Le Calvaire E-Book

Octave Mirbeau

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

Beschreibung

Autobiographical recounts the tortured 7 traumatic coming of age of Jean Mintie in 19th c France. Le Calvaire is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, which recounts the tortured and traumatic coming-of-age of the narrator Jean Mintie.

Leseprobe

COPYRIGHT

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited, 24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE email: [email protected]

ISBN printed book 978 1 946626 99 1

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 52 5

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 1886

First published by Dedalus in 1995

First ebook edition in 2013

Translation copyright © Christine Donougher 1995

Introduction copyright © Adrian Murdoch 1995

The right of Christine Donougher 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, resold, 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.

‘And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.’

Luke Chapter 23, verse 33

Le Calvaire is a young man’s novel. With its themes of social injustice and a miserable love affair it marks Octave Mirbeau as a product of his time. Like his colleagues, contemporaries and friends Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin, Mirbeau’s novel is imbued with the ideals of Baudelaire, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and the pragmatism of Darwin.

Published in 1886 in serial form, Le Calvaire bears the mark of Mirbeau’s recent seduction by the anarchist tracts of Peter Kropotkin (Paroles d’un révolté) and Leo Tolstoy (Ma religion).

What makes Le Calvaire stand out first of all is its vigorous stance against war. Jean Mintié, Mirbeau’s hero, asks ‘What was this patriotism, embodied for us by that stupid marauding general who persecuted old men and old trees, and by that surgeon who kicked the sick and bullied old mothers grieving for their sons […] I wanted to learn the human rationale for religions that stupefy, governments that oppress, societies that kill.’

Mirbeau is clearly drawing on his own experiences as an officer during the Franco-Prussian war and when the novel was first serialised the passages on the war were edited out: they were deemed too unpatriotic. They show a dislike of a military system that was very soon to persecute Dreyfus, and although the novel predates the Dreyfus affair by eight years, it comes as no surprise that Mirbeau stood firmly behind Zola’s J’accuse letter. Mintié was born out of the intellectual pacifist tradition that produced Erich Maria Remarque’s Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front in the First World War, and to some extent Jaroslav Hasek’s soldier Schweik too and in a later war the still dumb insolence of Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

The caricatures of the buffoonery of the generals and the careless cruelty of the surgeons are set pieces that are completely timeless. When someone tells Mintié who is curious about what the Prussians are like – he and his colleagues are fighting in a war which they do not understand – he is told: ‘They’re Germans, old man, just as we’re French’. The simplicity of the statement makes it all the more powerful.

Mirbeau’s polemic against war – early on in the novel – is however merely a distraction to the book’s main topic: the passion and downfall of Jean Mintié. Mirbeau bears the mark of the Jesuit upbringing that he fought so hard against all his life (speaking of his own education by Jesuits in Vannes, he referred to them as éducastrateurs and pilloried their ‘sacerdotal pomposity’). It is a theme that is explored more fully in his second novel L’Abbé Jules. Le Calvaire tells of Mintié’s own slow crucifixion – his seduction, betrayal, obsession, humiliation and finally his ultimate rejection not only by society and his friends, but by the beautiful Juliette Roux.

A frequent charge against Mirbeau is that his female characters are barely two-dimensional. Indeed his eroto-misogynism is viciously cruel at times, but it is a style that is worked to perfect effect in Le Calvaire. The three most important female characters – Mintié’s mother, Mary Magdalene and Juliette, the sacred whore – are three sides of the same character. The mother, the maiden and the mistress.

At the beginning of the novel Mintié describes the incestual love of his mother in most erotic terms. ‘She was frenzied in her demonstrations of love, which terrified me and terrify me still. As she clasped my head, gripped my neck let her lips wander over my forehead, cheeks and mouth, her lips grew fretful and became mingled with bites, like animal’s kisses. She kissed me with the truly carnal passion of a lover.’

After her death, he transfers his erotic affections onto a statue of the Virgin at the chapel at home and speaks of his ‘violent need to take her’. After this relationship, any human being can only be a disappointment. Here too there is an irony when the housekeeper suggests that his passion for the Madonna is such that he will surely become a priest. It is when Mintié moves to Paris to work – as Mirbeau himself did to become a journalist – that his decline and plummet really begin. His closest male companion, the painter Lirat – we never learn his full name – warns him off Juliette. But Lirat starts off as his Tiresias and as he betrays him, becomes his Judas on Mintié’s march to Golgotha.

