Diary of a Country Priest

by Georges Bernanos

  I remained silent.

  ‘Answer me! She must have told you that her father … Oh, don’t deny it, I can see it in your eyes. And you believed her, did you? A wretched little girl who dares …’ She couldn’t finish. I think my silence, or the way I looked at her, or something emanating from me – what sadness – stopped her before she could raise her voice, and each time, even though she was shaking with vexation, she had to resume in her ordinary voice, just a little more hoarse than before. I think this powerlessness, which had at first irritated her, in the end upset her greatly. She clenched her fists, and the broken fan slipped from her hand. Blushing, she quickly swept the pieces under the clock. ‘I got carried away,’ she began, but the feigned gentleness of her tone was unconvincing. She was like a clumsy worker who, trying his tools one after the other without finding the one he is looking for, angrily throws them down. ‘Well, now it’s your turn. Why did you come, what do you want?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Chantal told me she is going away soon.’

  ‘Yes, very soon,’ she said, making an effort to laugh. ‘It was all arranged a long time ago. She lied to you. What gives you the right to oppose—’

  ‘I have no right, I simply wanted to know your intentions, and whether the decision is irreversible.’

  ‘It is. I don’t think a young girl can reasonably consider staying in England for several months with a friendly family an ordeal that she can’t face?’

  ‘That’s why I would have liked to come to an agreement with you, so that we can get your daughter to resign herself and obey.’

  ‘Obey? You would kill her!’

  ‘I do indeed fear that she might go to some extreme.’

  ‘Some extreme … How well you speak! I presume you’re insinuating that she’d kill herself? But that’s the last thing she’d do! She can’t stand it when she has a sore throat. She’s very much afraid of death. That’s the one thing in which she resembles her father.’

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘those are the very people who kill themselves.’

  ‘Come now!’

  ‘People who don’t dare face the void are fascinated by it, they throw themselves into it for fear of falling in.’

  ‘You must have learned that, you probably read it somewhere. It’s well beyond your experience. Are you afraid of death?’

  ‘Yes, madame. But allow me to speak frankly. It is a very difficult transition, one not made for proud heads.’ I lost patience. ‘I’m less afraid of my own death than I am of yours.’

  It was true: at that moment I could see her – or thought I could see her – dead. No doubt the image that formed in my eyes must have passed into hers, for she let out a stifled cry, a kind of fierce moan, and walked over to the window. ‘My husband is free to keep whomever he wants here. Besides, the governess has no means of her own, we can’t just throw her out to satisfy the resentment of an impudent girl!’ Once again she was unable to continue in the same tone, and her voice faltered. ‘It’s possible my husband has been too … too attentive towards her, too familiar. Men his age can be quite sentimental … Or think they are.’ She stopped again. ‘And what if I don’t really care? I’ve suffered all these years, all these ridiculous humiliations – he deceived me with all the maids, impossible girls, real slatterns – and now when I’m just an old woman, and resigned to be one, you think I should open my eyes, fight back, run risks? Why? Should I care more about my daughter’s pride than my own? Can’t she also endure what I’ve endured?’

  She had uttered these terrible words without raising her voice. Standing in the recess of the vast window, one arm dangling at her side, the other raised above her head, her hand crumpling the tulle curtain, she flung these words at me as she might have spat out a burning poison. Through the rain-splashed windows, I could see the grounds, looking so noble and so peaceful, the majestic curve of the lawns, the solemn old trees … Of course, this woman should have inspired in me nothing but pity. But whereas I usually find it easy to accept other people’s faults and share their shame, the contrast between the quiet house and its terrible secrets horrified me. Yes, the madness of men was less obvious to me at that moment than their stubbornness, their spite, the insidious aid they give, before the very eyes of God, to all the powers of confusion and death. Ignorance, disease and poverty devour thousands of innocents, and when Providence, by some miracle, sets up a refuge where peace can flourish, the passions come crawling in, and once they are there they scream day and night like beasts …

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘beware!’

  ‘Beware of what, of whom? You, perhaps? Let’s not be dramatic. What you’ve just heard is something I’d never before admitted to anyone.’

  ‘Not even your confessor?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with my confessor. These are feelings I cannot control. Not that they have ever influenced my conduct. This house, Father, is a Christian house.’

  ‘Christian!’ I cried. It was as if the word had struck me full in the chest and burned a hole there. ‘True, madame, it welcomes Christ, but what do you do with Him? He was at Caiaphas’ house too.’

  ‘Caiaphas? Are you mad? I don’t blame my husband or my daughter for not understanding me. Some misunderstandings are beyond repair. You get used to them.’

  ‘Yes, madame, you get used to not loving. The devil will have profaned everything, even the resignation of the saints.’

  ‘You argue like one of the common people. Every family has its secrets. Even if we displayed ours in the window, would we get any further? Having been deceived so many times, I could have become an unfaithful wife. But there is nothing in my life I need feel ashamed of.’

  ‘Blessed are the sins that leave us feeling ashamed! Please God that you despise yourself!’

  ‘A strange morality.’

  ‘True, it isn’t the world’s morality. What does God care for prestige, dignity, science, if they are nothing but a silk shroud on a rotting corpse?’

  ‘Perhaps you would prefer scandal?’

  ‘Do you think the poor are blind and deaf? Alas, they are only too clear-sighted! Nobody is more credulous, madame, than a man with a full belly. Whatever you do to hide the vices of your houses from the poor, they recognize them from a long way away, by their smell. We’re told endlessly about the terrible things the pagans did, but at least all they demanded of their slaves was to be as submissive as pets, and once a year they smiled at the revenge of the Saturnalia. Whereas you others, abusing the divine Word that teaches the poor the obedience of the heart, you try to steal by cunning what you should receive on your knees as a gift from heaven. There is no worse disorder in this world than the hypocrisy of the powerful.’

  ‘The powerful! I can name you ten farmers richer than we are. We’re very small people, Father.’

  ‘You’re seen as masters, lords of the manor. There is no other basis for power than the illusions of the poor.’

  ‘That’s just phrase-making. The poor don’t care about our family affairs!’

  ‘Oh, madame,’ I said, ‘there is really only one family, the great human family, of which Our Lord is the master. And you rich people could have been His privileged sons. Remember the Old Testament: there, the goods of the earth are often the wages of heavenly favour. After all, wasn’t it rather a precious privilege to be born exempt from that temporal servitude which make the lives of the needy a monotonous quest for the bare necessities, an exhausting struggle against hunger and thirst, an insatiable belly that demands its due each day? Your houses should be houses of peace and prayer. Haven’t you ever been moved by the loyalty of the poor to the naive image they have of you? You always talk about how much they envy you, what you don’t understand is that they don’t so much envy you your worldly goods as that indefinable something they couldn’t even name but which sometimes enchants their solitude, a dream of magnificence, of grandeur, a poor dream, a poor man’s dream, but one blessed by God.’

  She advanced towards me, as if to indicate that I should le
ave. I sensed that my last words had given her time to recover, and I regretted having uttered them. On rereading them, I am troubled. Not that I disown them! But they are merely human, nothing more. They express how deeply, how cruelly, my child’s heart has been disappointed. True, others besides myself, millions of members of my class, my species, still know that disappointment. It is in the inheritance of the poor, it is one of the essential elements of poverty, it is no doubt poverty itself. God wants the poor to beg for grandeur like all the rest, even though it shines forth from them without their knowing it.

  I took my hat from the chair on which I had placed it. When she saw me in the doorway, my hand on the handle, there was a movement of her whole body, a kind of impulse, which startled me. I read an incomprehensible anxiety in her eyes.

  ‘You’re a strange priest,’ she said in a voice shaking with impatience and irritation. ‘I’ve never known another one like you. At least let’s part good friends.’

