I therefore wish to set it down here, in all honesty, that I am not relinquishing my duties. On the contrary: the almost incredible improvement in my health greatly favours my work. So it is not quite correct to say that I am not praying for Dr Delbende. I fulfil that obligation as I do all the others. I have even deprived myself of wine in the last few days, which has weakened me to a dangerous extent.
A short conversation with the curé of Torcy. This admirable priest’s self-control is obvious, blindingly so, and yet one would look in vain for any material sign of it, he does not betray it by any gesture, any specific word, anything that feels like an effort of will. His face reveals his suffering, expresses it with a frankness, a simplicity that are truly supreme. At such moments, we sometimes catch, even from the best of men, an ambiguous look, the kind of look that says more or less clearly, ‘You see, I’m fine, don’t praise me, it’s quite natural to me, thank you …’ His look innocently seeks out your compassion, your sympathy, but there is a nobility about it. This is the way a king might beg. He spent two nights beside the body, and his cassock, always so clean, so neat, was now creased into thick fanlike folds and covered in stains. For the first time in his life, perhaps, he had forgotten to shave.
There is one sign, though, of his self-control: the spiritual strength that emanates from him is undimmed. Visibly consumed with anguish (there is a rumour that Dr Delbende committed suicide), he still spreads calm, certainty and peace. I officiated with him this morning, as subdeacon. I had had the impression previously that at the moment of the consecration, his beautiful hands shake a little as he holds them above the chalice. Today, they didn’t shake. They even had an authority about them, a majesty … The contrast with his face – hollowed by sleeplessness, exhaustion and some more tormenting vision, which I can guess at – cannot really be described.
He left without waiting to attend the funeral lunch provided by the doctor’s niece – who looks a lot like Madame Pégriot, only even fatter. I walked him to the station, and as the train was not due for another half-hour, we sat down on a bench. He was very weary, and in the full light of day his face struck me as even more ravaged. For the first time I noticed two surprisingly sad, bitter lines at the corners of his mouth. I think that made up my mind for me. I said abruptly:
‘Aren’t you afraid the doctor might have—’
He didn’t let me finish my sentence, his imperious gaze somehow nailing the last words to my lips. With great difficulty I managed not to lower my eyes, because I know he doesn’t like that. ‘Eyes that flinch,’ as he puts it. At last his features softened gradually and he even smiled.
I shan’t report his conversation. Was it even a conversation? It probably lasted no more than twenty minutes … The deserted little square, with its two rows of lime trees, seemed much quieter than usual. I remember a flight of pigeons passing regularly above us, at high speed, so low that you could hear the whoosh of their wings.
He does indeed fear that his old friend killed himself. He was apparently very demoralized, having, up until the last moment, counted on inheriting from a very old aunt who had recently put all her property in the hands of a very well-known businessman, representing the Bishop of S—, in exchange for an annuity. The doctor had made a lot of money in the past and gave it away in acts of generosity which were always very original and slightly crazy, but which didn’t always remain secret and made people suspect him of political ambitions. Ever since his younger colleagues had shared his patients among them, he had not consented to change his habits.
‘What can one do? He wasn’t the kind of man to make sacrifices for the greater good. He told me a hundred times that fighting what he called the ferocity of men and the stupidity of fate went against common sense, that society could not be cured of injustice – whoever killed one would kill the other. He compared the illusions of the reformers to those of the old followers of Pasteur who dreamed of an aseptic world. In short, he considered himself a Luddite, nothing more, the survivor of a long-disappeared race – supposing it ever existed – waging against the invader, who over the centuries had become the legitimate owner, a struggle without hope and without mercy. “I’m taking my revenge,” he would say. He didn’t believe in the regular troops, if you see what I mean. “Whenever I meet an injustice going about all on its own, unprotected, and I find that it’s a match for me, neither too weak nor too strong, I jump on it and strangle it.” That cost him dearly. No later than last autumn he paid old woman Gachevaume’s debts – eleven thousand francs – because Monsieur Duponsot, the miller, had arranged to buy up the claims and had his eye on the land. Obviously his devilish aunt’s death was the final blow. But three or four hundred thousand francs wouldn’t have lasted long in those hands! Especially as with age the poor dear man had become impossible. He’d got it into his head that he was going to maintain – that’s the word – an old drunk named Rebattut, a former poacher, as lazy as a dormouse, who lives in a charcoal burner’s hut on the edge of the Goubault estate and is known for running after the young cowgirls, is never sober, and on top of everything else didn’t care two hoots about him. Not that he was unaware of this, oh no! But he had his reasons, reasons of his own, as always.’