From the very first innocent invitation to tea, the reader is surprised by Mintié’s violent dislike of Juliette’s dog, Spy. A dislike that is carried out in an extreme form in the book’s denouement as the only way Jean finds to affect his torturer.

Mintié is aware the whole time of what he is doing and what must be done. He himself says: ‘This was not Love, as before, curly-haired, pomaded, and beribboned, swooning in the moonlight, with a rose between his teeth, strumming his guitar under balconies; this was Love smeared with blood, wallowing in the mire, Love in onanistic frenzy, accursed Love that leeches on to man and drains his veins, sucks outs his marrow, strips his bones of flesh.’

Embracing this love wholeheartedly, Mintié loses all his money, self respect and friends, selling even the Priory, his family home – as a drug addict might – for his love for Juliette. From the beginning their relationship is a prostitute/client one and even at the end of the novel when for Jean:

‘Juliette became impersonalised: she was no longer a woman with her own individual existence, she was prostitution itself, sprawled vastly all over the world, the eternally sullied, unchaste idol that panting crowds rushed after, in hideous darkness lit by monstrous torches fashioned in the image of the androgynous demon Baphomet.’

He still gives her his last money in a desperate attempt to keep her.

Le Calvaire is very clearly a first novel. It does not show the exquisite cruelty of Torture Garden, the de Sade-like degeneracy of the Diary of a Chambermaid or even the sustained anti-clericical polemic of L’Abbé Jules, but no where else does Mirbeau capture the total and utter passion of love that has been perverted. Le Calvaire is the most accessible of Mirbeau’s novels for the reader to identify with. Who cannot fail to be moved, when Mintié says in one of his bursts of clarity that become rarer and rarer throughout the book of his declining relationship:

‘Alas! I must see through to the very end the painful ascent of this Calvary, even if my flesh is left in bleeding shreds, even if my bare bones shatter on the rocks and stones.’?

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 monarchist newspaper Le Gaulois and started writing for radical paper La France

1886

Published Letters from My Cottage

1888

Published L’Abbé Jules

1890

Published Sebastien Roch

1894

Dreyfus affair

1898

Published Torture Garden

1900

Published Diary of a Chambermaid

1917

Died February 16

CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

About the Book

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

The Translator

The Editor

CHAPTER ONE

I was born one October evening at St-Michel-les-Hêtres, a village in the département of Orne and I was immediately christened with the names Jean François Marie Mintié. In due celebration of this entry into the world my godfather, who was an uncle of mine, handed out sweets aplenty and threw lots of small coins to the local urchins gathered on the church steps. Fighting over them with his companions, one child fell so badly on the edge of a step that he fractured his skull and died the next day. As for my uncle, he went down with typhoid on his return home and passed away a few weeks later. My nurse, old Marie, often recounted these events to me with pride and admiration.

St Michel-les-Hêtres is situated on the edge of a big state-owned forest, the forest of Tourouvre. Despite a population of fifteen hundred inhabitants, the village creates no greater stir than the trees, grass and corn on a still day in the country-side. A brake of giant beech-trees that turn crimson in autumn shelters it from the north winds, and its tile-roofed houses come all the way down the hillside to the broad evergreen valley where herds of cattle are to be seen wandering freely. The river Huisne, glinting in the sunlight, capriciously loops and twists through meadows divided from each other by rows of tall poplars. Strung out along the river’s course, humble tanneries and little windmills are clearly visible among the alder-groves and over on the far side of the valley are fields with hedges that run in straight lines and straggling apple-trees. Little pink farm-houses and small villages glimpsed here and there amid almost black foliage grace the horizon. Because of the forest near by, there is a to-ing and fro-ing in the sky, all year round, of crows and yellow-billed jackdaws.

