Abbe Jules E-Book

Octave Mirbeau

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Tells the story of a priest's lifelong struggle with his passions, part of an autobiographical trilogy with Le Calvaire and Sebastien Roch.

Das E-Book Abbe Jules wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Copyright

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 873982 37 2

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 53 2

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors,

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected] www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W 2080

email: [email protected]

Publishing History

First published in France in 1888

First published by Dedalus in 1996

First ebook edition in 2013

Translation copyright © Nicoletta Simborowski 1996

Introduction copyright © Adrian Murdoch 1996

The right of Nicoletta Simborowski to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed in Finland by W. S. Bookwell

Typeset by RefineCatch

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’s Abbé Jules

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The Translator

The Editor

Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’sAbbé Jules

“I speak … of the presbyterate. Such men think of nothing but their dress. They use perfumes freely and see that there are no creases in their shoes. Their curling hair shows traces of the tongs; their fingers glisten with rings; they walk on tiptoe across a damp road not to splash their feet.”

St Jerome

By rights, Octave Mirbeau should have become a pillar of the establishment. His family were dyed-in-the-wool middle class members of that establishment, and his education was what one would have expected.

But then at the age of 11 he was sent to boarding school at Vannes to be educated by Jesuits and just like the Abbé Jules himself, Mirbeau came to hate the Church. In his letters he calls religious schools “a disgrace” and a “permanent danger” and his novel is one of the high points of anti-clerical literature.

Abbé Jules is the second novel – written in 1888 – in an unconnected trilogy that began with Le Calvaire in 1886 and would be concluded with Sebastien Roch in 1890. In the first the radical that Mirbeau had become railed against the army, in the second against the Catholic Church and in the third against society.

Whereas Le Calvaire is a fairly straightforward tale of love – however perverted it might become – in the following two years Mirbeau had become an angry social commentator.

Although Jules himself is a grotesquely exaggerated caricature of a fallen priest – indeed the passages about his childhood show an utterly loathsome man – Mirbeau wants him to be seen as a victim of society. He has been corrupted by his environment. By this time Mirbeau had become a close friend of Jules-Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose collection of short stories, Les Diaboliques were a considerable influence on him. That book explored how outward respectability conceals moral depravity.

Mirbeau can be particularly direct in his commentary, and lack of subtlety is a fair charge often levelled against him by detractors. His use of rhetoric to expose the hypocrisy he saw and felt is frequently a case of over-egging the pudding. The aged Jules teaching his nephew Albert rants:

“Religions – and the Catholic religion above all – have set themselves up as the great pimps of love. Under the pretext of softening the brutal side of love – which is in fact its only heroic aspect – they have developed the perverse, unhealthy side, by the sensuality of music and perfumes, by the mysticism of prayer and the moral onanism of adoration … Do you understand?”

Nevertheless Mirbeau’s genuine passion against what he perceives as a wrong makes it easier to overlook any stylistic drawbacks. At any rate it is possible to argue that Mirbeau was the most successful of his contemporaries as he was banned for being obscene. He had embarrassed the establishment.

But while many of these charges are true, Mirbeau is also capable of subtle writing and of witty caricature.

Early on in the novel he describes a crucifix as “painted” and “rotted with damp [it] has only one leg and one arm, but the devout still come and kneel at the foot of the cross”. And in the passage with Reverend Père Pamphile and the monastery of Réno, the decay of the building mirrors the decay of the man which in turn becomes an allegory for the decay of the church:

“From the height of a turret which dominated the monastery, he surveyed the spectacle of this destruction and savoured the great, painful joy of it. All around, trees lay, pell-mell, hideously mutilated, some on their side, twisted and bleeding from huge wounds, others trunk uppermost, groaning, leaning on their crushed branches, as if on stumps. One alone stood upright at the entrance to the garden, a stunted cherry-tree, eaten away by disease, astonished to be so alone on this earth, bereft of its hardy offspring, on land completely levelled.”