  ‘How could I not be your friend, madame? I’m your priest, your pastor.’

  ‘Words, words! What exactly do you know of me?’

  ‘What you’ve told me.’

  ‘You’re trying to upset me, but you won’t succeed. I have too much common sense.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, stamping her feet, ‘we’ll be judged by our actions, I suppose. What sin have I committed? It’s true that my daughter and I are like two strangers. Until now we’ve tried to keep it hidden. Then this crisis came. I’m carrying out my husband’s wishes. If he’s wrong … Oh, of course, he thinks his daughter will come back to him.’ Something moved in her face, and she bit her lip, too late.

  ‘And is that what you think, madame?’ I said.

  God! She threw her head back and for a split second I saw – yes, I saw – the confession rise despite herself from the depths of her unforgiving soul. Her eyes, caught in a lie, said ‘Yes’, but the irresistible movement of her inner being flung the ‘No’ through her half-open mouth.

  I think that ‘No’ surprised even her, but she wasn’t tempted to hold it back. Family hatreds are the most dangerous of all for the reason that they endlessly replenish themselves, through constant contact, they are like those open abscesses that poison us gradually even though we feel no fever.

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘you’re throwing a child out of her house, and you know it will be for ever.’

  ‘That depends on her.’

  ‘I shan’t allow it.’

  ‘You hardly know her. She’s too proud to stay here on sufferance, she wouldn’t stand for it.’

  My patience left me. ‘God will break you!’ I cried.

  She let out a kind of moan – oh, not the moan of a defeated person asking for mercy, but rather the sigh, the deep sigh of a creature gathering strength before launching a challenge. ‘Break me? He’s already broken me. What more can He do to me? He took my son. I’m not afraid of Him any more.’

  ‘God took him away from you for a time, and your hardness—’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘The hardness of your heart may separate you from him for ever.’

  ‘You blaspheme. God does not take revenge.’

  ‘“He does not take revenge”: these are human words, meaningful only to you.’

  ‘Are you saying my son hates me? The son I bore, the son I nourished?’

  ‘You won’t hate each other, you won’t know each other any more.’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘No, I won’t be quiet, priests have been quiet too often, and I wish it were only out of pity. But we are cowards. The principle once laid down, we let others speak. And what have you others made of hell? A kind of perpetual prison, similar to yours, and you craftily lock up in advance the human prey that your police forces have been hunting down since the beginning of the world – the enemies of society. You’re happy to add the blasphemers and the sacrilegious. What sensible mind, what poor heart would accept such an image of God’s justice without revulsion? When that image embarrasses you, it’s all too easy for you to dismiss it. We judge hell by the maxims of this world, and hell is not of this world. It is not of this world, let alone of the Christian world. Eternal punishment, eternal expiation – the miracle is that we have any idea of it here on earth, when no sooner has the sin left us than all it takes is a look, a sign, a mute appeal, and forgiveness swoops down on it, from high in the heavens, like an eagle. That’s because the most wretched of living men, even if he thinks he can no longer love, still has the power to love. Our very hatred shines forth and the least tortured of demons would blossom in what we call despair, as if it were a luminous, triumphant morning. Hell, madame, means no longer to love. No longer to love: that sounds to your ears like a familiar expression. For a living man, no longer to love means to love less, or to love elsewhere. But what if this faculty which seems to us inseparable from our being, our very being – understanding is also a way to love – were to disappear? No longer to love, no longer to understand, and yet to keep on living, what a marvel! The mistake common to all is to attribute to these abandoned creatures something that is still ours, something of our perpetual mobility, when in fact they are outside time, outside movement, fixed for ever. Alas, if God led us by the hand towards one of these painful things, even if it had once been our dearest friend, what language would we use to speak to him? Of course, that a living man, our kin, the lowest of the low, vile among the vile, should be thrust like that into a burning limbo, well, I would like to share his fate, I’d argue with his torturer to take his place. Share his fate! … The misfortune, the inconceivable misfortune of these burning stones that once were men is that they no longer have anything to share.’

