This must be paid for, surely.
(N. B. – Several pages have been torn out at this point, apparently in haste. What remains written in the margins is illegible, every word broken up into pen strokes so hard that they have made holes in the paper in several places.
One page has been left intact, blank except for these lines:
‘Resolved as I am not to destroy this diary, but having decided to get rid of these pages, which were written in a genuine fit of madness, I want nevertheless to bear witness against myself that my harsh ordeal – the greatest disappointment of my poor life, for I could not imagine anything worse – found me momentarily lacking in resignation, lacking in courage, and that I was tempted to …’
The sentence is unfinished, and there are several lines missing at the beginning of the following page.)
… must make the break at all costs.’
‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘at all costs? I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of these finer points. I’m a wretched little priest who asks nothing but to pass unnoticed. Yes, I do stupid things, but they are what I am. Yes, they make me look ridiculous, they make people laugh, and so they should. Can’t I also be given time to see my way clearly? And there’s a shortage of priests, as you know. Whose fault is that? The best students go off to be monks, and poor peasants like me are left to take care of three parishes! Actually, I’m not even a peasant, as you know perfectly well. True peasants despise people like us, butlers and maids who move from one place to another along with their masters – that’s when we’re not smugglers, poachers, good-for-nothings, outlaws. Oh, I’m not saying I’m a fool. It might be better if I were. I’m not a hero either, I’m not a saint, I’m not even—’
‘Be quiet,’ the curé of Torcy said. ‘Don’t be such a child.’
The wind was blowing hard, and I suddenly saw his dear old face turn blue with cold.
‘Come in here, I’m frozen.’ It was the little shack where Clovis stores his firewood. ‘I can’t walk back with you now, how would that make me look? And besides, the garage owner, Monsieur Bigre, is supposed to be driving me back to Torcy. To be honest, I should have stayed a few days more in Lille, this weather’s not good for me.’
‘You came for me!’ I said.
He first shrugged his shoulders angrily. ‘And what about the funeral? Besides, this is none of your business, my boy, I do as I please, come and see me tomorrow.’
‘I can’t come tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or probably this week, unless—’
‘I don’t want to hear the word “unless”. Come or don’t come. You’re too calculating. You’re overdoing the adverbs. We should construct our lives clearly, like a French sentence. Each of us serves the Lord in his own way, his own language! And even the way you look, that outfit of yours, that cape, for example—’
‘This cape is a gift of my aunt’s!’
‘You look like a German Romantic. And that face!’
I had never seen that expression of his before, it was almost one of hatred. I think at first he’d had to force himself to speak sternly to me, but the harshest words were only now coming to his lips, and he might have been angry with himself for being unable to hold them back.
‘I can’t help my face!’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, you can! First of all, your eating habits are ridiculous. I really should talk to you about that, very seriously. I wonder if you realize …’ He broke off. ‘No, later,’ he resumed in a softer voice. ‘We’re not going to talk about that in this shack. But anyway, your eating habits fly in the face of common sense, and you’re surprised you’re in pain! I’d also have stomach cramps if I were in your place! And as for your inner life, my friend, I fear it’s the same thing. You don’t pray enough. You suffer too much for what you pray, that’s what I think. We must eat in proportion to our tiredness, and in the same way prayer must be commensurate with our efforts.’
‘It’s just that … I … I can’t!’ I cried, and I immediately regretted the admission when I saw his eyes grow hard.
‘If you can’t pray, try again! Listen, I, too, have had my struggles! The devil inspired in me such a horror of prayer that I sweated profusely just saying my rosary. Try to understand!’
‘Oh, I understand!’ I replied, and with such eagerness that he looked me up and down for a long time, but without malevolence, on the contrary …
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve been wrong about you. Try to answer the question I’m going to ask you. I’ll give you my little test for what it’s worth, it’s only an idea of mine, a way to find my bearings, and I haven’t always got it right, of course. Basically, I’ve thought a lot about vocation. Yes, we’re all called, but we’re not all called in the same way. To simplify things, I start by trying to put each of us in his true place, in the Gospels. Of course, that makes us two thousand years younger, but what of it? Time means nothing to God, He looks beyond that. I tell myself that well before our birth – to talk human language – Our Lord met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, in Nazareth, on the roads of Galilee, wherever. One day among all the days, His eyes came to rest on us, and depending on the place, the time, the situation, our vocation took on its particular character. Oh, I’m not saying this is correct theology! It’s just how I think of it, imagine it, dream it. But if our souls, which haven’t forgotten, which always remember, could drag our poor bodies, from century to century, back up that enormous slope of two thousand years, they would lead us straight to that same place where … What is it? What’s the matter?’