Precisely why Mirbeau could throw his poisoned darts so accurately is because he knew his enemy intimately. This is apparent in his parodic descriptions of the priests themselves. They are venal (“A soul is born and that means ten francs”) or stupid, receive legacies from old women, they are puffy, repugnant, heavy, vulgar, carnivorous and egotistical. In the passage where Jules finally cracks there are beautiful vignettes about the priests at dinner which are reminiscent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

“The two priests near him, who were telling each other filthy scatological jokes in low voices, containing their laughs, dribbling sauce, all that he saw, all that he heard, set him beside himself,” echoes St Jerome’s letter on the decline of the priesthood and Jules’ reaction is reminiscent of Jesus’ reaction to the money lenders in the Gospel of John – and both of these passages will have been familiar to Mirbeau.

The reader is left deliberately slightly confused whether Jules is a good or a bad person. Jules is both an antagonist and a victim. Perhaps it is best summed up by contemporary and friend, Stephane Mallarmé, who admired Abbé Jules very much and praised Mirbeau’s “bitter and tender prescience”.

Octave Mirbeau

1848

Born February 16, in Trévières (Calvados)

1859

Sent for schooling by Jesuits in Vannes

1870

Joined the army

1885

Conversion to anarchism. Stopped writing for the pro-monarchist newspaper Le Gaulois and started writing for radical paper La France

1886

Published Letters From My Cottage and Le Calvaire

1888

Published Abbé Jules

1890

Published Sebastien Roch

1894

Dreyfus affair

1898

Published Torture Garden

1900

Published Diary of a Chambermaid

1917

Died February 16

PART ONE

Chapter One

Apart from the days when my father had carried out a difficult operation, a major confinement, and later at table explained the most exciting stages in technical terms, often in Latin, my parents hardly ever spoke to one another. Not that there was any ill-feeling; on the contrary, they loved one another very much, got on well, the best in the world, in all aspects and one could not imagine a more united household; but accustomed to having the same thoughts, and experiencing the same reactions and being unromantic by nature, they had nothing to say to one another. They had nothing to say to me either, finding me either too old to be amused with nursery rhymes or too young for them to bore me with serious discussions. Furthermore, they were steeped in the idea that a well-brought up child should only open his mouth to eat, recite lessons and say his prayers. If ever I occasionally happened to rebel against this family system of upbringing, my father would intervene strictly and enforce my silence by means of this definitive argument:

“What is the matter with you? Do Trappist monks speak? Well, do they?”

Apart from this, if they were not always as cheerful and affectionate as I might have wished, I felt they loved me as best they could.

For them to feel they had permission to unseal their lips, notable events were necessary, aside from professional escapades and day-to-day occurrences, events such as the sacking of an employee, a deer stalked and killed in Monsieur de Blandé’s wood, the death of a neighbour, the unexpected news of a wedding. The probable pregnancies of rich clients were also useful as themes for brief exchanges which could be summarised as follows:

“Just as long as I am not mistaken!” my father would say. “As long as she really is pregnant!”

“Ah! that will be a wonderful confinement!” affirmed my mother. “Four of those a month, I would not ask for more, we could buy ourselves a piano.”

And my father tutted.

“Four a month! My word! You are a little too greedy my darling! And in any case that blessed woman still worries me. Her pelvis is so narrow.”

Without knowing exactly which mysterious part of the body was indicated by that word ‘pelvis’, by the age of nine, I knew the exact gauge and childbearing properties of the pelvises of all the women in Viantais. Nevertheless, this did not prevent my father, despite his scientific observations and listings of uteruses, placentas and umbilical cords, from assuring me that babies were found under cabbage leaves. Neither was I ignorant of the exact nature of a cancer, a tumour and a phlegmon; my forlorn spirit had gradually been swamped with horrible images of wounds, a state of mind which I concealed as if shameful; the sorrow of the sickbed had passed over me, chilling the confident smile of my earliest childhood. And when of an evening I saw my father take his bag and spread out on the table the small, fearsome instruments of glittering steel and watched him blow into his probes, wipe his scalpels, polish in the lamp flame the slim blades of his lancets, my prettiest dreams, of bluebirds or wondrous fairies, would be transformed into a surgical nightmare, where pus flowed, severed members piled up and hideously bloodied bandages and dressings lay tangled. Occasionally, he spent the evening cleaning his forceps, which he often forgot in the hood of his gig. He shined the rusty arms with a yellow powder, polished the spoons, oiled the central pin. When the instrument was gleaming, he liked to manoeuvre it, pretending to introduce it delicately into imaginary cavities. Then he would wrap it up again in its green serge sheath and say:

