Torture Garden E-Book

Octave Mirbeau

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Clara goes to China where she experiences the delights of the torture garden. Baroque sadism mioxed up with political satire. 'A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the narrator are put into context by the immersion into the Sadeian world of the Torture Garden.' The Times

Leseprobe

To the priests, the soldiers, the judges

to those people

who educate, instruct and govern men

I dedicate

these pages of Murder and Blood

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden

Frontispiece

My Mission

First Part

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Second Part: The Torture Garden

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Copyright

Introduction to Octave Mirbeau’s TORTURE GARDEN

By Brian Stableford.

Octave Mirbeau was born in Europe’s year of revolutions, 1848. From his family he inherited the conservative bourgeois values of the rural middle class, which were to have been solidly cemented by the Jesuits, to whom he was sent for schooling in 1859, but his sufferings at their hands instead sowed the seeds of future resentment and conversion to a very different world-view. His rebellion was not immediate; he went to Paris to study the law before serving as an officer in the Army of the Loire during the Franco-Prussian War, and it was a family friend who subsequently found him a job as the art critic for the Bonapartist newspaper L’Ordre. Once he had taken his place in the literary community of the nation, however, he began to reformulate his values and began a drift to radicalism which ultimately became a determined charge taking him to extremes which none of his contemporaries reached.

Mirbeau’s career parallels in many significant features that of his contemporary Anatole France (born 1844), who similarly abandoned his conservative heritage to embrace a fierce radicalism. Both became extraordinarily passionate in their anti-clericalism and both were numbered among the most outspoken supporters of the ill-fated Captain Dreyfus, who was malevolently fitted up on a preposterous charge by the Army Establishment. But France’s literary career was born from the groves of Academe while Mirbeau’s was launched from the platform of popular journalism, and their literary armaments were of a markedly different character; it is not entirely surprising that France was eventually drawn to doctrinaire Communism (though he later split from the party over ideological differences) while Mirbeau became a devout Anarchist.

France’s anti-clericalism was first given free rein in the short novel La tragedie humaine (1895; tr. as The Human Tragedy), in which a truly virtuous priest is bitterly disappointed to discover that the only mercy and charity to be found in a world dominated by the hopelessly corrupt Church is the compassion of Satan. No stronger contrast can be imagined, given the basic similarity of feeling, than that between this neat and poignant fable and Mirbeau’s L’Abbe Jules (1888), which offers a complex and somewhat paradoxical portrait of its eponymous anti-hero, a veritable monster of a dishonest priest. Mirbeau’s clear intention is to demonstrate that the abominable Jules is really a victim of society, a mirror of the corruption inherent in his environment, but the achievement of this end is subverted by the grotesque exaggeration which he uses to melodramatise his argument. To be widely misunderstood because of his extravagance was to be Mirbeau’s perennial burden.

The literary work which represented the culmination of France’s radicalism was La revolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels), in which a young idealist among the fallen angels – whose elder counterparts have long been the tutors and comforters of mankind – sets out to raise an army of revolution against the tyrant demiurge Jehovah, and searches for Satan in the hope of finding a general fit to lead the campaign. Typically, France’s novel ends quietly, when Satan – who has been following the advice which Voltaire offered at the end of Candide and cultivating his garden – declines to play the Napoleonic role, on the grounds that were the battle to be won he would only end up (as Napoleon did) as a vainglorious emperor, no better than the king who had been toppled. On the surface, at least, there is little which this witty, urbane and sentimental book has in common with Mirbeau’s Le jardin des supplices (1899; tr. as Torture Garden) but at heart they share the same motives: to expose the hypocrisies of Church and society; to shock the reader into a realisation that much of what he or she complacently takes for granted is cruel and ugly.

The difference between the delicacy of France – who was always at his most punctilious when dealing with implicitly shocking premises – and the luridness of Mirbeau is a matter of method. France’s method won him the Nobel Prize, while Mirbeau’s created sufficient embarrassment to have his work condemned as obscene, but that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that their accomplishments were not so very unalike. Mirbeau’s rhetoric proved a little too effective for his own good, both in his own lifetime and afterwards, but the undermining of his literary reputation – the amount of space devoted to Mirbeau in reference books in no way does justice to his contemporary importance as a force within the French literary community – has little to do with the aesthetic merit of his books or the moral weight of his arguments. He is a writer of considerable power and originality, who is one of the most striking and most interesting products of the great French tradition of philosophical fiction.