  I think I am reporting my words quite faithfully, and they may appear quite impressive when read. But I am sure I uttered them so clumsily, so awkwardly that they must have sounded ridiculous. I could barely articulate the last words. I was broken. Anyone seeing me, with my back to the wall, kneading my hat in my fingers, beside this imperious woman, would have taken me for a guilty man trying in vain to justify himself. (Doubtless, that is indeed what I was.) She was looking at me with extraordinary attention. ‘There is no sin,’ she said in a hoarse voice, ‘that can justify …’ I felt as if I were hearing her through one of those thick fogs that muffle sounds. And at the same time, sadness seized hold of me, an indefinable sadness against which I was totally powerless. Perhaps this was the greatest temptation of my life. At that moment, God helped me: I suddenly felt a tear on my cheek. A single tear, such as we see on the faces of the dying when they are nearing their end. She watched that tear flow.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ she said. ‘Did you understand me? I was saying that no sin in the world …’

  No, I admitted, I hadn’t heard her.

  She wouldn’t take her eyes off me. ‘Rest a moment, you’re not in a fit state to go anywhere, I’m stronger than you are. Come on, now, none of this is anything like what we’re taught. It’s daydreaming, poetry. I don’t think you’re a bad man. I’m sure that on reflection you will blush at this abominable blackmail. Nothing can separate us, in this world or the next, from what we have loved more than ourselves, more than life, more than salvation.’

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘even in this world, it takes a trifle, a poor little brain haemorrhage, less even than that, and we no longer know people who were once very dear to us.’

  ‘Death is not madness.’

  ‘No, it is even more unknown to us.’

  ‘Love is stronger than death, that’s what’s written in your books.’

  ‘We didn’t invent love. It has its own order, its own laws.’

  ‘God is its master.’

  ‘He isn’t the master of love, He is love. If you want to love, don’t place yourself outside love.’

  She put both her hands on my arms, her face almost touching mine. ‘This is senseless, you’re speaking to me as if I’m a criminal. My husband’s infidelities, my daughter’s indiff
erence and rebelliousness, all that is nothing, nothing, nothing!’

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘I am speaking to you as a priest, and according to the lights that are given me. You would be wrong to take me for a fanatic. Young as I am, I’m well aware that there are households like yours, some of them unhappier still. But a sickness that spares one kills another, and it seems to me that God has made it possible for me to know of the danger threatening you and you alone.’

  ‘In other words, I’m the cause of everything.’

  ‘Oh, madame, nobody knows what a bad thought may lead to in the long run. Good and bad thoughts are alike: for every thousand borne away on the wind, choked by brambles, withered by the sun, just one takes root. The seed of good and evil flies everywhere. The great misfortune is that men’s justice always intervenes too late: it represses or condemns acts, but can look back no further, no higher than the person who committed them. But our hidden sins poison the air that others breathe, and such and such a crime, of which some wretch carried the seed unwittingly, would never have ripened into fruit without that principle of corruption.’

  ‘This is madness, pure madness, unhealthy dreams.’ She was ashen. ‘If one thought of these things, one wouldn’t be able to live.’

  ‘I think you’re right, madame. I think that if God gave us a clear idea of just how connected we are to other people, for good or ill, we would indeed no longer be able to live.’

  Reading these lines, people will no doubt think that I was speaking quite deliberately, that I was following a plan. That was far from the case, I swear. All I was doing was defending my position.

  ‘Would you deign to tell me what this hidden sin, this worm in the fruit, is?’ she said after a long silence.

  ‘You must resign yourself to the … to the will of God and open your heart.’

  I didn’t dare speak to her more clearly about her dead son, and the word ‘resignation’ seemed to surprise her.

  ‘Resign myself? To what?’ Then all at once she understood.