The curé of Torcy doesn’t like him very much. He only ever calls him ‘the little count’, ‘your little count’, which irritates me. ‘Why “little count”?’ I asked him. ‘Because he’s an ornament, a pleasant, somewhat old-fashioned ornament. The kind of ornament that seems impressive when glimpsed on a peasant’s sideboard but would be passed over in an antique shop or at a major auction.’ And when I admitted that I still hoped to interest him in my youth club, he shrugged. ‘A pretty Saxon money box, your little count, but impossible to break open.’
And indeed, I don’t think that he is very generous. While he may not give, like so many others, the impression of being in thrall to money, he cares about it, that’s for sure.
I also tried to talk to him a little about Mademoiselle Chantal, whose sadness bothers me. He was very reticent at first, then suddenly cheerful, which struck me as forced. Mention of Mademoiselle Louise seemed to irritate him enormously. He turned red, and then his face grew hard. I fell silent.
‘You have a vocation for friendship,’ my old master Canon Durieux once observed. ‘Take care it does not become a passion. It is the only one of which one is never cured.’
* * *
We preserve, granted. But we preserve in order to save, that is what the world refuses to understand, asking only to endure. But it can no longer be content with merely enduring.
The old world could have endured perhaps, and for a long time. That was what it was made for. It was terribly heavy, its huge weight held it to the earth. It had come to terms with injustice. Instead of trying to get round it, it had accepted it completely, swallowed it whole, made it an institution like any other by establishing slavery. No doubt, whatever the degree of perfection it might one day have attained, it would nevertheless have remained in the grip of the curse laid on Adam. The devil was not unaware of that, he knew it better than anyone. But it was nevertheless a rough undertaking to lay it almost entirely on the shoulders of a herd of human cattle, the heavy burden of it could have been reduced by as much. The largest possible degree of ignorance, rebellion, despair reserved for a kind of sacrificial nation, a nation without a name, without a history, without assets, without allies – at least respectable ones – without a family – at least a legal one – without a name and without gods. What a simplification of the social problem, of the various methods of government!
But this institution that appeared unshakeable was actually extremely fragile. It only took a century to abolish it, to destroy it for ever. A day might have sufficed. Once the ranks were again mixed, once the scapegoated nation was dispersed, what force would have been capable of making it assume the yoke again?
The institution died, and the old world collapsed with it. Everyone believed, or pretended to believe, in its necessity, it was accepted as a fact, but it will not be rebuilt. Mankind will never again run that terrible risk, it would be a foolhardy thing to do. The law may tolerate injustice or even favour it insidiously, it will no longer sanction it. Injustice will never again have a legal status, that’s over. But it nevertheless remains widespread in the world. In this way, society, which would no longer dare use injustice for the good of a small number, has condemned itself to pursue the destruction of an evil it carries within itself, an evil that, abolished in law, almost immediately reappears in people’s customs, so that the same infernal circuit begins all over again in reverse. Whether we like it or not, society must now share the condition of man, experience the same metaphysical adventure. Having once been indifferent to good or evil, knowing no other law than that of its own power, it has been given a soul by Christianity, a soul to be lost or saved.
* * *
I showed these lines to the curé of Torcy, but didn’t dare tell him they were by me. He is so shrewd – and I lie so badly – that I wonder if he believed me. He gave me back the sheet of paper with a little laugh that I know well, which bodes no good. At last he said:
‘Your friend doesn’t write badly, it’s even a bit too polished. Generally speaking, while it may always be worthwhile to think justly, it’s best to leave it at that. We see the thing as it is, without music, and we don’t risk singing a song just to ourselves. When you meet a truth in passing, take a good look at it, so that you’ll be able to recognize it, but don’t wait for it to give you the eye. The truths of the Gospel never give us the eye. With the others, where you’re never sure exactly where they were before they came to you, it’s dangerous to have a private conversation. I wouldn’t like to take a big lout like me as an example, but whenever I do happen to have an idea – one of those ideas that might be useful to my flock, of course, forget about the others! – I try to bring it to the Lord’s attention, I immediately put it in my prayer. It’s surprising how much it changes. Sometimes it becomes unrecognizable …
‘No matter. Your friend is right. Modern society may well deny its master, it too has been freed, it’s no longer enough for it to administer the common heritage, it too has set off like all of us, whether we like it or not, in search of the kingdom of God. And that kingdom is not of this world. So society will never stop. It can’t stop running. “Save yourself or die!” Who can say the contrary?
