Diary of a Country Priest

by Georges Bernanos

  What could I say, how could I support this wounded creature whose life seemed to be streaming out of her from some invisible mutilation? Despite everything, it seemed to me that I had to keep silent a few more seconds, to run that risk. In any case I had regained just enough strength to pray. She, too, was silent.

  At that moment, something strange happened. I can’t explain it, I am just reporting it as it was. I am so tired, so nervous, that it’s quite possible I merely dreamed it. In short, while I was staring at that patch of shadow where, even in broad daylight, it is hard for me to recognize a face, Mademoiselle Chantal’s face started to appear little by little, by degrees. The image held there, before my eyes, in a kind of wonderful instability, and I did not dare move for fear the slightest gesture might erase it. Of course, I did not think of this at the time, it only came to me afterwards. I wonder if that vision was not linked to my prayer, perhaps it was my prayer itself? My prayer was sad, and the image was equally sad. I could barely sustain that sadness, and at the same time, I wanted to share it, to assume it completely, I wanted it to penetrate me, fill my heart, my soul, my bones, my whole being. It silenced that muted murmur of confused, conflicting voices that I had been hearing constantly for two weeks, it re-established the silence there used to be, the happy silence within which God will speak – God speaks …

  I left the confessional. She had already stood up and now we found ourselves face to face again. I no longer saw my vision in her. She was extremely pale, to an almost ridiculous extent. Her hands were shaking. ‘I can’t stand it any more,’ she said in a childish voice. ‘Why did you look at me like that? Leave me alone!’ Her eyes were dry and burning. I didn’t know what to say in reply. I walked her gently to the door of the church.

  ‘If you loved your father, you wouldn’t remain in this horrible state of rebellion. Is that what you call love?’

  ‘I don’t love him any more,’ she replied, ‘I think I hate him, I hate all of them.’ The words hissed in her mouth, and at the end of every sentence she had a kind of hiccup, a hiccup of disgust, of fatigue, whatever. ‘I don’t want you to take me for an idiot,’ she said in a proud, self-satisfied tone. ‘My mother imagines I know nothing of life, as she puts it. I’d have to have been wearing a blindfold. Our servants are real horrors, though she thinks they’re beyond reproach – “very reliable people”. She chose them, so what do you expect? Girls should be sent to boarding school. In short, by the age of ten, or perhaps even earlier, there wasn’t much I didn’t know. It horrified me and made me feel sorry for them, but I accepted it all the same, just as you accept illness, death and lots of other repulsive necessities to which you have to resign yourself. But there was my father. My father was everything to me, a master, a king, a god – a friend, a great friend. When I was a little girl, he spoke to me all the time, he treated me almost as an equal, I had his photograph in a medallion on my chest, with a lock of hair. My mother never understood that. My mother—’

  ‘Don’t talk about your mother. You don’t love her. You even …’

  ‘Oh, you can say the word. Yes, I hate her, I’ve always—’

  ‘Be quiet! Alas, in every house, even Christian ones, there are invisible beasts, demons. The fiercest of them had been in your heart for a long time, and you didn’t know it.’

  ‘All the better,’ she said. ‘I hope that beast is horrible, hideous. I no longer respect my father. I no longer believe in him, and I don’t care about the rest. He’s deceived me. You can deceive a daughter just as you can deceive a wife. It’s not the same thing, it’s worse. But I’ll take my revenge. I’ll run away to Paris, I’ll dishonour myself, I’ll write to him and say: Look what you’ve turned me into! And he’ll suffer what I’ve suffered!’

  I reflected for a moment. It seemed to me that as she spoke I could read other words on her lips, words she did not utter but which seared themselves into my brain, one by one, in letters of fire. I cried out, almost reluctantly, ‘You won’t do that. That’s not what you’re tempted to do, I know!’

