I had to leave the chateau at about two, and the catechism class went on much later than I had thought, because we are coming up to the end-of-term examination. I would have liked to spend the night beside the countess, but the nuns are still there, and the canon of La Motte-Beuvron, an uncle of the count’s, decided to watch with them. I didn’t dare insist. In addition, the count continues to be incomprehensibly cold, almost hostile towards me. What am I to think?
The canon of La Motte-Beuvron, who is clearly also troubled by me, took me aside for a moment and asked me if during yesterday’s conversation, the countess made any reference to her health. It was obvious to me that it was his way of discreetly encouraging me to talk. Should I have? I don’t think so. I would have had to tell him the whole story. And the countess’s secret, which never belonged to me entirely, belongs to me less than ever now, or more precisely, has been taken away from me for ever. Can I foresee how ignorance, jealousy, hatred perhaps, would turn it to their advantage? Now that these horrible rivalries have lost their meaning, could I risk reviving their memory? And it is not only a question of memory, I fear they may stay alive for a long time still, they are the kind that death does not always defuse. And besides, if I report the confessions I received, will they not seem to justify old resentments? Mademoiselle Chantal is young, and I know from experience how tenacious, how indelible perhaps, the impressions of youth are … In short, I told the canon that the countess had expressed the desire to see understanding re-established among the members of her family.
‘Really, Father?’ he said curtly. ‘Were you her confessor?’
‘No.’ I must admit his tone irritated me somewhat. ‘I think she was ready to appear before God,’ I added.
He looked at me strangely.
I went back into the bedroom one last time. The nuns were finishing their rosary. Heaped along the wall were bunches of flowers which had been brought by women friends and relatives who trooped by all day long, filling the house with their almost joyful noise. There was the constant flash of car headlights across the windows, I would hear the crunch of tyres on the gravel in the driveway, the shouting of the drivers, the sound of the horns. None of this put a stop to the monotonous droning of the nuns, they were like two women at the spinning wheel.
The light from the candles was better than the daylight had been at revealing the countess’s face through the muslin. A few hours had sufficed to calm it, to relax it, and the enlarged rings beneath the closed eyelids were like a kind of pensive gaze. It was still a proud face, of course, even imperious. But it seemed to be turned away from an adversary she had long braved face to face and to have gradually sunk into an infinite, unfathomable meditation. How far from us it already was, how beyond our power! And suddenly I saw her poor hands, folded, her very thin, very long hands, more truly dead than the face, and I recognized a little mark, a simple scratch I had noticed the previous evening, while she was clasping the medallion to her chest. The thin strip of collodion was still there. I don’t know why my heart broke at that moment. The memory of the struggle she had sustained in front of me, before my eyes, that great combat for eternal life from which she emerged exhausted but unbeaten, came back to me so vividly that I thought I might faint. How could I not have guessed that such a day was to have no tomorrow, that we had confronted one another at the extreme limit of that invisible world, on the edge of the abyss of light? We might have fallen in together! ‘Be at peace,’ I had said to her. And she had received this peace on her knees. May she keep it for ever! It was I who gave it to her. What a marvel, that one can give a gift of something one does not oneself possess, what a sweet miracle from empty hands! The hope that was dying in my heart had blossomed again in hers, the spirit of prayer I had thought lost irrevocably God had given back to her, perhaps in my name, who knows? … May she keep that too, may she keep it all! And here am I, stripped bare, Lord, as only you can strip a person bare, for nothing escapes your terrifying solicitude, your terrifying love.
I moved aside the muslin veil and with my fingertips lightly touched the high, pure forehead, filled with silence. And, poor little priest that I am, faced with that woman who as recently as yesterday had been so superior to me in age, birth, fortune, mind, I understood – yes, I understood what paternity was.
On my way out of the chateau, I had to cross the gallery. The door to the drawing room was wide open, as was that of the dining room, where people were bustling around the table and hastily gobbling down sandwiches before setting off back to their homes. Such is the custom of this region. There were some who, whenever a member of the family passed and caught them with their mouths full and their cheeks puffed up, went to a great deal of trouble to assume an air of sadness and compassion. The old ladies especially struck me as – I hardly dare write the words – ravenous and ugly. Mademoiselle Chantal turned her back on me, and I heard, as I passed, a kind of murmur. I got the impression they were talking about me.
I have just leaned my elbows on the window. The parade of cars continues down there, that muted party atmosphere … Her funeral is on Saturday.
* * *
First thing this morning, I went to the chateau. I was told that the count was overcome with grief and could not receive me, and that the canon of La Motte-Beuvron would come to the presbytery at about two this afternoon to speak to me about the funeral arrangements. What is going on?
The two nuns thought I looked so ill that, unbeknownst to me, they asked the butler to bring me a glass of port, which I enjoyed greatly. The boy, old Clovis’s nephew, who is usually so polite and even attentive, replied very coldly to my advances. (It is true that servants of great houses don’t really like familiarity, which is probably awkward anyway, from people like me.) But he was serving at table yesterday evening, and I think he must have overheard some of what they said about me. What did they say?