‘What your friend says about slavery is very true, too. In the old days, the law tolerated slavery and the apostles went along with it. They didn’t say to the slave, “Free yourself from your master”, the way they said to the lustful man, for instance, “Free yourself from the flesh right now!” There’s a subtle difference. Why? Because they wanted, I suppose, to give the world a breathing space before throwing it into a spiritual adventure. You can be sure a strapping fellow like Saint Paul wasn’t under any illusion. The abolition of slavery wouldn’t abolish the exploitation of man by man. When it came down to it, a slave was expensive, which must always have earned him a degree of consideration from his master. Instead of which, I knew in my youth a bastard of a stained-glass-maker who got fifteen-year-old boys to blow the glass and replaced them when their poor little chests gave out – the animal had plenty to choose from. I would much have preferred to be the slave of one of those good old Roman burghers who at least probably weren’t tight-fisted. No, Saint Paul wasn’t under any illusion! He only told himself that Christianity had let loose in the world a truth that nothing would ever stop, because it was already there deep in human consciousness, and man had immediately identified with it: the truth that God saved all of us, and all of us are worthy of God’s blood. You can translate that however you like, even into rationalist language – the most stupid of all – it forces you to bring together words that explode at the slightest contact. Future society can always try to sit on them! It’ll get its backside burned, that’s all.
‘And yet the poor world still dreams of something like the old contract once signed with demons that was meant to ensure its peace. To reduce a quarter or a third of the human race to the condition of cattle, but superior cattle, might not have been too high a price to pay for the coming of supermen, pure-bloods, the true earthly kingdom … We think it, but we don’t dare say it. In embracing poverty, Our Lord so elevated the poor man in dignity that we’ll never again be able to get him down off his pedestal. He gave him an ancestor – and what an ancestor! A name – and what a name! We still love him better when he’s rebellious than when he’s resigned, he seems still to belong to the kingdom of God, where the first will be the last, he seems like a ghost – a ghost at the marriage feast, in his white robe … The State does the best it can. It wipes the children, bandages the lame, washes shirts, boils soup for the tramps, polishes the spittoons of the senile, all the while looking at the clock and wondering if it’ll have time to attend to its own business. It’s probably still hoping it can make machines play the role once reserved for slaves. Not a chance! The machines keep turning, and more and more people are unemployed, so that machines seem to be manufacturing nothing but unemployed people, don’t you see? One way or another, the poor man has a hard life. Anyway, they’re still trying, over in Russia
… Mind you, I don’t think the Russians are worse than anyone else – all men today are fanatics! – but those Russian devils have guts. They’re the Flemish of the Far North, those people. They can swallow anything, they may well swallow a few technocrats for a century or two without dying.
‘Their idea, when it comes down to it, isn’t a stupid one. Of course, the poor man still has to be wiped out – the poor man is the witness of Jesus Christ, the heir to the Jewish people! – but instead of reducing him to cattle, or killing him, they think they can turn him into a man of private means or even – assuming things keep getting better and better – a civil servant. There’s nobody steadier or more docile than a civil servant.’