  She began shaking so hard that she had to rest her two hands on the wall. And another little event occurred which I now report like the other, without explaining this one either. I spoke without thinking, I suppose. And yet I was sure I was not wrong. ‘Give me the letter, the letter that’s there in your bag. Give it to me now!’

  She made no attempt to resist, simply heaved a deep sigh, shrugged and handed me the paper. ‘You’re the devil!’ she said.

  We walked out almost calmly, but I was finding it difficult to keep upright, I was walking bent double, my almost forgotten stomach pain had flared up again, stronger, more harrowing than I had ever known it. Something good old Dr Delbende had said came back to me: like being on a spit. That was what this was. I thought of that badger the count had nailed to the ground in front of me with a blow from his spear and which lay dying in the ditch, pierced through, abandoned even by the dogs.

  Mademoiselle Chantal had in any case stopped paying attention to me by now. She was walking, very tall, between the graves. I hardly dared look at her. I held her letter in my hands and she occasionally threw it a sidelong glance, with a strange expression on her face. It was hard for me to follow her, I had to bite my lips hard to stop myself from crying out with every step I took. In the end, it struck me that there was a lot of pride in my stubborn resistance to pain, and I simply prayed for it to stop for a minute, because I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  It was the first time perhaps that I had looked at a woman’s face. Oh, of course, I don’t usually avoid them, and I sometimes find them pleasant, but although I don’t share the qualms of some of my classmates from the seminary, I am too well aware of how wicked people can be not to observe the reserve indispensable to a priest. Today, curiosity got the upper hand. A curiosity I cannot feel any shame over. It was something like the curiosity of the soldier who ventures out of the trench to finally get a glimpse of the enemy in the open, or like … I remember how at the age of seven or eight, going with my grandmother to the house of an old cousin who had died and being left alone in the room, I lifted the coffin lid and looked at the face of the dead man.

  There are pure faces, places that radiate purity. The one I had before my eyes had probably been like that once. But now there was something closed and impenetrable about it. Purity had left it, but neither anger, nor scorn, nor shame had yet managed to erase that mysterious sign. They simply passed across that face like grimaces. Its extraordinary, almost frightening nobility testified to the force of evil, of sin, a sin that was not hers … God! Are we so wretched that the rebellion of a proud soul can turn against itself!

  ‘You may try your best,’ I said (we were now at the far end of the graveyard, near the little gate that leads to Casimir’s enclosure, in that abandoned corner where the grass is so tall that you can no longer make out the graves, graves abandoned for a century), ‘anyone other than me might have refused to listen to you. Well, I’ve listened to you. But I won’t take up your challenge. God does not take up challenges.’

  ‘Give me back the letter, and I’ll let you off,’ she said. ‘I can defend myself.’

  ‘Defend yourself against what, against whom? Evil is stronger than you, my child. Are you so proud that you believe yourself to be out of reach?’

  ‘Of the mud at least, if I want,’ she said.

  ‘You yourself are part of the mud.’

  ‘Words, words! Does your God now forbid us from loving our fathers?’

  ‘Don’t use the word love,’ I said. ‘You’ve forfeited the right, and probably the power. Love! Throughout the world there are thousands of people who ask God for love, who are ready to suffer a thousand deaths so that one drop of water may fall into their burning mouths, that water that was not refused to the Samaritan, and who beg for it in vain. I myself …’

  I stopped in time. But she must have understood, and I got the impression she was struck dumb. It is true that, even though I had spoken in a low voice �
�� or perhaps for that very reason – the restraint I had imposed on myself must have given my voice a peculiar tone. I felt it as if it were trembling in my chest. The girl must have thought me mad. Her eyes evaded mine, and I thought I could see a shadow spread across her cheeks.

  ‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘keep that excuse for others. I’m nothing but a poor, very unworthy and very unhappy priest. But I know what sin is, and you don’t. All sins are alike, there is only one sin. I’m not speaking an obscure language. These truths are within reach of the humblest Christian, provided he is willing to receive them from us. The world of sin faces the world of grace like the reflected image of a landscape on the edge of a dark, deep stretch of water. There is a communion of saints, there is also a communion of sinners. In the hatred and scorn that sinners bear one another, they unite, they embrace, they gather, they mingle, and one day they will be nothing, in the eyes of the Everlasting, but that lake of clinging mud over which the immense tide of divine love, the sea of living and reddening flames that have given birth to chaos, passes endlessly but in vain. Who are you to judge other people’s sins? Whoever judges sin becomes one with it, embraces it. You think you’re very different from the woman you hate, but in fact your hate and her sin are like two offshoots of the same branch. What do your quarrels matter? Gestures, cries, nothing more – just hot air. For better or worse, death will soon reduce you all to stillness and silence. What does it matter, when right now you are united in evil, all three of you caught in the trap of the same sin – a single sinful flesh – companions – yes, companions! – companions for all eternity?’

  I must be reporting my own words very inaccurately, because there remains nothing specific in my memory but the movements of the face on which I thought I could read them.

  ‘Enough!’ she said in a muted voice. Only her eyes did not ask me for mercy. I had never seen, will no doubt never see, such a hard face. And yet some presentiment told me that this was her final, her greatest effort against God, that the sin was leaving her. Why do we talk of youth and age? Was that pained face the same one I had seen a few weeks earlier, almost a child’s? I couldn’t have said what age she was now. Was she in fact ageless? Pride has no age. Nor does pain, when it comes down to it.

  She left without saying a word, abruptly, after a long silence … What have I done?

  * * *

  I am back very late from Aubin, where I had to visit some sick people after dinner. I doubt there’s much point in trying to sleep.

  How could I have let her go like that? I didn’t even ask her what she had expected of me!

  The letter is still in my pocket, but I have just looked at the front of the envelope: it is addressed to the count.

  My pain in the pit of my stomach, ‘like being on a spit’, won’t go away, I can even feel it in my back. Constant spells of nausea. I am almost happy that I am unable to think: the fierce distraction of suffering is stronger than anxiety. I remember those unruly horses which, when I was a little child, I would go to see being shod by Cardinot the blacksmith. No sooner was the little rope, sticky with blood and foam, tied around their muzzles than the beasts stopped struggling, lowering their ears and shaking on their long legs. ‘You’ve had your fill, you crazy thing!’ the blacksmith would say with a huge laugh.

  I, too, have had my fill.

  The pain stopped suddenly. Actually, it had been so regular, so constant, that, with the help of my tiredness, I was almost dozing. When it wore off, I leaped up, my temples throbbing, my brain terribly lucid, having the impression – the certainty – that I had heard someone calling me …

  My lamp was still alight on the table.

  I walked around the garden, in vain. I knew I wouldn’t find anybody. It all still seems to me a dream, but one of which every detail appears to me so clearly, in a kind of inner light, an icy illumination that leaves no area of shade where I can find any security, any rest … This is how, beyond death, man must see himself again. Oh, yes, what have I done?

  For weeks now I hadn’t prayed, hadn’t been able to pray. Hadn’t been able? Who knows? This grace of graces has to be earned like any other, and no doubt I no longer deserved it. Anyway, God withdrew from me, of that at least I’m sure. From that point on, I ceased to be anything, and I kept this secret to myself alone! More than that: I felt quite vain about keeping this silence, I found it beautiful, heroic. It is true that I was tempted to go and see the curé of Torcy. But it was at the feet of my superior, the dean of Blangermont, that I should have thrown myself. I would have said to him, ‘I am no longer fit to lead a parish, I have neither prudence, nor judgement, nor common sense, nor true humility. Just a few days ago, I still allowed myself to judge you, to scorn you almost. God has punished me. I am a danger to men’s souls!’