“I don’t like using that I must say. I’m always worried there’s going to be an accident. They’re so fragile, these blessed organs…”

“Doubtless,” my mother would reply, “But you are forgetting that in those cases you can charge double.”

Whilst all this taught me things that children do not usually know, it did not keep me entertained. In my idle existence, nothing was more painful to me than mealtimes, when time dragged so. I would have preferred to escape somewhere, caper about on the stairs, in the corridor, in the kitchen, stay with old Victoire who at the risk of incurring my mother’s reproaches, allowed me to potter amongst her saucepans, play with the taps of the oven, wind up the spit, and sometimes told me extraordinary tales of bandits which filled me with a delicious terror. But obedience obliged me to sit rigid with boredom on my chair, the seat of which was too low and was raised by two volumes, two coverless and ancient copies of the Lives of the Saints, and I was not allowed to leave the table until my mother stood up, thus giving the sign I could go. In the summer I contrived not to be too bored. The drowsy flight of flies, the droning of wasps above plates of fruit, the butterflies and insects attracted by the fresh scent of newly watered flowers, and swooping down on the tablecloth, were sufficient distraction. Also, through the open window, I liked to gaze at the garden, the distant valley, and even further away, the hills of St Jacques, violet and misty, beyond which the sun was setting. Alas, in winter there were no more flies, no more wasps, no more butterflies, no more sky, no more anything … nothing but that gloomy room and my parents, each absorbed in unknown thoughts from which I always felt excluded.

It had rained all day, I recall, and that evening, a particularly sad winter evening, my parents had not uttered a word. They seemed more morose than ever. My father folded his table napkin carefully into a heart-shape, as was his habit every evening when the meal was finished, and suddenly he asked:

“What can he have been up to in Paris? It’s inconceivable.”

With sharp little movements, he flicked off the crumbs of bread that had fallen into the folds of his waistcoat and trousers, drew his chair up to the hearth where the embers were dying, and, his body bent slightly towards the fire, his elbows on his knees, he warmed his hands, rubbing them together occasionally and cracking the joints. Victoire came to clear away, moving around the table, the sleeves of her dress rolled up to her elbows. When she had gone, my father repeated in an even more questioning tone: “What can he have been up to in Paris? For six years, with no news, ever? A priest! It’s certainly odd. I would dearly like to know.”

I realised they were talking about my uncle, the Abbé Jules. That morning, my father had received a letter from him, announcing his imminent return. The letter was brief and contained no explanation. There was no trace of any emotion, any affection, any attempt at an excuse for such a long period of neglect. He was coming back to Viantais and was content to inform his brother of the fact in a letter much like the circulars that suppliers send to their customers. My father had even pointed out that the handwriting was particularly careless.

For the third time he exclaimed:

“What can he have been up to in Paris?”

My mother, seated very stiff and upright at the table, her arms folded, her expression vague, nodded. She looked strict, nun-like, an impression accentuated by her black serge dress which was plain and completely without ornament, without any whiteness of linen at the neck or wrists.

“Peculiar as he is,” she said, “we can be sure it is not a very edifying tale!” And after a brief silence, she added drily:

“He could well have stayed in Paris. I expect no good to come of his return.”

My father agreed.

“Doubtless, doubtless,” he said, “with a character like his, life will not be easy, not all the time. No indeed. Nevertheless …”

He thought for a moment, then spoke again:

“Nevertheless, there is some advantage, my dear, in the Abbé being nearby, there is some considerable advantage.”