I, too, sometimes think about the Russians. My classmates at the seminary often talked about them – talked a lot of rubbish, I think, mainly to impress the teachers. Our democratically inclined priests are very kind, very zealous, but I find them – how can I put it? – a little bourgeois. And the common people don’t love them much, that’s a fact. Perhaps they just don’t understand them? Anyway, as I said, I sometimes think about the Russians with a kind of curiosity, a kind of tenderness. When you’ve known poverty, its mysterious, incommunicable joys, then the Russian writers, for example, bring tears to your eyes. The year Father died, Mother had to be operated on for a tumour, and she spent four or five months at the hospital in Berguette. An aunt took me in. She ran a little tavern very near Lens, an awful wooden shack where Dutch gin was served to miners who were too poor to go anywhere else, to a real café. The school was two kilometres away, and I learned my lessons sitting on the floor behind the counter. Not so much a floor as a few planks of rotted wood. The smell of the earth came up through the slits, earth that was always damp and muddy. On the evening after payday, our customers didn’t even bother to go outside to do their business: they urinated on the ground and I was so scared under the counter that I finally fell asleep. No matter: the schoolmaster liked me and would lend me books. That was how I came to read Maxim Gorki’s memoirs of his childhood.
We find centres of poverty in France, obviously. Pockets of poverty. Never large enough for the poor to be able to live truly apart, live a true life of poverty. Wealth itself is too nuanced here, too human, really, for the terrifying power of money to shine forth resplendently in all its blind strength, its cruelty. I think of the Russians as a poor people, a nation of poor people, who knew how poverty could possess and intoxicate. If the Church could put a whole nation on its altars and had chosen that one, it would have made it the patron saint of poverty, the private intercessor of the poor. Apparently, Monsieur Gorki has made lots of money and is leading a life of luxury somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, at least so I read in the newspaper. Even if it’s true – especially if it’s true! – I’m glad I prayed for him every day for many years. At the age of twelve, I don’t dare say I was ignorant of the Lord, for among the many voices rampaging through my head, I already recognized His voice. All the same, the first experience of poverty is ferocious! Blessed be he who has kept a child’s heart from despair! That’s something the members of high society don’t really know, or that they forget, because it would scare them too much. Among the poor as among the rich, a wretched child is alone, as alone as a king’s son. At least in our country, poverty can’t be shared, every poor person is solitary in his poverty, a poverty that is his alone, like his face or limbs. I don’t think I had a clear idea of that solitude, or perhaps I hadn’t formed any idea at all. I was simply obeying the law of my life, without understanding it. I would have ended up loving it. There is nothing tougher than the pride of the destitute, and suddenly that book from a distant place, from that fabulous land, gave me a whole nation as companion.
I lent the book to a friend, who of course never gave it back. Not that I’d especially want to reread it. What would be the point? It’s enough to have heard – or thought one has heard – just once the lament that resembles that of no other people – no – not even that of the Jewish people, who stew in their pride like a dead man in herbs. Actually, it isn’t a lament, it’s a chant, a hymn. Oh, I know it’s not a church hymn, you can’t call it a prayer. There is everything in it, as they say. The moans of the muzhik as he is whipped, the screams of the woman being beaten, the belching of the drunkard and that rumbling of wild joy, that roar of the entrails – for poverty and lust, alas, seek each other out, call to each other in the darkness, like two starving animals. Yes, that at least should horrify me. And yet I think that such poverty, a poverty that has forgotten even its name, that no longer searches, no longer reasons, but merely looks around wild-eyed, must wake up one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.
So I now seized the opportunity.
‘And what if they succeeded all the same?’ I asked the curé of Torcy.
He reflected for a moment. ‘As you can imagine, I’m not going to advise the poor to immediately give up their pension books to the tax collector! It’ll last however long it lasts … But in the end, what can we do? We’re here to teach the truth, and it shouldn’t embarrass us.’
His hands were shaking a little on the table, not a lot, and yet I realized that my question had aroused in him the memory of terrible struggles in which his courage, his reason, even perhaps his faith had almost foundered … Before replying, he moved his shoulders like a man who sees his way barred and moves aside. Not that I would have been much of a barrier!