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Reg Carr, whose excellent book Anarchism in France; the case of Octave Mirbeau (1977) is the only substantial study of the author in English, pinpoints the year 1885 as the crucial turning-point in Mirbeau’s life. It was the year in which there appeared French versions of two works which were to have an enormous impact on his ideas about life and literature: Kropotkin’s Paroles d’un revolte and Tolstoy’s Ma religion. Both helped to give form and force to Mirbeau’s developing anarchism, and the second – although it failed to shake the dogmatic atheism which he had adopted in opposition to the Jesuits – must have made him think long and hard about the ideological functions of literature. His journalistic pieces became much more outspoken in the defence of writers and artists under attack – 1885 was also the year in which a storm blew up over the government’s censorship of the stage version of Zola’s Germinal, and Mirbeau was already involved in ongoing controversies regarding the poetry of the Symbolists, the painting of the Impressionists and the novels of the Naturalists; he had long been a friend of Maupassant and Zola, and had been a significant early champion of Monet, Gauguin and Rodin.

In 1885 Mirbeau gave up writing for the monarchist paper Le Gaulois and firmly nailed his colours to the mast of the radical La France. In political articles of that year he launched the vitriolic attack upon the penal code which culminated in some of the more savage passages of Torture Garden, while his career as a writer of fiction – previously pursued in somewhat desultory fashion through the medium of rather derivative short stories – also took a leap forward with the publication of the collection Lettres de ma chaumière, which featured material of a more personal and polemical kind, reflecting acidly on the life and folkways of his native Normandy.

This mixture of the personal and the polemical was carried to greater lengths in his first novel, Le Calvaire (1886), where the bitterness of his reflections on the iniquities of social injustice are compounded by the emotional residues of an unhappy love affair. The novel proved controversial because of the way in which Mirbeau transformed his own experiences of the Franco-Prussian war into a savage portrayal of military stupidity which seemed antipatriotic to many – the relevant chapter was dropped from the serial version for that reason – but its most remarkable feature is the portrayal of its chief female character, whose seduction, betrayal, mental torture, ruination and final abandonment of the hero constitutes the slow crucifixion to which the title refers. This helped to prepare the ground for the characterization of Clara in Torture Garden.

Although the misogyny of Le Calvaire is very remarkable it is by no means without parallel in the French literature of the period. One of Mirbeau’s closest friends was Jules-Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose most famous work is the classic collection of short stories Les diaboliques (1874), which displays the conviction that the facades of social convention and politeness conceal awesome depths of moral depravity, and that women in particular have become expert in using the mask of virtue to obscure a murderous callousness. Barbey d’Aurevilly was a subtle writer, but he was one of the chief sources of inspiration for the rather less subtle Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose Comes cruels (1883) lent its title to a subgenre of tales which were later to become part of the staple diet of Grand Guignol theatre. In the same year that Mirbeau published Le Calvaire Villiers de l’Isle-Adam published his extraordinary L’Eve future, in which a nobleman disappointed by the appalling perfidies of womankind commissions Thomas Edison to manufacture a beautiful machine embodying the virtues of fidelity and love – of which real women are held to be incapable. The illustrator of Les diaboliques was Felicien Rops, one-time friend and associate of Baudelaire, who frequently produced vivid and bizarre illustrations of the myth of the femme fatale; Carr suggests that Rops’ drawings were a key influence on Mirbeau’s most graphic passages, which are to be found in greatest abundance in Torture Garden.

Mirbeau followed Le Calvaire and Abbe Jules with a more explicitly political novel, Sebastien Roch (1890), which offered a minutely-detailed retrospective analysis of his experiences at the Jesuit college at Vannes which he had attended in infancy. The ruination of his hero is much more complete than Mirbeau’s own spoliation – the nightmarish hangover of his “education” drives Roch to an early grave – but this tragedy is compounded by the fact that within the beleaguered mind of the youth a rebellion of compassionate feeling has begun to take shape, only to be cruelly aborted. As in previous novels, Mirbeau derives affective force only from a recapitulation of his early tribulations and not from the fact of his own eventual triumph; there is thus a seeming discrepancy between the apparent pessimism of his fiction and the relative optimism of his political articles.