I only have half an hour to eat my lunch, change my douillette (it is starting to rain again) and tidy the house a little – it has been in a terrible state of untidiness for several days now. I wouldn’t like to shock the canon of La Motte-Beuvron, who is already so ill disposed towards me. So I really should be spending my time more usefully than in writing these lines. And yet I need this diary more than ever. The small amount of time I devote to it is the only time I feel the will to look closely at myself. Reflection has become so painful to me, my memory is so bad – I mean my memory of recent events, let alone any other! – my imagination so slow, that I must kill myself with work to tear myself away from the kind of vague, formless daydreaming from which prayer, alas, doesn’t always deliver me. As soon as I stop, I feel myself sink into a half-sleep that clouds all the perspectives of memory, makes each of my past days a landscape of mists, without roads or landmarks. Provided I keep it scrupulously, morning and evening, my diary punctuates these solitary musings, and I sometimes slip the last sheets into my pocket so that I can reread them whenever, in the course of my monotonous, exhausting walks from one subsidiary parish to the other, I fear I will have one of my dizzy spells.
As it is, does this diary have too much place in my life? … I don’t know, but God does.
* * *
The canon of La Motte-Beuvron has just left. He is a very different priest from what I imagined. Why didn’t he speak to me more clearly, more frankly? He would have liked to, no doubt, but these worldly and oh-so-proper men visibly dread showing their softer side.
We first settled the matter of the funeral, which the count wants to be decent, but no more than that, according – he says – to the wishes so often expressed by his wife. Once that was done, we both remained silent for quite a long time. I was very embarrassed. The canon kept looking up at the ceiling and mechanically opening and closing the case of his big gold watch. ‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘my nephew Omer’ (the count’s name is Omer, I didn’t know that) ‘wishes to speak to you in private this evening.’ I replied that I had arranged to meet the sacristan at four o’clock to unfold the drape
ries, but would go to the chateau straight after that. ‘Come on, my boy, you can see him in the presbytery. You’re not the chateau’s chaplain, absolutely not! I’d even advise you to be on the defensive, don’t let yourself be dragged into discussing the acts of your ministry with him.’
‘What acts?’
He reflected before replying. ‘You saw my great-niece here?’
‘Mademoiselle Chantal came to see me, Father.’
‘She is a dangerous, untameable character. No doubt she was able to win you over?’
‘I treated her harshly. I think rather that I humiliated her.’
‘She hates you.’
‘I don’t think so, Father. She may imagine she hates me, which is not the same thing.’
‘Do you think you have some influence over her?’
‘For the moment, none whatever. But she may not forget that a poor man like me stood up to her one day, and that the Lord is not to be deceived.’
‘She gave a very different version of your interview.’
‘That may be so. Mademoiselle is too proud not to blush sooner or later at her lie, and she will be ashamed of it. She needs to be ashamed.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me?’ I said. ‘Look at my face. If the Lord made it for something, it was certainly for slaps, and I haven’t yet received any.’
At that moment, his gaze fell on the door of the kitchen, which had been left ajar, and he saw my table, still covered with the oilcloth, with the remains of my meal on it: bread, apples (I was brought a basket of them yesterday) and the three-quarters-empty bottle of wine.
‘I see you don’t take much care of your health.’
‘I have a very temperamental stomach,’ I replied. ‘There’s not a lot I can digest: bread, fruit, wine.’
‘Judging by the way you look, I fear that wine is more harmful to you than useful. The illusion of health is not health.’
I tried to explain to him that the wine was an old Bordeaux supplied by the gamekeeper.
He smiled, and his tone changed: he was talking to me now as an equal, almost deferentially. ‘Father, it’s likely we don’t have two ideas in common as far as running a parish is concerned, but you are the master in this one, and you have a perfect right to be so, one has only to hear you to know that. I have been obedient too often in my life not to have formed an idea of true authority, wherever I find it. Only, use yours with caution. There are some people who may feel that authority particularly. I am an old priest, so I know how a seminary training can destroy individuality, reducing everyone to the same level of mediocrity. It was unable to do anything with you. And the reason for your strength lies in the fact that you don’t know, or don’t dare realize, how different you are from everyone else.’
‘You’re making fun of me,’ I said. A strange dizziness had taken hold of me, I could feel myself trembling with fear, faced with that indefinable gaze, whose impassivity chilled me.
‘It’s not a matter of knowing one’s own power, Father, but the way in which one uses it, because that is what makes a man. What’s the use of a power which one never uses or uses only half of? In great situations as in small ones, you commit yours totally, and no doubt unwittingly. That explains many things.’
As he spoke, he took a sheet of paper from my desk and pulled the pen holder and the inkwell towards him. Then he pushed it all towards me.
‘I don’t need to know what happened between you and … the late countess,’ he said. ‘But I would like to put paid to these stupid and no doubt dangerous comments. My nephew is moving heaven and earth, and Monseigneur is so simple that he takes him to be an important person. Summarize in a few lines your conversation the day before yesterday. You don’t have to be precise, let alone’ – he emphasized these words – ‘reveal anything of what was confided not only to your honour as a priest, that goes without saying, but to your simple discretion. In any case, this paper will only leave my pocket to be shown to His Excellency. But I dislike gossip.’ When I didn’t reply, he once again fixed me for a very long time with his deliberately expressionless eyes, his dead eyes. Not a muscle in his face moved. ‘You’re defying me,’ he resumed in a calm, confident, peremptory voice.