My mother replied sharply, with a twitch of her shoulders:

“Some advantage! You really believe that do you? First of all, he cares as little for his family as he does for saying mass. Has he ever just once sent a little gift for the child, his godson? When you cared for him through the worst of his illness, spending entire nights at his bedside, neglecting your own patients, did he even thank you? You said: ‘He’ll give us a nice present.’ Where is it, this nice present of his? And the rabbits, the woodcocks, the fat trout and all the good things he stuffed himself with! The sacrifices we made for him! He acted, in fact, as if everything was his due.”

“Yes, yes of course,” broke in my father, “we did our best …”

“Oh no! We were idiots. He is a bad brother, a bad priest and a hopeless person. If he comes back to Viantais, it’s because he has no more money, he has squandered everything and we will have to look after him. Well, that was all we needed now!”

“Come come my dear, you exaggerate. If he comes back, Lord, it will be because he has never been capable of staying in one place for long. He’s a rascal! He’s leaving Paris just like he left the bishop’s service where he could have achieved anything, like he left his Randonnai parish, where he was living such a peaceful life and was receiving so many donations. He needs change, novelty. He’s not happy anywhere. As for his fortune, ha! I don’t agree with you at all. He was pretty mean, the Abbé, pretty miserly. Don’t you remember?”

“Being miserly, my dear, does not in any way prevent someone from wasting their money on foolish schemes. Who knows what silly notions go through the mind of the likes of him? In fact, you’re forgetting that before leaving for Paris, the Abbé sold his farm, his two meadows and the Faudière wood. Why? And where is all the money now?”

“True, true,” said my father, suddenly lost in thought.

“Not to mention that he is not liked round here, that he will harm your chances of any public office and even affect your standing with your patients. The Bernard family for instance, that you have been so careful to hold on to. I would not be at all surprised if they left you. Lord, that really is a possibility. And you try to find another family who are ill so often and pay so well.”

My father leaned back in his chair, twisted his lip and scratched the back of his neck.

“Yes, yes,” he said, over and again, “You’re right. That is a possibility.”

My mother’s voice took on a conspiratorial note.

“Listen, I have never wanted to tell you this so as not to upset you, but I was always afraid I was going to hear something terrible. Think of Verger, who killed the archbishop, Verger was a priest too, mad, fanatical, like the Abbé Jules.”

My father turned round swiftly, fear in his eyes. All of a sudden his face was an abyss of horror. Shuddering, he stammered:

“Verger! Why do you mention him? Verger! My God!”

“Yes. Well. I’ve often thought of it. I never opened your newspaper without my heart in my mouth. Who knows? Apart from anything else, all your family are somewhat … unusual.”

The conversation ceased and a profound silence descended upon us once more.

Outside the wind whistled, shaking the trees and the rain had started to rattle on the window-panes again. My father, his face stricken, watched the fire die. My mother, pensive, pale from the strain of having said so much, looked into the middle distance as usual. As for me, in that dining room half-bathed in shadow, in that room without furniture, with bare walls, the windows dark with the night-sky, I felt completely alone, abandoned, miserable. From the ceiling, the walls, from the very eyes of my parents, a chill fell on me, which enveloped me like an icy cloak, penetrating my bones, gripping my heart. I felt like crying. I compared our gloomy, monastic home with that of the Servières, friends that we dined with every Thursday. How I envied the soft, intimate warmth of that house, the caress of its carpets, the walls hung with comforting drapes and family portraits in oval frames, the old souvenirs religiously preserved, all those attractive trifles scattered about, which were each a smile, the constant pleasure contained in a glance, the revelation of a cherished habit. Why was my mother not like Madame Servière, cheerful, lively, lovely, dressed in beautiful fabrics with lace and flowers on her bodice and perfume in the blonde twists and coils of her hair? She was so charming, Madame Servière. Everything about her moved me so much that I liked to sit on chairs she had just vacated, respiring the air she had breathed and embracing the places where her body had rested. Why did I not feel the same about my own mother? Why was I not like Maxime and Jeanne, children of my own age, who could chat, run, play in corners, be happy and who had huge gilded books, whose pictures their father explained, amid admiring comments and laughter?