I hadn’t even noticed that I was crying, it hadn’t occurred to me.
‘Why are you crying?’
The truth is that I have always seen myself in the Garden of Olives, at the moment – yes, it’s strange, the exact moment when, placing His hand on Peter’s shoulder, He asks that question – quite pointless, really, almost naive – but so polite, so tender: are you asleep? It was a very familiar, very natural, impulse of the soul, I hadn’t been aware of it until now, and all at once …
‘What’s the matter?’ the curé of Torcy kept repeating impatiently. ‘You’re not even listening, you’re daydreaming. My friend, whoever wants to pray must not daydream. Your prayer is frittered away in dreams. There’s nothing more harmful to the soul than that haemorrhage!’
I opened my mouth, I was going to reply, I couldn’t. Too bad! Isn’t it enough that Our Lord granted me that grace today, revealing to me, through the mouth of my old master, that nothing would ever tear me from the place chosen for me since time immemorial, that I was a prisoner of the Holy Agony? Who would dare to claim such grace? I wiped my eyes, and blew my nose so clumsily that the curé smiled.
‘I didn’t think you were such a child. You’re a nervous wreck, my boy.’
(But at the same time he was observing me again, with such keen attention that it was extremely hard for me to keep silent. I could see his eyes move, and it was as if he had almost sensed my secret. Oh, he is a true master of souls, a lord!)
At last, he shrugged his shoulders, with the air of a man giving up. ‘Enough of this, we can’t stay in this shack until tonight. It may be that God wishes to keep you in a state of sadness after all. But I’ve always noticed that such trials, however much they upset us, never distort our judgement when the good of men’s souls requires it. I’d already been told a lot of boring, annoying things about you, things that don’t matter! I know how spiteful people can be. But when it came to the poor countess, now there you acted very stupidly, you turned it into theatre!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Have you read The Hostage by Monsieur Paul Claudel?’
I replied that I didn’t even know who or what he was talking about.
‘Really? Well, all the better. In it, there’s a holy girl who, on the advice of a priest rather like you, goes back on her word, marries an old renegade and gives in to despair, all under the pretext of preventing the Pope from going to prison, as if ever si
nce Saint Peter the Pope’s place wasn’t rather in the Mamertine than in a palace decorated from floor to ceiling by those Renaissance bad boys who got their catamites to pose for the Madonna! Mind you, this Monsieur Claudel is a genius, I don’t deny that, but these men of letters are all the same: as soon as they want to tackle holiness, they smear themselves with the sublime, they put the sublime everywhere! Holiness isn’t sublime, and if I’d heard the heroine’s confession, I would first of all have insisted that she change her birdlike name – her name is Sygne – for a true Christian woman’s name, and then that she keep her word, because when it comes down to it there is only one, and even our Holy Father the Pope can do nothing about that.’
‘But in which way am I …’ I said.
‘That business of the medallion?’
‘The medallion?’ I really didn’t understand.
‘Come now, you idiot, you were seen and heard, there’s nothing miraculous about it, don’t worry.’
‘Who saw us?’
‘Her daughter. But the canon of La Motte-Beuvron already told you, so don’t play the fool.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no? I don’t believe it! Well, I’ve started, so I’ll have to finish now, won’t I?’
I didn’t flinch, I’d had time to regain a little calm. If Mademoiselle Chantal had altered the truth, she had done so with skill, and I would have to struggle in an inexplicable web of half-truths from which I would not be able to extricate myself without risking betraying the dead woman in my turn. The curé seemed surprised and disconcerted by my silence.
‘I wonder what you understand by resignation … Forcing a mother to throw in the fire the one memento she’s kept of her dead child, that’s a Jewish story, like something from the Old Testament. And what gave you the right to speak of eternal separation? We cannot blackmail people’s souls, my boy.’