‘Teaching, my boy, isn’t much fun! I’m not talking about those who get away with blarney: you’ll see plenty of them in your life, and you’ll learn to recognize them. Consoling truths, they call it. Truth should first set us free, and console us afterwards. Not that we have the right to call it consolation. Why not condolences? The word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who teach would rather pick it up with tongs, would you, for fear of getting burned, rather than grab it with both hands? Don’t make me laugh. A priest who comes down from the pulpit of Truth with his mouth like a hen’s arse, a little bit worked up but happy, hasn’t preached, all he’s done is drone, at best. Mind you, it can happen to anyone, we’re sleepers, it’s sometimes really hard to wake up, the apostles were fast asleep in Gethsemane! But in the end, we have to realize. Not that the priest who gesticulates and sweats like a removal man is any more awake than the others, oh no. I only claim that when the Lord happens to draw from me words that might be useful to my flock, I know it from how much it hurts me.’
He laughed, but I no longer recognized his laugh. It was a brave laugh, yes, but a broken one. I wouldn’t dare allow myself to judge a man so superior to me in every way, and the quality of which I am going to speak here is one that is alien to me, one to which neither my education nor my birth dispose me. True, the curé of Torcy is thought by some to be quite ponderous, almost vulgar – common, as the countess says. But I can write what I like here, without any risk of hurting anyone. Well, what seems to me – at least from a human point of view – the dominant character of this remarkable man is pride. If the curé of Torcy is not a proud man, then the word has no meaning, or at least I can no longer find one for it. At that moment, it was clear that he was suffering in his pride, in his pride as a proud man. I was suffering like him, and would so much have liked to do something useful, something effective. I told him stupidly:
‘Then I, too, must often drone because—’
‘Be quiet,’ he replied – I was surprised by the sudden gentleness of his voice – ‘we can’t expect an unfortunate tramp like you to yet do anything other than recite his lesson. But the Lord blesses your lesson anyway, because you don’t have the prosperous look of a preacher for Low Masses … You see,’ he went on, ‘any idiot is bound to be sensitive to the sweetness, the tenderness of the word, as the Holy Gospels relate it to us. Our Lord wanted it that way. First of all, it’s in the order of things. Only the weak or the thinkers imagine they’re obliged to roll their pupils and show the whites of their eyes before they’ve even opened their mouths. And besides, nature wo
rks in the same way: for the little baby resting in its cradle and taking possession of the world with its newly opened eyes, isn’t life all sweetness, all caress? And yet life is hard! Come to think of it, though, the welcome life gives us is not as deceptive as it may seem, because death asks only to keep the promise made at the dawn of time: the smile of death, though it might be more solemn, is no less sweet and smooth than the other. In short, the word becomes young for the young. But when the great and proud of this world think it clever to repeat it to themselves like a mere fairy tale, retaining only its touching, poetic details, then I’m scared – scared for them naturally. You hear the hypocrite, the lustful man, the miser, the wealthy exploiter – with their thick lips and shiny eyes – coo the Sinite parvulos without seeming to notice the words that follow – some of the most terrible perhaps that the ear of man has ever heard: “Except you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”’
He repeated the verse as if to himself, and then continued, his head hidden in his hands:
‘The ideal, you see, would be to preach the Gospel only to children. We calculate too much, there’s the rub. Which means we can’t do otherwise than teach the spirit of poverty, only that’s hard, my boy! So we try to make do, more or less. And we start by talking only to the rich. The confounded rich! They’re very strong, very crafty fellows, and they’re excellent diplomats, as is only to be expected. Whenever a diplomat has to put his signature to a treaty he doesn’t like, he argues over every clause. One word changed here, a comma moved there, and everything ends up reduced. This time, though, it was worth it: we were dealing with a curse, no less! But there are curses and curses, it seems. In this case, we skate over it. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God …” Mind you, I’m the first to find that text very harsh and I don’t refuse to make distinctions, which would in any case cause too much pain to the clientele of the Jesuits. Let us admit that when the Lord said those words, He meant the truly rich, the rich who have the spirit of riches. Fine! But when diplomats suggest that the eye of the needle was one of the gates of Jerusalem – only a little narrower – so that to enter the kingdom the rich man only risked grazing his calves or wearing his fine tunic down at the elbows, I can’t help it, it annoys me! Even if Our Lord had written the words “Danger of death” on sacks of gold in His own hand, as the highways administration does on electric pylons, they would have argued otherwise.’
Diary of a Country Priest Page 5