Stifling yawns, I twisted and turned without ever finding a comfortable position atop the execrable Lives of the Saints which served me as a seat. To keep my ears and my eyes occupied, I listened to Victoire behind the door, scraping her clogs on the kitchen flagstones, moving crockery about and I contemplated the circle of yellow light which trembled on the ceiling above the lamp.

That evening, my father forgot to note down in his diary the home visits and treatment he had given the sick during the day. I noticed also that he did not read his paper, two actions which he normally performed with pitiless regularity.

To entertain myself a little, I decided to think about my uncle the Abbé, whose return had occasioned a conversation between my parents of such unaccustomed length and vivacity. I was very small when he left the area: barely three, nevertheless I was surprised that I could place him in my memories only very vaguely; since that time, not a day had gone past without someone threatening me with my uncle as if he were a kind of bogeyman, a terrible ogre that carries off naughty children. They had told me how one day I was playing in his garden in Randonnai and fell right into a bed of tulips and that my uncle in a fury whipped me ferociously with a strap. And when they needed to depict the physical or moral ugliness of anyone, my parents never failed to use this comparison: “Ugly as Abbé Jules, dirty as Abbé Jules, greedy as Abbé Jules, violent as Abbé Jules, deceitful as Abbé Jules.” If I cried, my mother would shame me by shouting: “Oh just look at him, he’s just like Abbé Jules!” If I was disobedient: “Carry on like that, carry on, boy, you’ll end up just like Abbé Jules.” Abbé Jules! That is to say, every kind of fault, vice, crime and hideousness, every mystery. Often, the priest, Sortais, came to see us and each time he would ask:

“Well then, still no news of Abbé Jules?”

“Alas, no, Father.”

The priest would then cross his stubby, plump hands over his fat stomach and shake his head tragically.

“Who would have thought such things possible? Still, just yesterday I said a Mass for him.”

“Perhaps he’s dead, Father.”

“Oh, if he were dead my good lady, we would know.”

“Perhaps that would be for the best, Father.”

“Perhaps, my dear lady, but God’s mercy is so great. One never knows. Nevertheless, it is very sad for the clergy, very sad … very, very sad.”

“And for his family too, come along, Father.”

“And for the region. And in every respect, every respect. Very sad in every respect.”

And the priest took a pinch of snuff with a loud sniff.

I remember also stories about the Abbé’s youth which my father had told me on days when he was in a good mood, half scandalised, half thrilled. He began them in a severe tone of voice, promising to derive some home truths from them, then he gradually allowed himself to be overtaken by the sinister gaiety of these farces and he finished his tale in peals of laughter, slapping his thigh. Among many, one made a vivid impression on me. Sometimes, when I saw my father’s face relax a little, I would ask:

“Papa, tell me about Uncle Jules and my Aunt Athalie.”

“Have you been good then? Have you done your lessons for today?”

“Yes of course, papa. Oh, please, tell me the story.”

And my father would narrate:

“When she was very small, poor Aunt Athalie – who is no longer with us – alas, was very greedy; so greedy that you could not leave any sweetmeat in her reach or she would devour it. In the servants’ pantry, she snaffled the leftovers, she went in the cupboards and opened up pots of jam and stuck her fingers inside, in the garden she bit the apples still on the trees and the gardener was in despair thinking that dormice and other pests were causing these ravages. He doubled the number of traps and spent entire nights lying in wait and your aunt made fun of him: ‘Well now, Francois, and how are the dormice?’ ‘Don’t talk to me about them Missy, them’re sorcerers, so they are. I’ll ’ave ’em, you mark my words.’ It was your aunt that he got though. She was severely punished, because gluttony and disobedience are serious sins. Although she was mischievous – a real little devil – Athalie was not well. She coughed a great deal and everyone feared for her chest. To cure her condition, your grandmother used to make her drink a spoonful of codliver oil every morning. It is not nice, codliver oil and, as I told you, your aunt had a taste for nice things. To convince her to take it, it was the very devil. However, after a few months, she looked well on this regime, her colour had come back and she coughed less. But it didn’t prevent her dying later of a pulmonary phthisis. She had cavities in her lungs. When you have cavities, you see, there’s nothing to be done; you’re going to die sooner or later. And children who are naughty always get cavities …”