My family lived on the outskirts of the village, opposite the very ancient, dilapidated church, in a strange old house called the Priory – the outbuilding of an abbey destroyed during the Revolution of which only two or three bits of crumbling ivy-covered wall remained standing. I distinctly recall, but not with any fondness, the most minor details of those scenes of my childhood. I recall the extremely warped gate that creaked open on to a big courtyard boasting a scraggy lawn, two stunted rowans that blackbirds dwelt in, some very old chestnut-trees so wide-boled that four men together – as my father proudly informed every visitor – could not have got their arms round them. I recall the house, with its grimly forbidding brick wall, its semi-circular flight of steps with some wilting geraniums, its irregular windows that looked like holes, its steeply pitched roof, topped with a weathervane that would hoot like an owl in the breeze. I recall the pond behind the house, where some muddy aurum lilies floated and thin white-scaled carp darted about. I recall the gloomy curtain of fir trees that concealed the outhouses, the back yard, the office my father had built by a road skirting the edge of the property, so that the coming and going of his clients and clerks should not disturb the silence of the house. I recall the park with its enormous bizarrely twisted trees, overgrown with polyps and mosses and bound to each other with tangled creepers; with its paths that were never raked and its weathered stone seats, like old tombstones, standing at intervals along them. And I recall myself, too, a puny child in a glazed-cotton smock, running round in all this cheerless neglect, scratching myself on brambles, persecuting the animals in the back yard, or else trailing around all day long in the vegetable garden after Felix who served us as gardener, valet and coachman.

Many years have passed. All that I loved is dead now; all that I knew has changed. The church has been rebuilt: it has a carved door, pointed arch windows and elaborate gargoyles representing the faces of demons roasting in hell; its bell-tower of new-cut stone grins cheerfully against the azure sky. On the site of the old house stands a pretentious chalet, built by the new owner, who has filled the forecourt with coloured glass balls, miniature waterfalls and plaster cupids besmirched by the rain. But everything remains so deeply etched in the hard agate of my memory that time has failed to erode it.

I want now to speak of my parents, not as I saw them as a child, but as they seem to me today, completed by memory, made more human by revelations and confidences, in the full glare of light, in the total truthfulness of aspect that life’s uncompromising lessons confers on faces too briefly loved and known too closely.

My father was a notary. From time immemorial, this was the way it had always been in the Mintié family. It would have seemed unnatural and completely revolutionary had a Mintié dared to break with family tradition and renounce the gilt wooden plaques that, like some aristocratic title, were handed down religiously from generation to generation. At St-Michel-les-Hêtres, and in neighbouring parts, my father held a position that memories of his ancestors, his own rotund appearance of a country gentleman and above all his income of twenty thousand a year rendered solidly unassailable. Mayor of St-Michel, county councillor, deputy justice of the peace, vice-president of the agricultural association, member of numerous land economy and forestry societies, he disdained none of these small and coveted honours of provincial life that bestow prestige and bring influence. He was a very kind man, extremely courteous and mild, with a mania for killing. He could not lay eyes on a bird, cat, insect or any living thing whatsoever, without at once being seized with the strange desire to destroy it. He was merciless in going after blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches and bullfinches, waging a trapper’s bitter war against them. Felix was detailed to alert him as soon as a bird appeared in the park and my father would drop everything – clients, business, meals – to slaughter the bird. Often he lay in ambush for hours at a time, motionless behind a tree where the gardener had told him there was a little blue-headed tit. When out for a stroll, every time he saw a bird on a branch, if he did not have his shot gun with him, he would aim his walking stick at it, never failing to say, ‘Bang! Got it, by God!’ Or else, ‘Bang! I’d have missed it, for sure, it’s too far away.’ These were the only comments he was ever inspired to make about birds.

Cats, too, were one of his major preoccupations. Once he had detected a cat’s footprint on the gravelled paths, he had no further rest until it was found and slain. Sometimes, on bright moonlit nights, he would get up and lie in wait until dawn. He was a sight to be seen, with his shotgun on his shoulder, holding up by the tail the cat’s stiff, bleeding carcass. Never did I behold anything so heroic, and David after killing Goliath could not have looked more elated with triumph. With a gesture of majesty, he would throw the cat at Cook’s feet. ‘Oh, the filthy beast,’ she would say, and immediately set about cutting it up, keeping the meat for beggars and drying the pelt on the end of a pole to sell to tanners. If I dwell so much on these apparently trivial details, it is because all my life I have been obsessed, haunted, by these cat incidents in my childhood. One of these made such an impression on me that even now, despite the intervening years and the sorrows I have suffered, not a day passes that I do not think of it with sadness.