Such discrepancies are not uncommon, and are frequently misunderstood; the fact that the rhetoric of fiction is fundamentally alarmist has much more to do with the essential nature of dramatic tension than the attitudes of writers. All Utopian fiction is weak and anaemic; whatever its virtues as a form of political analysis it has none as engaging narrative. By contrast, the Dystopian fiction of Brave New Worlds packs a powerful affective punch; the fact that the real world of 1984 bore no resemblance at all to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is quite irrelevant to the novel’s success in telling us what we ought to be afraid of and what we must at all costs resist. The end of Nineteen Eighty-Four should not be seen as an acceptance of the inevitability of despair but as a reductio ad absurdum to show conclusively what result is entailed by the ways of thinking against which it warns us. It is important that the reader should bear this in mind in considering Mirbeau’s works – and imperative that it should be noted in the preface to any analysis of the nature and merits of Torture Garden.

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Although Torture Garden was not published in full until 1899 it drew upon some earlier materials and it is possible that Mirbeau had begun work on it as early as 1892. It seems, however, that it was his involvement in the Dreyfus affair between 1896 and 1898 which confirmed his determination to write a more scathing attack on the hypocrisies and injustices of French society than any which had gone before. Unlike Anatole France’s similarly-motivated L’ile des pingouins (1908; tr. as Penguin Island) Mirbeau’s novel contains very few overt references to the injustice of the treatment meted out to the luckless captain, but its scalding sarcasm when it deals with the hideous callousness and injustice of the workings of the law and its human instruments embody a particular fury which the case certainly helped to awaken. The form and manner of the novel had already been set, but it was the Dreyfus Affair which provided the fervent impetus necessary for its completion.

It is probable that Mirbeau had found Torture Garden very difficult to write because it was the first of his novels to break away – and the only one to break away entirely – from the autobiographical resources which had fuelled his earlier works, and it embodies a keen awareness of the various literary traditions to which it belongs: the tradition of Utopian fiction; the tradition of the critical conte philosophique; and the tradition of French Orientalism.

In its basic construction Torture Garden echoes – probably quite deliberately – the form of More’s Utopia. Where More’s book had an introductory letter introducing its narrator Mirbeau’s has a preface introducing “the manuscript”. More’s book then presents a dialogue in which contemporary society is subject to various criticisms, before moving into its partly satirical and partly homiletic account of the imaginary island of Utopia. Mirbeau likewise divides his main story into two, first presenting a satirical examination of contemporary society via an abbreviated autobiography of the author of the manuscript, then moving on to a detailed description of the allegorical Garden of Tortures, which the narrator discovers in China in the company of his remarkable mistress, Clara.

Torture Garden is frequently represented as a work which owes much to the Marquis de Sade, and Clara has been deemed the perfect exemplar of a connoisseur of Sadism. There are indeed certain affinities between Torture Garden and some passages to be found in Juliette, because the method of both works requires detailed description of particularly nasty methods of torture and execution, but these similarities are compounded with vitally important differences, and the philosophical discourses to which the two writers affiliate their arguments are quite distinct.

The argument of Sade’s Juliette, if it is to be reduced to its simplest possible form is that once we accept (as in his opinion, we must) that there is no God, then the foundation-stone of human morality has been removed. If there is no God to reward us with salvation or punish us with eternal damnation, his characters argue, then what good reason can we possibly have for preferring good to evil? Is it not the case, they propose, that once the fear of retribution is eliminated, then the decision is merely a matter of taste – of arbitrary aesthetic preference? Sade is, of course, here providing a challenge to convention, dramatically posing a question rather than stating a conclusion; we should not accept his grotesque characters as representations of the way in which he would have liked to live his own life. There is, however, an element of special pleading in his work; he found himself to be sexually stimulated by the contemplation of various forms of behaviour usually considered perverse and/or disgusting and by lurid fantasies of extreme violence. Like others so afflicted – John Cowper Powys is perhaps the most notable literary example – he was both fascinated by and anxious about this curious susceptibility.