‘What were they?’
‘That this Rebattut was the best hunter he had ever met, that you couldn’t deprive him of that pleasure any more than you could deprive him of food and drink, that by constantly taking him in, the gendarmes would end up turning this harmless maniac into a dangerous savage. All that mixed up in his dear old head with what were genuine obsessions. He would say to me, “Giving men passions and forbidding them from satisfying them is beyond me, I’m not God.” It has to be said that he hated the marquis of Bolbec, and that this marquis had sworn to have Rebattut cornered by his gamekeepers and sent to Devil’s Island. So why not?’
I think I wrote somewhere in this diary that sadness seems alien to the curé of Torcy. His soul is cheerful. On this occasion, whenever I looked away from his face, which he kept raised very high and very straight, I was surprised by a particular tone in his voice. However grave it gets, you cannot say it is sad: it retains a certain almost imperceptible quiver that is like the quiver of an inner joy, a joy so deep that nothing can upset it, like those great stretches of water that remain calm in a storm.
He told me many other things, almost incredible, almost mad things. At the age of fourteen, our old friend had wanted to become a missionary, but he lost his faith during his medical studies. He was the favourite pupil of a very great teacher, whose name I cannot remember, and his classmates all predicted an exceptionally brilliant career for him. The news that he had settled in this godforsaken region came as a great surprise. He said he was too poor at the time to prepare for the exams that would have got him his diploma, not to mention the fact that overwork had seriously compromised his health. The truth was that he couldn’t get over his loss of faith. He had kept some extraordinary habits: for example, he sometimes yelled at a crucifix hanging on the wall of his bedroom. Occasionally he would sob at its feet, his head in his hands, at other times he would go so far as to wave his fist at it in defiance.
A few days ago, I would probably have listened to these confidences with more composure. But at that moment I wasn’t in a fit state to bear them, they were a stream of molten lead being poured over an open wound. Of course, I hadn’t suffered as much, and I will probably never suffer again, even when I die. All that I could do was keep my eyes lowered. If I had raised them to the curé of Torcy, I think I would have cried out. Unfortunately, on such occasions, we are often less in control of our tongues than of our eyes.
‘If he really did kill himself, do you think …’
The curé of Torcy jumped, as if my question had startled him out of a dream. (It’s true that for the last five minutes he had been speaking rather as if in a dream.) I could sense him looking at me out of the corner of his eyes. I am sure he guessed many things.
‘If anyone other than you
had asked me a question like that!’
Then for a long time he remained silent. The little square was still as deserted and as bright, and at regular intervals, in their monotonous round, the big birds seemed to plunge down on us from high in the sky. I waited mechanically for their return, the swish of their wings like that of a huge scythe.
‘God alone is judge,’ he said, in his calm voice. ‘And Maxence’ (it was the first time I had heard him call his old friend that) ‘was a just man. God judges the just. It isn’t idiots or riffraff who give me most concern, far from it! What do we have saints for? To make up for the lot of them, and they’re good at it. Whereas …’
His large hands rested on his knees, and his broad shoulders cast a big shadow in front of him.
‘What can we do? We’re at war, right? We must look the enemy in the face – face up to things, as he often said, do you remember? That was his motto. In a war, if a man in the third or fourth line, a mule driver at a staging post, falls back, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Or if it’s some decrepit civilian with nothing to do but read the paper, why should that bother the field marshal? But there are those in the vanguard. In the vanguard, a chest is a chest. One chest less and it makes a difference. And then there are the saints. What I call saints are those who have received more than the others. The rich. I’ve always thought that the study of human societies, if we were able to observe them in a metaphysical spirit, would give us the key to many mysteries. After all, man is in the image and likeness of God: whenever he tries to create an order to suit himself, he can’t help but make a clumsy copy of the other, the true order. The division into rich and poor must correspond to some great universal law. In the eyes of the Church, a rich man is the poor man’s protector, his elder brother in a way! Mind you, he’s often that despite himself, through the simple play of economic forces, as they say. A millionaire goes bust, and thousands of people are out of a job. So it’s easy to imagine what happens in the invisible world when one of these rich people I’m talking about, a steward of God’s mercies, stumbles! Security provided by the mediocre is nonsense. But security provided by the saints, now that’s a scandal! We must be mad not to understand that the only justification for inequality in the metaphysical sphere is risk. Our risk. Yours and mine.’