In order, doubtless, to give my imagination time to absorb these prophetic words, my father tended to stop for a moment at this point in his story. He would look at me sternly, blow his nose at length and while a tiny shudder shook my body at the thought that I too, like my Aunt Athalie, might well have cavities, he continued in a jovial tone:

“One morning, your Uncle Jules – he was ten then – came into his sister’s room in his nightshirt. In one hand he held the bottle of codliver oil, in the other a paper bag full of chocolates which he had discovered somewhere or other at the back of a drawer. The poor mite was sleeping. He woke her roughly. ‘Right, drink up your spoonful!’ he told her. At first your aunt refused. ‘Drink up and I’ll give you a chocolate.’ He had opened the bag, shook the sweets, took handfuls which he showed her, smacking his lips. ‘They’re good, they’re really good … and there are some vanilla cream ones. Come on, drink up.’ Athalie drank, pulling horrible faces. ‘Take another now,’ said Jules ‘and I will give you two chocolates, you understand, two lovely chocolates.’ She drank a second spoonful. ‘Look, have a third and you will have three chocolates.’ She took a third spoonful. She took four, then six, than ten, then fifteen, she drank the whole bottle. Well, then your uncle was beside himself with joy. He danced about in the room, waving the empty bottle, shouting: ‘What a joke! Ha, ha, ha! What a great joke! You will be ill and you will be throwing up for two days! This is such fun!’ Your Aunt Athalie was crying, she could feel her stomach churning. She was ill, in fact, very ill, and almost died. For eight days she had a fever and vomited and she kept to her bed for two weeks. Your uncle was whipped. They locked him in a dark cupboard but it was impossible to wring one word of repentance from him. On the contrary, he kept on repeating: ‘She was sick, she was sick! This is such fun!”’

And my father burst out laughing and concluded:

“What a confounded child, Jules, eh?”

These details, incessantly repeated, ought to have imprinted the features of my uncle for ever on my fearful child’s mind. But no! I retained only a confused, wavering image of him which my fevered imagination twisted pitifully in a thousand different versions, fed by my family’s tales. My uncle, the Abbé! When I whispered these words to myself, I saw before me a ghostly face, bristling, split with a grimace, grotesque and terrible and I did not know whether to be afraid or laugh at it. My uncle the Abbé! I forced myself to evoke his true features, I called to my aid all the serious events of my life, from which memory that face might emerge, radiant and real. It was in vain. Of the person of my uncle, as vague as an old smudged pastel drawing, all I could retrieve was a long bony body slumped into a winged arm-chair, his legs crossed under his cassock, skinny, withered legs, with sharp ankles, ending in enormous feet, square at the ends and shod in green slippers. Around him were books. On a grey wall, in a bright room, a picture depicting red-bearded characters, bent over a skull. Then a voice, whose unpleasant tone still rings in my ears, the breathy voice of someone with pneumonia, always grumbling, irritable and critical. “Wretch!” here and “Wretch!” there and that was all.

I was not desperate to see him again, understanding instinctively that he would not bring me additional affection or amusement, certain too that I could expect nothing from a bad godfather who even at my baptism had refused to pay for the sugared almonds or buy a gift for my mother and never gave me presents at New Year – not even oranges. I had heard it said too that he did not like me, that he did not like anyone and he did not respect the Lord and was always in a temper. And my heart missed a beat at the idea that he might beat me with his strap as he had done in the past. However, I could not restrain a certain curiosity which was sharpened by my father’s exclamation: “What can he have been up to in Paris for six years?” This question contained an impenetrable mystery for me. It made me see the Abbé Jules in a dark and teeming distance, surrounded by vague shapes, surrendering to forbidden practices whose purpose I longed to know. Why had he gone? Why did no one know anything about his life there? Why was he coming back? What would I think of him? His bony body, his withered legs, his green slippers, the bottle of codliver oil, the tulips, the strap all danced in my head in a wild sarabande. On the brink of meeting this troubling uncle again I felt the same compelling fear I experienced on fair days standing on the threshold of the animal cages and the acrobat’s booths. Was I suddenly going to be faced with a miraculous person, someone incomprehensible, endowed with diabolic powers, a thousand times more terrifying than the clown in a red wig who swallowed swords and flaming tow, more dangerous than the negro, cannibal devourer of children who showed his white teeth laughing like a hungry ogre? All the supernatural which my fevered brain was capable of imagining I associated with the person of the Abbé Jules who, by turns minuscule and gigantic, camouflaged himself like an insect amid the blades of grass and suddenly filled the sky, taller, more massive, than a mountain. I did not wish to reflect any longer on the possible consequences of the installation of the Abbé Jules in Viantais, for terror was gradually taking me over, and my uncle was now starting to appear to me with a hooked nose, eyes of burning ember and two sharpened horns which his forehead levelled at me ferociously.