To what extent Sade could or did import the substance of these fantasies into his actual behaviour we cannot be sure, but it is probably safe to assume that like everyone else in the world his real accomplishments had very little connection with his daydreams. Although people occasionally do try to act out their fantasies – sexual and otherwise – in a spirit of extreme optimism, they invariably find that reality cannot match the vivid promise of fantasy. Much of the excitement of fantasy derives from the fact that it is fantasy, and that it has all the power of the imagination to draw upon in envisaging an impossibly gorgeous and sensual experience which mere mundanity could never offer. The alchemy of fantasy permits excitement to be isolated and miraculously purified, while the mere chemistry which cannot be excluded from actual sexual intercourse and the actual cruelties of bullying and other assorted blood sports insists upon compounding it with the vagaries of physiology, with dirt, with discomfort and with injury – and thus, alas, with a necessity to make moral judgements from which fantasy can easily be freed. The only way in which fantasy can sensibly enter actual behaviour is as play; whenever the acting out becomes serious it becomes ridiculous, and also dangerous.

Mirbeau was, like Sade, a committed atheist – but he lived in an age where atheism was less implicitly outrageous. In Sade’s day the desertion of faith carried an inevitable sensation of implicit wickedness, with which Sade coped by declaring it to be delicious. For Mirbeau, atheism was something which could simply be embraced and then taken for granted. There was for him, as for Anatole France and the historian Jules Michelet, no particular difficulty in considering religion – and therefore the object of religious worship – as a recognisable evil in itself. For Mirbeau the death of God did not imply that the very notion of morality must be thrown overboard; to the contrary, it was the perception of a better and truer morality which had contrived to throw God overboard.

What was for Sade a fascinating, appalling and difficult problem – how to construct a secular morality – was for Mirbeau a matter to be taken very much for granted. He knew perfectly well what Good was – it was compassion and justice – and that Evil was its negation; what seemed to him fascinating, appalling and desperately problematic was that in civilized society there was so much Evil masquerading as Good, which the majority of people seemed not even to see, let alone to care about. In Torture Garden he set out to show people what their world, behind its careful facades and hypocrisies, was truly like; he set out to use analytical discussion (in the preface), satirical caricature (in the first part of the main narrative), and fantastic allegory (in the second part of the main narrative) to strip away all the masks and illusions of custom and philosophy, thus to display all the callousness and perversity of the underlying psyche of “civilised” man. Where Sade had set out slyly to create moral unease, Mirbeau set out forthrightly to call forth moral outrage.

The heart of Torture Garden is the relationship between the narrator, and the mistress whom he meets while going into exile. The narrator, like other Mirbeau anti-heroes, is a typically corrupt product of a society in which all moral authority – parental, educational, juridical and political – is a mere show, the one true motive in human affairs being the determination to “get the better of people”. This narrator, however, is an utter incompetent – though he allies himself early in life with the cynical Eugène Mortain, who rises to become a Minister of France, he remains a mere pawn, pathetically unable to take advantage of the opportunities for personal advancement which are presented to him. When he has become an embarrassment to his one-time friend he is persuaded to pass himself off as a scientist in order that he might pursue his supposed researches in Ceylon. His subsequent meeting with Clara, who persuades him to go with her to China instead, is a crucial diversion from the geographical Orient to the exotic Orient of the French literary imagination.

The significance of “The Orient” to French writers of the nineteenth century – by no means only those of a Romantic stripe – can hardly be underestimated. Several of them undertook pilgrimages of a kind, though only a few (Rimbaud being the most celebrated example) got further than North Africa. Some, including Gerard de Nerval, wrote up these adventures, but no documentary account of actual exotica could possibly offer more than the feeblest echo of the lush Orient of the imagination. Even the more conscientiously-inclined writers who dabbled in such fantasies – Flaubert in Salammbô (1862), France in Thais (1890) and Pierre Louys in Aphrodite (1896) – had little difficulty in investing their milieux with a special kind of magic, and the further the imaginative spectrum extended eastwards the lusher and gaudier the imagery grew. Where prose fiction was concerned China had been most extravagantly evoked, albeit by proxy, in Theophile Gautier’s Fortunio (1838), whose absurd hero establishes an El Dorado of imported Chinoiserie on the outskirts of Paris only to destroy it and return to the East because he cannot tolerate the perfidies of civilized women. The perfidies in question were a subject of keen interest to Mirbeau, as Le Calvaire had demonstrated, and he must have found Fortunio as interesting as Gautier’s more famous novella “Une nuit de Cleopatre” (1838; tr. as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”), whose elaborate commentary on the erotically-charged callousness of its heroine provided a model for Clara. Mirbeau was as much a dissenter from Gautier’s brand of self-indulgence as he was from Sade’s, but Gautier is similarly significant as a precursor of Mirbeau’s allegorical imagery.