One afternoon we were in the garden, my father and I. My father had in his hand a long stick with an iron spike on the end of it, that he used to impale lettuce-devouring slugs and snails. Suddenly we saw a little kitten drinking at the edge of the pond. We hid behind a seringa bush.

‘Son,’ my father said to me a very low voice, ‘quickly, run and fetch my gun … go round the back … take care it doesn’t see you.’

And crouching down, he carefully parted the seringa branches so as to follow the cat’s every movement. Firmly planted on its front paws, with neck outstretched and quivering tail, it was lapping the water in the pond, and raised its head from time to time to lick its coat and scratch its neck.

‘Go on,’ said my father, ‘get moving.’

I felt terribly sorry for that kitten. It was so pretty, with its tawny fur with silky black stripes, its neat supple movements and its tongue like a rose-petal, dipping into the water. I wanted to disobey my father, I even thought of making a noise, of coughing, of deliberately rustling the branches to warn the poor creature of its peril. But my father gave me such a stern look that I headed off towards the house. I was soon back with the gun. The kitten was still there, happy and unsuspecting. It had finished drinking. It sat with its ears pricked, bright-eyed, its body quivering, following the flight of a butterfly through the air. Oh! That was a moment of unspeakable agony. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was going to faint.

‘Papa! Papa!’ I cried.

At the same time, a shot was fired, a sharp shot like the crack of a whip.

‘Damn it!’ my father cursed.

He took aim again. I saw his finger press the trigger. Quickly, I shut my eyes and covered my ears … Bang! And I heard a mewling, at first plaintive, then heart-rending – ah! so heart-rending! – it sounded like a child crying. And the kitten leapt, twisted, clawed at the grass and stirred no more.

Of utterly undistinguished intellect, warm-hearted although apparently indifferent to all but his parochial considerations and the interests of his practice, generous with advice, eager to be of service, conservative, healthy and cheerful, in all justice my father enjoyed universal respect. My mother, the daughter of a local aristocrat, brought as her dowry not wealth but more solid contacts, closer relations with the local gentry – which to him was just as useful as additional money or more land. Although his powers of observation were very limited, and he made no claim to being able to understand people the way he could understand the terms of a marriage contract or the details of a will, my father soon realised completely what a difference there was, in breeding, upbringing and sensibility, between him and his wife. Whether this upset him at all, I do not know. In any event he did not show it. He resigned himself. Between them – he, a bit dull-witted, philistine and easy-going; she, educated, sensitive and emotional – there was a gulf that he did not for one moment try to bridge, finding in himself neither the desire nor the strength to do so. This moral predicament, of two people bound to each for ever with no thoughts or aspirations in common to draw them together, did not at all bother my father, who spent a lot of time in his office and was satisfied if the house was well run, his meals well organised and his little routines and idiosyncrasies rigorously respected. On the other hand, it was very difficult for my mother and weighed very heavily on her.