I replied that I didn’t understand why such a conversation should be the object of a report, that there had been no witnesses and that consequently the only person who could allow it to be divulged would have been the countess.
He shrugged. ‘You don’t know the bureaucratic mind. If your testimony is presented by me, it’ll be gratefully accepted and filed away, and nobody will give it another thought. Do it your way and you’ll get bogged down in verbal explanations, which would be futile anyway, because you’ll never be able to speak their language. Even if you were to tell them that two and two make four, they would still take you for a fanatic, a madman.’
I said nothing.
He placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘All right, enough of that. I’ll see you again tomorrow, if you’ll allow me. I fully admit I came here intending to prepare you for my nephew’s visit, but what would be the point? You aren’t one of these people who are able to speak and yet say nothing, and that, unfortunately, is what is required.’
‘But what have I done wrong?’ I cried. ‘What am I being blamed for?’
‘For being what you are, and there is no remedy for that. What can we do, my child? These people don’t hate your simplicity, but they guard against it, as if it were a fire that could consume them. You wander around with your poor humble smile that demands mercy, and a torch in your fist, which you seem to take for a crook. Nine times out of ten, they’ll tear it from your hands and stamp on it. But it only takes a moment’s distraction, you understand? Besides, to be frank, I didn’t have a particularly favourable opinion of my late niece; these Tréville-Sommerange girls have always been a strange breed, I don’t think the devil himself would find it easy to draw a sigh from their lips or a tear from their eyes. See my nephew, speak to him as you see fit. Remember only that he’s an idiot. And don’t have any respect for the name, the title, or any of that nonsense of which I fear that your generosity takes too much account. There are no more noblemen, my dear friend, get that into your head. I knew two or three, in the days of my youth. They were ridiculous but extraordinarily distinctive characters. They made me think of those twenty-centimetre oaks that the Japanese cultivate in little pots. The little pots are our habits, our customs. There is no family that can resist the slow erosion of avarice when the law is equal for everyone and public opinion is judge and mistress. The noblemen of today are closet bourgeois.’
I walked him to the door, and even took a few steps with him along the road. I imagine he was expecting me to suddenly open up to him, take him into my confidence, but I preferred to remain silent. At that moment, I felt all too incapable of overcoming a painful impression that I would not in any case have been able to hide from that strange gaze of his, which rested on me at times with calm curiosity. How could I tell him that I didn’t have the slightest idea of the count’s accusations, and that, although he may not have realized it, we had been speaking at cross purposes?
It is so late that I don’t think there is any point in my going to the church, the sacristan must have done what was needed.
I was none the wiser after the count’s visit. I had cleared the table and tidied everything, but – of course – left the cupboard door open. Like the canon, he immediately spotted the bottle of wine. It is a kind of wager. When I think about my daily menu, with which not even many poor people would be content, I am somewhat irritated by everyone’s surprise in realizing that I do not only drink water. I quickly got to my feet and went and closed the door.
* * *
The count was very cold, but polite. I don’t think he knew that his uncle had been to see me, and I had again to settle the question of the funeral. He knows the rates better than I do, argues over the price of candles, and pointed out himself with a stroke of the pen, on the map of the
church, the exact place where he wants the catafalque to be erected. But his face is marked by grief and exhaustion, even his voice has changed, it is less unpleasantly nasal than usual, and in his very modest black suit, with his strong shoes, he looks like your average rich peasant. ‘Is this old man in his Sunday best,’ I thought, ‘really the companion of one and father of the other …’ Alas, we say ‘the Family’, ‘families’, as we also say ‘the Motherland’. We should pray a lot for families, families scare me. May God have mercy on them!
I am sure, though, that the canon did not deceive me. In spite of his efforts, the count appeared increasingly nervous. Towards the end, I even thought that he was going to speak out, but just then a horrible thing happened. Searching in my desk for a printed form we needed, I had rather scattered the papers. As I was hastily sorting them again, I thought I heard his breathing become shorter and more rapid behind me. Expecting him to break the silence any second, I deliberately prolonged my task. The impression became so strong that I turned abruptly and almost bumped into him. He was standing very close to me, very red in the face, holding out a paper folded in four that had slipped under the table. It was the countess’s letter. I almost let out a cry, and as I took it from his hands, he must have noticed that I was shaking, because our fingers met. I even think he was afraid. After a few insignificant sentences, we parted ceremoniously. I will go to the chateau tomorrow morning.
I have been awake all night, day is beginning to dawn. My window has remained open and I am shivering. I can barely hold my pen, but it seems to me that I am breathing better, I am calmer. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and yet this cold that goes through me replaces sleep. An hour or two ago, while I was praying, sitting on my heels, my cheek placed against the wood of my table, I felt suddenly so hollow, so empty, that I thought I was dying. It was sweet.
Diary of a Country Priest Page 17
