-excited, I’d still afraid for her. She doesn’t obey me, you know.” Marguerite, think how terrible it would be for your mother at this very moment finding your room empty, crying out, calling you, mad with worry. Marguerite you must go home at once, don’t waste a second, you must go home.’

  I don’t think she was even listening. She was soothed by the sound of my voice, but she did not hear the words emerging from my mouth. I felt her shivering, but with an emotion which was not the same as my own. Her fingers grasped mine, but they did not convey the affectionate pity I was feeling.

  ‘You must go home, Marguerite,’ I repeated. ‘I promise I will come and see you tomorrow and we will see each other every day. Every day, I promise.’

  She wasn’t listening. As if emerging from a dream which my words had not disturbed for a single moment, she murmured in a distant, child-like voice:

  ‘Guess what I’ve done.’

  ‘Marguerite, you must go home,’ I repeated, beginning to grow exasperated.

  ‘Guess what I’ve done, go on, please, guess. You don’t even want to try. You said the other day that you had no books and that upset you. Well, guess what I’ve done.’

  ‘I did say that but …’

  ‘I don’t want anything to upset you and I want you to have books, so … Can’t you guess?’

  She leaped up from the bench, threw off the shawl wrapped round her, then rummaged around in the pocket of her dress with sharp, jerky, impatient gestures. Eventually she let out a little cry of triumph, sat down again beside me, opened my hand wide and placed some coins in it, saying:

  ‘There, now you can have books, lots of books, and I’ll be so pleased.’

  At first, I was amazed, stunned,
my hand outstretched, trembling slightly. The coins in my hand chinked together. There must have been five, six, possibly more, all gold coins. I looked from the coins to Marguerite, seeing neither the money nor her face in the darkness. I felt no anger or shame. I felt only a painful pity and respect for that child and her sublime recklessness. I stammered:

  ‘Where did you get this money?’

  ‘It’s mine.’ I drew her to me and held her against my chest. She wrapped her arms round my neck.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Marguerite. You stole it from your mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, are we not one and the same flesh, my mother and I?’

  I slipped the money back into the pocket of her dress and said:

  ‘The other day I was lying. I have plenty of books. You must put back everything you took. Promise?’

  She seemed about to swoon, her waist pliant, her breath warm on my face.

  ‘Why?’

  I hugged her, kissed her forehead with an emotion greater than love, with forgiveness.

  ‘Because I ask you to.’

  We went back arm-in-arm, feeling drunk but pure. The moon rose high in the sky above the hills and was reflected in the glitter of the girl’s tears.

  After that, Sébastien gradually stopped keeping his diary. The dates are further and further apart; impressions are recorded only rarely. The subject matter is the same: his struggle with his instincts and with his upbringing; his incomplete, impotent acts of rebellion, his mental problems. His personality is darkened and overshadowed by undefined fears. His energies decrease with each day that passes. He no longer has the courage to pursue an intellectual task nor any physical exercise beyond its beginning. Merely walking is onerous to him. He takes a few steps then stops, seized by an insurmountable laziness when faced with the long expanse of roads opening out before him, and the far horizons. He sits by the wayside, his elbows in the grass or stretches out on his back in the shade and stays there all day without thinking or suffering, dead to all that surrounds him. However, he notes here and there briefly the odd meeting with Marguerite. But he has never experienced again the feelings of the first evening. The meetings annoy him and upset him. Usually he does not speak and Marguerite hangs on his shoulder and weeps; he lets her cry and glimpses with disgust, almost terror, the day when tears will no longer be enough and she will demand kisses. Once Marguerite was bold enough to caress him, a brusque, violent caress that revealed all her repressed ardour. Sébastien pushed her roughly away and left her alone in the night, in the grip of a nervous crisis. He did not want to see her again, trying to take cowardly advantage of the incident to put a stop to the meetings altogether. Then he turned back to her, drawn by something good, tender and chaste which survives beneath his physical disgust and which is stronger than pity. Marguerite, overcome, began to cry again. She still prefers these sad encounters without a word of love spoken, without a single caress, to the thought of losing Sébastien and never resting her head on that dear shoulder, never having him near her. The hours spent like this wear her down and consume her. She grows thin; her eyes are ringed with even darker circles; she no longer has those sudden moods of wild joy.

  From August until October, Sébastien was confined to his bed by an attack of typhoid fever which almost killed him. He notes later in his diary that his illness scarcely altered his state of mind, that the delirium of fever was not noticeably more painful than his normal thought processes, nor more crazed than his normal dreams. His nightmares still pursued the usual round of unbearable visions: the school. He writes:

  ‘During the month or so that the delirium reigned, I imagined I was reliving my years in Vannes and it was neither more painful nor more pointless than the years I really did spend at the school.’