My mother was not beautiful – still less, pretty – but there was so much simple nobility in her bearing, so much natural grace in her gestures, such great kindness on those rather pale lips and there was in her eyes, by turns as pale as an April sky and then dark as sapphire, a smile so caressing, so sad, so defeated, you forgot the brow that was too high and rounded below an irregular hairline, the nose that was too big and the grey metallic complexion that sometimes went slightly blotchy. One of her friends often said to me – and I have since very painfully become aware of this – that in her presence you felt penetrated, then gradually overcome, then irresistibly dominated by a strange sense of sympathy, a mixture of fond respect, vague desire, compassion and the need to devote yourself to her. Despite her physical imperfections, or rather on account of the very same, she had the bitter potent charm of certain creatures favoured by misfortune, over whom there hangs some aura of hopelessness. Hers had been a sickly childhood and adolescence, marked by several disturbing occurrences of nervous disorder. But it was hoped that marriage, with the change of circumstances in her life, would restore her health, which the doctors said was affected only by an extreme sensitivity. It did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, marriage only encouraged the morbid germs within her, and her sensitivity increased to the point that, among other alarming symptoms, my poor mother could not stand the slightest smell without suffering an attack that always ended in a loss of consciousness. So what was wrong with her? Why those fits of melancholy, those states of exhaustion that for days kept her sunk in an armchair, motionless and uncommunicative, like some paralytic old woman? Why the tears that all of a sudden would choke her, and for hours on end would fall from her eyes like scalding rain? Why those aversions to all and sundry that nothing – neither distractions, nor entreaties – could conquer? She could not have said, for she did not know. About her physical pains, her mental anguish, the hallucinations that inspired in her heart and mind a yearning for death, she was none the wiser. She did not know why one evening in front of the hearth, where a large fire was burning, she suddenly felt a dreadful temptation to roll in the blaze, to surrender her body to the caress of the flames that allured her, fascinated her, sang to her hymns of mysterious love. Nor did she know why, while out for a stroll another day, on catching sight of a man walking with a scythe on his shoulder in a half-mown field, she ran towards him with outstretched arms, crying, ‘Death, o blessed Death, take me, take me away!’ No, truly, she did not know. What she did know was that at these moments the image of her mother, her dead mother, was always there, before her; her mother, whom she herself had found, one Sunday morning, hanged, from the chandelier in the drawing room. And she recalled the body gently swinging in the air – that black face, those white, pupilless eyes, and even that ray of sunshine, filtering through the closed blinds, splashing with dramatic light the lolling tongue and swollen lips. These ailments and aberrations, this infatuation with death – it was probably her mother that had passed them on to her, from birth. It was from her mother’s loins that she had absorbed the poison, from her mother’s breast that she had imbibed it; the poison that now filled her veins, impregnated her flesh, addled her mind, sapped her soul. In the intervals of calmness – that became rarer with the passing days, months, years – she often thought about these things, and while analysing her existence, tracing her most distant memories through to the present, comparing the physical resemblances between the mother who had killed herself and the daughter who longed to die, she felt the burden of this grim heritage weigh even more heavily on her. She thrilled with self-abandonment to the idea that it was not possible for her to resist the fatality of her ancestry, which now seemed to her like a long line of suicides, going back to the darkest night of long ago, and progressing through the ages to end up … where? At this question her eyes grew blurred, a cold sweat dampened her temples and her hands clutched at her throat as though to tear from it the imaginary rope whose knot she felt bruising her neck and choking her. Every object was in her sight an instrument of fateful death, all things reflected its convulsed and bleeding image. The branches of trees rose up, for her, like so many sinister gallows, and in the green waters of ponds, amid the reeds and water lilies, in the river with its long weeds, she discerned her own form floating, covered with mud.

Meanwhile, my father would be crouched behind a seringa bush, shot-gun in hand, watching a cat, or blasting at a warbler trilling away, in hiding, behind the branches. In the evening by way of sole comfort he would say kindly, ‘Well, my dear, your health’s still no better, then? Bitters, I say, take some bitters. A glass in the morning, a glass in the evening … There’s nothing to beat it …’ He did not grumble, he never lost his temper. He would sit at his desk, looking through the papers the mayor’s secretary had brought over to him during the day, signing them rapidly with an air of disdain. ‘Hah!’ he would then cry, ‘it’s typical of this rotten government. They’d be better employed doing something for farmers instead of bothering us with all this nonsense!’ Then he would retire to bed, repeating placidly, ‘Bitters, take some bitters!’

His resignation upset her, as though it might have been a reproach. Although my father was indifferently educated, and she found in him none of the feelings of male tenderness nor the fabulous poetry she had dreamed of, she could not deny his physical activeness and a kind of moral well-being that she sometimes envied, while at the same time despising his dedication to things she deemed petty and vulgar. She felt guilty towards herself, and towards her life, so fruitlessly wasted in tears. Not only did she not involve herself any more in her husband’s affairs, but she gradually ignored her own duties, abandoning the housekeeping to the vagaries of the staff, and neglected herself to the point that her maid, that good-hearted old woman Marie, who had seen her come into this world, was often obliged to take her in hand, with fond scolding, and to look after her and feed her like a babe-in-arms. In her need for solitude, she came to find it impossible to tolerate the presence of her family and friends any more; and embarrassed and discouraged by the increasingly morose face, the mouth that never uttered a word, the forced smile that was immediately contorted by an involuntary trembling of her lips, their visits became less frequent until in the end they completely forgot their way to the Priory. Religion, like everything else, became a weariness to her. She no longer set foot in church, nor prayed, and two Easters went by with no sight of her at the altar rail.