‘You present things this way,’ I said, ‘I could present them differently. What would be the point? The essentials are true.’
‘Is that all you can say in reply?’
‘Yes.’
I thought he was going to condemn me. Instead, he grew very pale, almost ashen, and I realized how much he loved me. ‘Let’s not stay here any longer,’ he stammered. ‘And above all refuse to see the girl again, she’s a she-devil.’
‘I won’t close my door to her. I won’t close my door to anyone, as long as I’m priest of this parish.’
‘She claims that her mother resisted you to the end, that you left her in a terrible state of anxiety, an incredible disorder of the spirit. Is that true?’
‘No!’
‘You left her—’
‘I left her with God, at peace.’
‘Ah!’ He heaved a deep sigh. ‘But perhaps in dying she still remembered your demands, your harshness?’
‘She died at peace.’
‘How do you know that?’
I was not even tempted to tell him about the letter. If the expression did not appear ridiculous, I would say that from head to toe I was nothing but silence. Silence and night.
‘Well, she died. What are we to think? Such scenes are not good for a person with a weak heart.’
Still I was silent. With these words, we parted.
I walked slowly back to the presbytery. I was not in pain. I even felt relieved of a great weight. That discussion with the curé of Torcy was like a dress rehearsal for the interview I would shortly be having with my superiors, and I discovered almost with joy that I had nothing to say. For the past two days, without my having been very clearly aware of it, my fear had been that I would be accused of an error I had not committed. If that had happened, honesty would have forbidden me from keeping silent. Instead of which, I was now free to let everyone judge for himself the actions of my ministry, which were in fact open to very different interpretations. And it was also a great relief to me to think that Mademoiselle Chantal might have been genuinely mistaken about the true nature of a conversation she had probably misheard. I assume she had been in the garden, beneath the window, the entablature of which was a long way from the ground.
To my surprise, I felt hungry when I got back to the presbytery. My supply of apples is not exhausted, I quite often bake them on the embers and coat them with fresh butter. I also have eggs. The wine is truly mediocre, but passable when heated and sweetened. I was so sensitive to the cold that this time I filled my little saucepan. It holds as much as a water glass, no more, I swear. As I was finishing my meal, the curé of Torcy came in. Surprise – but not only surprise – rooted me to the spot. I got to my feet, swaying a little, I must have looked bewildered. As I got up, my left hand had clumsily brushed against the bottle, which broke with a horrifying noise. A trickle of dark, muddy wine started running over the flagstones.
‘My poor boy!’ he said. And he kept repeating, in a soft voice, ‘So this is how … this is how …’
I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand anything, except that the strange peace I had just enjoyed was merely, as always, the forerunner of a new misfortune.
‘That wine’s no better than dye. You’re poisoning yourself, you idiot!’
‘It’s the only kind I have.’
‘You should have asked me.’
‘I swear to you—’
‘Be quiet!’ He pushed the fragments of the bottle with his foot, as if crushing a repulsive animal. I waited for him to finish, incapable of articulating a single word. ‘No wonder you look the way you do, my poor boy. With a liquid like that in your stomach, you ought to be dead.’
He was standing now in front of me, his two hands in the pockets of his douillette, and when I saw his shoulders move I sensed that he was going to come out with it all, that he wouldn’t spare me a single word.
‘Well, I missed Monsieur Bigre’s car, but I’m glad I came. Sit down, first of all!’
‘No!’ I said. And I felt my voice shake in my chest, as happens every time a particular impulse of the soul, I don’t know what, warns me that the moment has come, that I have to face up to things. Facing up to things is not always the same as resisting. I even believe that at that moment, I would have admitted anything just to be left alone, with God. But no force in the world would have prevented me from staying on my feet.