  He would have understood! In fact, who would not understand, even if only on reading these wretched pages in which my weakness, my shameful weakness, shines through every line? Is this the testimony of the leader of a parish, a guide of souls, a master? I was supposed to be the master of this parish, and yet I show myself in this diary as I am: a wretched beggar who goes with his hand out from door to door and doesn’t even dare to knock. Oh, of course, I didn’t refuse the task, I did my best, but what was the point? That ‘best’ was nothing. A leader is not only judged on his intentions: having assumed responsibility, he remains accountable for the results. To take one example, in refusing to admit the bad state of my health, are we to believe that I was simply obeying a sense, even quite an exalted one, of duty? Did I actually have the right to run that risk? The risk a leader takes becomes everyone’s risk.

  The day before yesterday, I should not have received Mademoiselle Chantal. Her first visit to the presbytery was hardly decent. At least I should have been able to interrupt her before she … But I acted alone, as usual. I didn’t want to see that that creature, in front of me, swaying on the edge of hate and despair as if on the edge of a double chasm … That tortured face of hers! Of course, such a face could not lie, her distress was clear to see. And yet other people’s distress has not moved me to this extent. Why did hers strike me as an intolerable challenge? The memory of my wretched childhood is too close, I sense. I, too, once experienced that horrified recoil from the unhappiness and shame of the world … God! The revelation of impurity would be just a trivial test if it did not reveal us to ourselves. That hideous voice, never before heard, and which, as soon as we do hear it, awakens in us a long murmur …

  No matter! I should have acted with all the more thought, all the more caution. And I landed my blows at random, risked harming the innocent, harmless prey rather than the beast that was abducting her … A priest worthy of the name does not see only the concrete case. As usual, I feel that I took no account of the familial and social necessities, or the compromises, no doubt legitimate ones, that they give rise to. An anarchist, a dreamer, a poet: the dean of Blangermont is quite right.

  I have just spent a full hour at my window, in spite of the cold. The moonlight has laid a kind of luminous cotton wool over the valley, so light that the stirring of the air unpicks it into long streaks that rise obliquely into the sky and seem to hover there at a vertiginous height, although still very close … So close that I see shreds of it around the tops of the poplars. What a chimera!

  We really know nothing of the world, we are not of the world. To my left, I saw a big dark mass surrounded by a halo, and which, by contrast, has the glow of a basalt rock, a mineral density. It is the highest point of the estate, a wood planted with elms, and towards the summit of the hill, huge fir trees which storms from the west mutilate every autumn. The chateau is on the other slope, turning its back on the village and all of us.

  No, however hard I try, I can remember nothing of that conversation, no specific sentence … It is as if my attempt to sum it up in a few lines in this diary has finally erased it. My memory is empty. One thing strikes me, though. Whereas it is usually impossible for me to put ten words together in succession wit
hout stumbling, I have the feeling I spoke profusely. And yet I was expressing, for the first time perhaps, without caution, without digressions, without qualms either, I fear, that very vivid feeling – although it isn’t a feeling, it’s almost a vision, there is nothing abstract about it – the image, anyway, that I have of evil, of its power, because I usually make an effort to dismiss such a thought, it tests me too much, it forces me to comprehend certain unexplained deaths, certain suicides … Yes, many people, many more than we dare imagine, people apparently indifferent to any religion, or even any morality, must, one day or another – it only takes a moment – have sensed something of that possession and tried to escape it at all costs. Solidarity in evil, that’s the horrifying thing! Crimes, however terrible, tell us hardly more about the nature of evil than the greatest works of the saints tell us about the splendour of God. When, at the seminary, we start to study those books that a Freemason journalist of last century – Léo Taxil, I think – put before the public under quite a misleading title, something like Secret Books of the Confessors, what strikes us first of all is the extreme poverty of the means available to man, not so much to offend as to outrage God, to wretchedly mimic the demons … For Satan is too hard a master: he is not someone who can command, like his counterpart, with His divine simplicity: imitate me! He cannot bear his victims resembling him, he allows them only a coarse, abject, powerless caricature, on which the fierce irony of the abyss must feed, without its appetite ever being satisfied.