Then my mother confined herself to her bedroom, where she kept the shutters closed and curtains drawn, intensifying the gloom around her. It was here that she spent her days, sometimes stretched out on a chaise-longue, sometimes kneeling in a corner, with her head against the wall. And she would fret at the slightest sound from outside – of a door slamming, of slippers shuffling down the corridor, of a horse whinnying in the yard – which intruded on her novicehood in non-being. Alas, what was the solution to all this? For a long time she had fought against this mystery illness, and the illness, being stronger than she was, had overwhelmed her. Now her will was paralysed. She was no longer free to pick herself up again, or to act. A mysterious force ruled her, making her hands inert, her mind confused, and her heart unsteady, like some small smoking flame at the mercy of the winds. And far from resisting, she sought to plunge even deeper in distress, savouring with a kind of perverse relish the appalling thrills of her own annihilation.

Inconvenienced by the disruption to his domestic life, my father finally brought himself to show some concern for the progression of an illness that passed his understanding. He had the utmost difficulty in persuading my mother to accept the idea of a trip to Paris in order ‘to consult the lords of science’. The trip was disheartening. Of the three renowned doctors to whom he took her, the first declared that my mother was anaemic, and prescribed a fortifying diet; the second, that she was suffering from neuro-rheumatism, and prescribed a debilitative diet. The third said there was ‘nothing wrong with her’, and advised peace and quiet.

No one had any understanding of her. Even to herself she remained a mystery. Haunted by that terrible memory with which she associated all her unhappiness, she could not distinguish clearly what stirred vaguely in the secret of her heart, nor what indeterminate passions, frustrated aspirations, and captive dreams had accumulated there since childhood. She was like a young bird that, without any comprehension of the obscure and nostalgic need impelling it towards open skies of which it has no memory, batters its head and breaks its wings against the bars of its cage. Like the bird that hungers for the unknown sky, her soul, instead of yearning for death, as she believed it did, hungered rather for life, a life radiant with tenderness and full of love; and, like the bird, she was dying of that unassuaged hunger. As a child, she had committed herself, with all the exuberance of her passionate nature, to the love of objects and animals; as a young girl, she had yielded recklessly to the love of dreams; but objects brought her no satisfaction and dreams failed to acquire any precise and comforting form. There was no one to guide her, no one to rescue that young mind already assailed by inner turmoil; no one to open to wholesome reality the gates of a heart already guarded by vacant-eyed chimerae; no one with whom she could share the thoughts and feelings of love and desire brimming inside her that, finding no outlet for their expression, were kept bottled up, seething, until ready to burst out of that fragile shell ill-protected by over-strung nerves. Her mother, who was always ill, entirely immersed in the melancholia that would soon kill her, was incapable of intelligent, firm guidance; her father, being virtually bankrupt, and reduced to expedients, was fighting a desperate battle to keep the house that had belonged to the family for centuries and was in danger of being lost; and of the young men that called by – inane gentlefolk, conceited burghers, greedy peasants – not one of them bore on his brow the magic star that would lead her to God. Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be at odds with her way of thinking and feeling. For her, the sun was not sufficiently red, the nights sufficiently pale, or the skies sufficiently infinite. Her vague and shifting conception of people and things inevitably condemned her to sensory distortions and mental aberrations, and left her with nothing but the torment of a dream never realised and desires never fulfilled. And then came her marriage – not just a sacrifice, but a bargain, a deal to save her father from financial embarrassment! – and her disgust, her outrage at the sense of being treated as a degraded parcel of flesh, the prey, the passive instrument of a man’s pleasure! To have soared so high and to sink so low! To have dreamed of heavenly kisses, mystical embraces, ideal possession, and then … to come to this! Instead of infinities of dazzling light, in which her imagination could revel amid flights of enraptured angels and frenzied doves, darkness fell, a sinister, oppressive darkness, inhabited only by her mother’s spectre, stumbling over crosses and graves, with a rope around her neck.