The lamp was smoking. An acrid smell of burning oil filled the room. But, extraordinary phenomenon, no one took any notice. My parents were silent. My mother, motionless, her eyes vague, face stern, went on dreaming. My father prodded the fire furiously, crushing the coals in the tongs, rummaged in the ash which fluttered onto the hearth in grey-white flakes. The wind died down. The trees snored gently, the rain drip-dripped monotonously onto the earth. Suddenly, in the silence, the bell at the gate tinkled.

“It must be Monsieur and Madame Robin,” said my mother. “Let’s go on up.”

She stood up and took the lamp, turning down the wick. We followed her, I, happy to stretch my legs, my father repeating under his breath:

“What can he have got up to in Paris?”

Chapter Two

The houses in Viantais are built on the slopes of a little hill on either side of the road to Mortagne which emerges from the forest a mile away through a narrow gap in the trees. They are clean, cheerful houses, mainly constructed of brick, with high roofs and windows gaily adorned in summer with pots of flowers and climbing plants. Some aspire to gardens, symmetrically arranged in flowerbeds and the walls which enclose them are covered with lattices and framed with vines. Alleys with sudden views over the fields run off a single main street, which towards the centre of the town, broadens into a huge square in the centre of which is a fountain. Then the road continues to descend right to the valley and the main road, crossing the river over a bridge of pink granite, and continues its peaceful way through the fields, the crops and the woods. High up over the town and linked to it by a huge avenue of elms – a rendezvous for children playing hopscotch – the church stands, old, hunched, coiffed with a pointed bell-tower like a cotton bonnet. On the right, the schools and our house; on the left, the presbytery, separated from the cemetery by a collapsed wall with large gaps here and there through which one can see the crumbling crosses and the mouldering tombs. At the centre of the avenue of elms there stands a crucifix, whose painted wooden Christ, rotted by damp, has only one leg and one arm, but the devout still come and kneel at the foot of the cross and mutter prayers while reciting their rosary.

At that time Viantais had two thousand five hundred inhabitants and was home to no more than twenty fairly well-off households. People frequented each other very little, even within the family since almost every family was divided by ferocious and petty snobberies or troubled by problems concerned with inheritance. Our own socialising was limited to the Servière family, whose luxurious lifestyle embarrassed and worried my parents and made them wary. We also saw the priest Sortais, a fine and charitable old fellow but slightly undesirable since his excessively open temperament constantly led him to commit the most crass social blunders. Finally, we mixed with the Robin family who had immediately become close friends. Very occasionally we received a visit from cousin Debray, a former captain in the army, an arrant eccentric who squandered his time and his pension on stuffing weasels and polecats in comic and pretentious poses, but he was not really welcome because he was unable to open his mouth without swearing and “smelled of dead animals”, according to my mother. The Robin family, from the moment of their arrival – they had only been living locally for four years – had formed a close bond with us. At first sight we recognised each other as members of the same race. Since there existed between the Robins and my family no conflict of interest or ambition and they had the same instincts, the same tastes and a similar lack of understanding of life, a firm friendship was forged. Moreover, it was a friendship restricted to the facile observance of cordial selfishness, which would certainly not have survived the shock of the merest demand for sacrifice or devotion.