It is through Clara that the narrator is eventually brought to confront the true nature of the forces which have shaped him, not only in the form of the Garden to which she takes him but in her response to it, which fuses the vicarious excitement of witnessed cruelty with the excitement of erotic arousal in such a way that her visit culminates in a kind of orgasm whose aftermath (after the conventional fashion of post-coital triste) leaves her temporarily sated and briefly repentant. It is, of course, all too much for the narrator to bear – and yet his rebellion against it is (as Clara observes) far more a matter of cowardice than moral rearmament, for the seeds of a similar corruption are already within him and might already have germinated were it not for his simple incompetence in the business of getting the better of people. The reader is tacitly asked to weigh very carefully the moral quality of his or her own response.

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Mirbeau published four more novels after Torture Garden: Le journal d’une femme de chambre (1900; tr. as The Diary of a Chambermaid); Les vingt-et-un jours d’un neurasthenique (1901); La 628.E8 (1907) and Dingo (1913) (another, Un gentilhomme, was published posthumously in 1920, three years after his death). The first of these is the work for which he is best-known in England, though like Torture Garden it tends to be regarded as a semi-pornographic work. It attempts to repeat the essential message of Torture Garden in a more realistic mode, following the adventures of a young girl as she bears witness to the depravity of a sequence of exploitative employers, becoming gradually more cynical as she does so, ultimately – and inevitably – ending up as corrupt as they are.

The Diary of a Chambermaid has at least as much in common with Sade’s Justine and Juliette as Torture Garden has, but that is because it shares the same models, which are in this instance a group of English novels: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) and John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749; better known as Fanny Hill). By an appropriate paradox it was Richardson’s piously moralistic novel which Sade gleefully took as his model, carefully inverting its subtitle (Justine is subtitled les malheurs de la vertu; Juliette, les prospérités du vice). But all the earlier writers were seduced by their heroines in a way that Mirbeau never was; how much his detachment owed to his misogyny and how much to his journalistic objectivity it is difficult to say, but the fact remains that he was much more clinically analytical in his study of Celestine’s strategies for coping with the oppressive demands of men and the world than any of his predecessors.

In the next two “novels” this clinicality is taken to such lengths that the books become collections of caricatures in prose, each presenting a grotesque gallery of perverse characters without any semblance of a plot; Dingo goes even further, taking as its viewpoint character a dog which proves ultimately untameable in spite of the efforts of its human masters to teach it civilized ways – a figure which Mirbeau uses to present a deeply ironic and calculatedly perverse self-image. In furtherance of this intrinsic irony, this last novel offers portraits of a few of its human characters rather more sympathetic than Mirbeau had ever offered before, and though it is clear throughout what the dog’s eventual fate must be this is in many ways the author’s most overtly hopeful novel.

Mirbeau was, of course, right to see himself as a kind of metaphorical wild dog, ultimately unassimilable by the society in which he found himself because it could not contain or control the rage engendered by his instinct for natural justice. It was not so much that he was a radical, but that he was so bad-tempered about it. Had he been as slick and polished as Anatole France his work would have been more widely applauded and more widely liked. Even those whose own ideological views are utterly opposed to those of The Revolt of the Angels can find it an agreeable book to read, and a book full of nourishing food for thought, but Torture Garden – and almost everything else that Mirbeau wrote – was calculated to be provocatively disagreeable and essentially indigestible.

Torture Garden is a horror story, not in the commonplace sense that it uses horrific threats to heighten suspense while its characters flee to safety, but in the more authentic sense that it confronts its characters with the horror of their own secret selves and will neither let them flee nor offer them any possible refuge or reprieve. It is, of course, an indecent novel, because it assaults the very notion of “decency” as a hollow sham. It is a novel which, as a certain prosecuting barrister might have put it, you might not want your wives or servants to read.