  However a change has taken place in his life. His father cared for him devotedly throughout the dangerous part of his illness, spending entire nights at his bedside, clearly worried and distressed. Madame Cébron caught him one morning in despair saying to himself: ‘There’s no hope for him.’ Later, he watched over his convalescence with affection and tenderness. Sébastien writes:

  ‘My father and I now go out together sometimes, arm-in-arm like old friends, something which seems to intrigue people from round here, for it is the first time since my return from school that they have seen it happen. We don’t talk about the past any more, I think my father has forgotten it, nor the future: the future is the present. He is now accustomed to seeing me in a situation which he has come to consider natural and cannot conceive of any other existence for me. We scarcely talk at all and exchange few ideas. For my father, whatever I say is a riddle or evidence of madness. Basically, I think he fears me and perhaps respects me. He is slightly timid as if he is in the presence of someone dangerous and superior to him. He is careful how he expresses himself in front of me as if afraid of saying something stupid. I have noticed how limited his ideas are beneath his habitual rhetorical excesses. I think he has only three specific ideas in his head and he transposes them from the physical world to the abstract. These are height, breadth and price. That is the extent of his scientific and sentimental baggage. When we are in the countryside, I am struck by how little impression it seems to make on him.

  He will never say, for instance, that a thing is green or blue, square or pointed, hard or soft, but he’ll say: ‘That’s very tall,’ or ‘That’s wide,’ or ‘That must be worth a lot of money.’ One evening, we were coming back at sunset, the sky was splendid, ablaze with light, with glowing reds and trails of astonishingly vivid sulphurous yellow and pale green. Beneath the sky, the hills and fields seemed to be shrinking, drowned in deliciously unexpected, enchanting tones and layers of coloured, shifting mists. My father stood and watched the sky for some time. I thought he was moved by it and waited curiously for his response to this unusual emotion. After a few minutes, he turned towards me and asked me very seriously, ‘Sébastien, do you think that the Saint-Jacques hills are as high as the Rambure hills? I think they’re lower.’ I simply can’t be bothered with this kind of conversation. It annoys me. So I often end up replying to him in curt monosyllables. I shouldn’t say so, but I miss that time when we lived side by side but never spoke to one another, when, in fact, we were no more strangers to one another than we are now that we do talk.’

  In the midst of this jumble of thoughts and feelings, amidst his impressions of literature and sometimes strange attempts at drawing, is a constant preoccupation with society. He is torn between love and disgust for the poor, between the urge to rebellion towards which his instincts and thoughts drive him and the bourgeois prejudices of his upbringing.

  He writes: ‘Perhaps poverty is necessary for the equilibrium of the world. Perhaps the poor are necessary in order to feed the rich, the weak to strengthen the strong, just as little birds are necessary for the sparrowhawk. Is poverty the human fuel that keeps the great furnaces of life stoked? It is a terrible thing not to be sure, and the doubt caused by these endless, cruel questions stifles me.’ And later: ‘I think what distances me from the poor is something purely physiological: my extreme and unhealthily acute sense of smell. When I was a child, I would faint at the mere scent of a poppy. Now I even think according to my sense of smell and I often form an opinion on things through the smell they carry or simply evoke. I have never been able to overcome the offence that the smell of poverty gives me. I am like dogs that howl at beggars.’ Later still: ‘No, I can’t keep seeking reasons and excuses, the truth is that I collapse whenever any effort is required of me.’

  Sébastien’s diary ends in January 1870 with this unfinished page:

  18th January

  Today I drew lots and I was unlucky. Despite Madame Lecautel’s comments, my father doesn’t want me to become a soldier. I don’t think he has anything against the military as such: he could not imagine a more just, humane system than the one that already exists in society and which he serves without question. I think his decision is based on snobbery. He would ha
te it if people could say the son of Monsieur Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch was a simple square-basher like everyone else. My father bought a replacement for me. I’ll never forget the face of that trafficker in men, in human flesh, when my father and he discussed the price of my purchase in a small room in the town hall. Stocky, tanned, muscular, with curly black hair, bright whites of the eye, a slightly hooked nose, and the sinister joviality of the slaver, he was just as I imagine traffickers in negro slaves to have been. He wore an astrakhan cap, heavy boots and his greenish overcoat brushed the mud-encrusted heels of his boots. His fingers were covered in rings and jewels. They bargained long and hard, franc by franc, sou by sou, losing their tempers, swearing, as if they were haggling over animal livestock, not over a man I do not know but feel that I love, a man who will suffer and perhaps die for me, because he has no money. Several times I was on the point of stopping this disgusting torment of an argument and shouting: ‘Stop, I’ll join up myself!’ Cowardice held me back. In a flash of clarity I saw the dreadful existence of the barracks, the brutality of the officers, the barbaric despotism of discipline, the degeneracy of men reduced to the condition of beasts. I left the room, ashamed of myself, leaving my father and the slaver to wrangle over this disgraceful business. Half an hour later, my father came out into the street. He was red-faced and very upset, grumbling and shaking his head.

  ‘Two thousand four hundred francs. He wouldn’t take a penny less. It’s daylight robbery.’

  All day, Pervenchères has been in chaos. Bands of conscripts, wearing tricolour ribbons, their numbers proudly pinned to their caps, have been running about the streets singing patriotic songs. I notice a young lad, the son of a local farmer, and ask him:

  ‘Why are you singing like that?’

  ‘I dunno. I’m just singing.’