As he spoke, his body remained straight and still. Anyone seeing him sitting on that bench, on that cold sunny winter afternoon, would have taken him for an honest priest discussing the thousand trivial matters of his parish in a gently boastful manner with his deferential, attentive young colleague.
‘Bear in mind what I’m about to say: the whole problem may have derived from the fact that he hated mediocre people. “You hate anyone mediocre,” I’d say to him. He hardly bothered to deny it, for he was a just man, I repeat. We should be careful, you see. The mediocre man is a trap of the devil’s. Mediocrity is too complicated for us, it’s a matter for God. In the meantime, the mediocre should find a shelter in our shadow, under our wing. A shelter in the warmth – they need warmth, the poor devils! “If you were really searching for Our Lord, you would find Him,” I’d also say, and he’d reply, “I seek God where I have the most chance of finding Him, among His poor.” Slap! Only, his poor were all fellows like him, in other words, rebels, true lords. I asked him one day, “What if Jesus Christ were actually waiting for you in the apparel of one of these people you despise, because apart from sin, He assumes and sanctifies all our miseries? That coward is only a wretch crushed beneath the immense social apparatus like a rat caught beneath a beam; that miser an anxious man convinced of his powerlessness and consumed with the fear of not being up to scratch. That man who seems pitiless suffers from a kind of phobia of the poor – there is such a thing – a terror as inexplicable as that inspired in the nervous by spiders or mice. Do you seek Our Lord among these kinds of people?” I asked him. “And if you don’t seek Him there, what are you complaining about? It is you who missed Him …” And perhaps that’s what happened: he missed Him.’
* * *
Someone came back last night (or rather just as night was falling) into the garden of the presbytery. I imagine they were planning to ring the bell when I abruptly opened the skylight just above the window. The footsteps sped away quickly. A child, perhaps?
The count has just been here. His pretext: the rain. With each step, the water was spurting from his long boots. The three or four rabbits he had killed lay at the bottom of his game bag, a heap of bleeding mud and grey fur, a horrible sight. He hung this bag on the wall, and as he talked to me I could see through the mesh, amid that bristling fur, a still damp, very gentle eye staring at me.
He apologized for not beating about the bush, for getting straight to the point, with military frankness. It was about Sulpice Mitonnet: apparently, the whole village thinks his habits and morals are reprehensible. In the army, he had, as the count put it, ‘come close to being court-martialled’. He’s crafty and depraved, that’s the general verdict.
Rumours, as usual, facts that can be interpreted several ways, nothing specific. For example, it’s known that for several months Sulpice worked for a retired colonial magistrate of dubious reputation. I replied that you cannot choose your masters. The count shrugged and threw me a quick up-and-down look that clearly meant: ‘Is he stupid, or is he just pretending to be?’
I admit that there was something in my attitude that must have surprised him. I assume he had been expecting objections. I remained calm, perhaps even indifferent. What I endure is enough for me. Besides, as I listened to his words I had the strange impression that they were addressed to someone other than me – to the man I used to be and am no longer. They were coming too late. The count was also coming too late. His cordiality seemed to me quite affected this time, even a touch vulgar. Nor do I much like the way his eyes dart everywhere, shooting from one corner of the room to the other with surprising agility and then coming back and looking me straight in the eyes.
I had just had dinner, and the pitcher of wine was still on the table. Without a ‘by your leave’, he poured himself a glass. ‘This wine of yours is quite sharp, Father,’ he said. ‘It’s unhealthy. You should keep your jug nice and clean, wash it in boiling water.’
Sulpice came this evening as usual. His side hurts a little, he says he often gets breathless, and he coughs a lot. As I was talking to him, I was seized with nausea, a kind of chill, and I left him to his work (he is very skilfully replacing a few rotten boards in the wooden floor) and went and walked up and down the road. When I got back, I hadn’t yet decided anything, of course. I opened the door to the room. Busy with the planing of the boards, he didn’t see or hear me. He nevertheless turned abruptly, and our eyes met. In his, I read first surprise, then attention, then lies. Not this or that lie, a desire to lie. It was like murky water, like mud. And at last – I was still staring at him, the whole thing only lasted a moment, a few seconds perhaps, I don’t know – the true colour of his eyes appeared again, from beneath that sediment. It cannot be described. His mouth started trembling. He gathered his tools, carefully rolled them in a piece of cloth and walked out without a word.