For these reasons, Torture Garden has been unavailable in England for most of this century. In spite of the literary half-life which it has previously lived, however, it is an important book. It is important because it boldly dares to go where no book had gone before and where none has gone since. Perhaps that is because it overestimates the true extent of our hypocrisies, and thus has little or nothing to say to us, but perhaps – only perhaps – it is because it estimates the extent of our hypocrisies all too accurately, and offers a challenge which few of us are willing to meet.

FRONTISPIECE

One evening a few friends gathered together at the home of one of our most famous authors. After we had feasted bountifully, the discussion turned to murder – I no longer remember on what pretext. On no pretext at all, most probably. Only men were present: moralists, poets, philosophers and doctors, that is, everyone felt free to speak candidly and to follow their own fancies, obsessions or paradoxes without fear that this would immediately be followed by the sort of bewilderment and terror that appears on the outraged faces of our clerks at the slightest daring idea. Not that I mention clerks with any sense of contempt, of course, and I might just as easily have said lawyers or porters. I merely mean to delineate the average state of the French sensibility.

With a composure as perfect as if he was about to express what he thought about the cigar he was smoking, a member of the Academy of moral and political sciences said: “You know … I genuinely believe murder to be the greatest human obsession, and that our every action derives from it …”

We assumed this would be followed by a long exegesis, but he said nothing more.

“Well, of course!” a Darwinian scholar declared. “Your words, my dear chap, express one of those eternal truths that the legendary M. de la Palisse expressed every day: murder being the very foundation of our social institutions, it is consequently the most imperious necessity of civilised life. If there were no murder government of any sort would be inconceivable. For the admirable fact is that crime in general, and murder in particular, not simply excuses it, but represents its only reason to exist … Otherwise we would live in complete anarchy, something we find unimaginable … And so, far from wishing to eradicate murder, it is indispensable to cultivate it with intelligence and perseverance … And I don’t know a better means of cultivation than laws.”

Someone protested.

“Come now!” the scholar exclaimed. “I thought we were among friends and could speak without hypocrisy!”

“Feel free! …” agreed the master of the house. “Let’s take due advantage of the one occasion we shall be allowed to express our most intimate ideas, for in my books I have, as you have in your own spheres, been able to present the public only with lies.”

The scholar made himself more comfortable on the cushions of his armchair and stretched his legs, which had gone to sleep through having been crossed for too long. His head thrown back, arms hanging down and stomach soothed by good digestion, he propelled smoke rings towards the ceiling.

“In any event,” he answered, “murder is quite able to propagate itself … Strictly speaking, it does not result from one or another particular passion, nor is it the pathological form of degeneracy. It is a vital instinct lying within us all … that is within all systematically organised beings and which dominates them, in the same way as genetic instinct. Most of the time this is so true that these two instincts combine so well with one another, are so totally mingled together, that somehow they constitute a single and identical instinct. Thus it becomes impossible to know which one drives us towards giving life and which towards taking it back, or to distinguish which of them is murder and which love. An honourable murderer who killed women, not to steal from them but to rape them, once confided in me. His sport was to make the spasm of his pleasure coincide exactly with the other’s death spasm: ‘In such moments,’ he told me, ‘I felt like a god creating the world!’ ”

“Ah!” exclaimed the famous writer … “If you are going to look for your examples among professional murderers!”

The scholar replied gently: “But all of us are more or less murderers … I’m sure that intellectually we have all experienced analogous sensations to some degree. We may curb the innate need we have for murder, or attenuate physical violence by giving it a legal outlet – whether through industry, colonial trade, war, hunting or antisemitism – because it is dangerous to abandon oneself to it immoderately, outside the law. In any event, the moral satisfaction drawn from it is not such as to make it worthwhile being exposed to the ordinary consequences that follow – imprisonment, arguments in front of judges (always tiring and devoid of scientific interest) … and finally the guillotine …”

“You’re exaggerating,” interrupted the first speaker. “Murder is dangerous only for murderers lacking elegance and spirit – those impulsive brutes who are devoid of psychological insight … An intelligent and reasoning person may, with imperturbable serenity, commit all the murders he likes. He is assured of impunity … The superiority of his schemes will always prevail over habitual police investigations and, let’s admit it, against the feebleness of criminal investigations in which examining magistrates take such delight … In this business, as in all others, the small pay for the great … Dear chap, you’ll surely accept how many crimes go undetected …”

“And tolerated …”