Silence soon descended on the Priory. The screech of wheels, of gigs and traps bringing friends from the neighbourhood to the foot of the geranium-bedecked steps, was heard no more on the gravel drive. The main gate was barred, to oblige carriages to enter by the back yard. In the kitchen the servants spoke to each other in hushed voices and walked about on tiptoe, as people do in a house where someone has died. The gardener, acting on instructions from my mother, who could not bear the noise of wheelbarrows and of rakes scraping the ground, left the suckers to the sap the yellowing rose-bushes, and the weeds to choke the flowerbeds and grow over the paths. And the house, with that black curtain of fir-trees, like a catafalque, sheltering it from the west; with its windows that were always shut; and with the living corpse it kept entombed within those plain old-brick walls was like some vast burial vault. The local people, who on Sundays would go for a walk in the forest, did not pass by the Priory any more without a kind of superstitious terror, as though the house were under some curse and haunted by ghosts. Before long, there was even a legend that grew up; a woodcutter related how, one night on his way home from work, he had seen Madame Mintié, all in white, with dishevelled hair, way up in the sky, moving across the heavens, beating her breast with a crucifix.

My father shut himself up in his office even more, avoiding, as much as possible, being in the house, where he hardly appeared except at meal-times. He also began regularly to travel to remote fairs, to attend more frequently the committees and associations he presided over; he contrived to create for himself new distractions, distant activities. The county council, the agricultural meeting, the assize-court jury were great resources to him. When anyone asked after his wife, he would reply by nodding his head, and saying: ‘Well, I’m very worried, very anxious … Where’s it all going to end? I tell you, I fear the poor woman’s going mad …’

And he would counter any protest: ‘No, no, I’m not joking … As you well know, they’re a bit soft in the head in that family!’

Yet he never uttered a word of reproach, although every day he could see for himself the damage this state of affairs was causing to his business, and he could not understand at all my mother’s exasperating refusal to attempt any cure.

It was in this bleak atmosphere that I grew up. I was born a sickly and puny child. What care and attention, what fierce love, what mortal anguish this gave rise to! Faced with the poor creature that I was, in whom the breath of life was so weak it seemed rather a death rattle, my mother forgot her own troubles. Motherhood restored her dispirited energies, wakened her conscience to the new responsibilities and sacred duties that now fell to her. What hectic nights, what feverish days she lived through, bent over the cradle in which something stirred that was born of her own flesh and blood! Ah, yes, her own flesh and blood! I was hers, and hers alone. It was not of conjugal submission that I was born; unlike other sons of men, I was free of original impurity. She had carried me in her womb from the very beginning, and, like Jesus, I issued from a long cry of love. She now understood her earlier confusion, terror and distress; it was that a great mystery of creation had occurred within her.

She had much difficulty in raising me, and that I survived can be accounted a miracle of love. More than a dozen times my mother wrested me from the arms of death. So, what joy it was to her, and how rewarding, to see that little crumpled body thrive, and that puckered face acquire a pink glow, and those eyes open brightly at her smile, and those eager lips move searchingly, greedily sucking life from her nurturing breast! My mother enjoyed a few months’ complete and salutary happiness. She rediscovered a need to act, to be good and useful, to keep her hands and heart and mind occupied, in short, to live, and she was able to take in even the most mundane aspects of housekeeping a new and absorbed interest that was underlaid with a profound sense of peace. She regained her cheerfulness, a gentle, natural cheerfulness, with no violent throes. She made plans, looked to the future with confidence, and often marvelled that she no longer thought of the past, that dissipated nightmare. I was developing: ‘You can see him getting bigger every day,’ the maid used to say. And my mother observed with delight the secret work of nature, which was refining this embryonic flesh, moulding it into shape, firmed its features, giving it better-controlled movements, and instilling in its unformed brain, that had scarcely come into being, the first glimmerings of instinct. Oh! how everything now seemed dressed in lovely bright colours! Anthems of welcome and love’s blessings were all that existed, and even the trees, once so full of terror and menace, spread their leaves over her like so many protective hands. It was possible to hope that motherhood had saved her. Alas, this hope was short-lived.