I should have held him back, questioned him. I couldn’t. I couldn’t take my eyes off his poor figure on the road. It gradually straightened up and, as he passed the Degas’ house, he even raised his cap with a very gallant gesture. Twenty paces further on, he probably started whistling one of those terrible sentimental songs he loves, the words of which he has carefully copied into a little notebook. I went back into my room feeling extraordinarily weary. I understand nothing of what happened. Beneath his fairly shy exterior, Sulpice is quite insolent. Plus, he has the gift of the gab and sometimes talks to excess. I’m quite surprised that he missed this opportunity to justify himself – he must have thought it too easy a task, because I am sure he has little respect for my experience or judgement. And besides, how could he have guessed? I don’t think I said a word, and I doubt that I was looking at him with any contempt or anger i
n my eyes … Will he come back?
As I lay down on my bed to try and get a little rest, something seemed to break in me, in my chest, and I was seized with a trembling that is still with me as I write now.
No, I haven’t lost my faith! That expression ‘losing faith’ – as one might lose one’s purse or a bunch of keys – has always struck me as rather foolish. I think it belongs to that vocabulary of middle-class respectable piety bequeathed by those sad but loquacious priests in the eighteenth century.
One doesn’t lose faith, it stops informing one’s life, that’s all. And that’s why spiritual advisors in the old days weren’t wrong to be sceptical about such intellectual crises, which are no doubt much rarer than is claimed. When a cultivated man has come gradually, imperceptibly, to push his belief back into some cranny of his brain, where it can only be retrieved through an effort of reflection, of memory, even if he still has tender feelings for what is no longer, but might have been, it is impossible to give the name ‘faith’ to an abstract sign that no more resembles faith, to borrow a famous comparison, than the constellation of the Swan resembles an actual swan.
I haven’t lost faith. The cruelty of my ordeal, its shattering, inexplicable abruptness, may have overturned my reason, my nerves, suddenly dried up the spirit of prayer within me – for ever, who knows? – and filled me to overflowing with a dark resignation, more terrifying than the sudden fits and terrible plunges of despair, but my faith remains intact, I feel it. Wherever it is, though, I cannot reach it. I can find it neither in my poor brain, which is incapable of putting two thoughts together properly and is tormented by almost insane images, nor in my sensibility, nor even in my conscience. It seems to me sometimes that it has receded and survives where I would certainly not have looked for it, in my flesh, in my wretched flesh, in my blood and in my flesh, my perishable but baptized flesh. I wish I could express this thought as simply, as naively as possible. I haven’t lost faith, because God has deigned to keep me from impurity. Oh, no doubt such a comparison would make the philosophers smile! And it’s clear that the greatest disorders couldn’t lead a sensible man astray to the point of making him doubt the validity, for example, of certain axioms in geometry. With one exception, though: madness. After all, what do we know about madness? What do we know about lust? What do we know about their secret connections? Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of the species. What to say to one’s side? To the very source of life? To confuse the lust that is common to man and the desire that brings the sexes together is like giving the same name to the tumour and the organ it is eating away at, whose deformity sometimes resembles it to a horrendous extent. The world goes to great lengths, helped by all the prestige of art, to hide this shameful wound. It is as if with each new generation it is afraid that creatures still pure, still intact, will rise up in revolt, asserting their dignity and their despair. With what strange solicitude it watches over its children, hoping to attenuate in advance, through the use of enchanting images, the humiliation of a first experience that is almost inevitably pathetic! And when the half-conscious lament of majestic youth besmirched and offended by demons nevertheless rises, how easily the world stifles it in laughter! With what a skilful combination of sentiment and spirit, of pity, tenderness and irony, with what complicit vigilance we surround adolescence! Old swifts do not make such a fuss of the fledgling when it takes its first flight. And if the revulsion is too strong, if the precious little creature, over which the angels still watch, is seized with nausea and tries to vomit, we hand it a golden basin, carved by artists and bejewelled by poets, while an orchestra softly accompanies its retching with a vast murmur of foliage and splashing water!
Diary of a Country Priest Page 11