‘Listen,’ the curé of Torcy went on, ‘I’m not angry with you. And don’t go thinking I take you for a drunkard. Our friend Delbende put his finger on it from the start. We country people are pretty much all the sons of alcoholics. Your parents drank no more than anyone else, less perhaps, only they didn’t eat well, or else didn’t eat at all. Added to which, for want of anything better, they swallowed concoctions like this, remedies that would kill a horse. What can we do? Sooner or later, you would have felt that thirst, a thirst that isn’t yours, but one that lasts, oh, yes, it can last for centuries, a poor man’s thirst, it’s a solid inheritance. Not even five generations of millionaires can always quench it, it’s in the bones, in the marrow. No point telling me you didn’t notice anything, I’m sure you did. And even if you only drank a young girl’s portion every day, no matter. You were born saturated, my poor fellow. You slipped quite gradually into asking of wine – and what wine! – the strength and courage you would find in a good roast, a true one. Humanly speaking, the worst that can happen to us is to die, and you were killing yourself. Wouldn’t it be a consolation to think that you ground yourself down with a dose that wouldn’t even suffice to keep a vineyard owner from Anjou in joy and health? Mind you, you weren’t offending the Lord. But let this be a warning to you, my boy. You would offend him now.’
He fell silent. I looked at him, unwittingly, as I had looked at Sulpice Mitonnet or Mademoiselle Chantal or … Oh, yes, I felt that sadness overflowing from me … But he’s a strong, calm man, a true servant of God, a man. He, too, has faced up to things. We seemed to be bidding each other farewell across a distance, from one side to the other of an invisible road.
‘And now,’ he concluded, his voice a li
ttle more hoarse than usual, ‘don’t let your imagination run away with you. I have only one thing to say and I’m going to say it. You’re a damned good young priest all the same! Without wishing to speak ill of the dear departed, it has to be admitted that—’
‘No, don’t!’ I said.
‘As you wish!’
I would have liked to leave, as I had done an hour earlier in the gardener’s hut. But he was in my house now, and I had to await his good pleasure. God be praised! He had allowed my old master not to desert me, to fulfil his task once again. His anxious gaze abruptly grew firmer, and I heard again the voice I know well, strong and bold and full of a mysterious joy.
‘Work,’ he said. ‘Do little things, day by day. Apply yourself. Remember the schoolboy bent over his exercise book and sticking his tongue out. That’s how the Lord wishes to see us, when He abandons us to our own strength. The little things don’t seem like anything, but they give peace. It’s like the flowers of the field, you see. You think they have no scent, but taken together they fill the air with fragrance. The prayer of little things is innocent. In each little thing, there is an angel. Do you pray to the angels?’
‘My God, yes … Of course.’
‘We don’t pray enough to the angels. They scare the theologians somewhat, because of those old heresies of the Eastern churches, it’s a nervous fear. The world is full of angels. And what about the Blessed Virgin, do you pray to the Blessed Virgin?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘That’s what people say. But do you pray to her as you should, do you pray well to her? She is our mother, everyone understands that. She is the mother of the human race, the new Eve. But she is also its daughter. The old world, the painful world, the world from before grace cradled her for a long time to its desolate heart – for centuries and centuries – in the secure, incomprehensible expectation of a virgo genitrix … For centuries and centuries, it protected with its old hands burdened with crimes, its heavy hands, the wonderful little girl whose name it did not even know. A little girl, that Queen of the Angels! And she has remained so, don’t forget it! The Middle Ages understood that, the Middle Ages understood everything. But try preventing the idiots from redoing in their own way the “drama of the Incarnation”, as they put it! Whereas, for the sake of prestige, they think they have to dress modest justices of the peace as clowns, or sew stripes on the sleeves of railway conductors, it would embarrass them too much to admit to unbelievers that the one, the only drama, the drama of dramas – for there is no other – was performed without any stage sets, any decoration. Just think of it! The Word was made flesh, and the journalists of that time didn’t know anything about it! Although their everyday experience teaches them that it’s the very devil to recognize true greatness, even human greatness, genius, heroism, love itself – their poor love! So much so that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they take their flowers of rhetoric to the graveyard, they pay homage only to the dead. The holiness of God! The simplicity of God, the terrifying simplicity of God condemning the pride of the angels! Yes, the devil must have tried to look it in the face and the immense flaming torch at the peak of creation fell all at once into the darkness. The Jewish people were stubborn, otherwise they would have understood that a God made man, realizing the perfection of man, might well pass unnoticed and that they had to keep their eyes open. And look at that episode of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, I find it so beautiful! Our Lord deigned to taste triumph as He did the rest, just as He did death, He rejected none of our joys, He rejected only sin. But His death, why, He tended to it, nothing was missing. Whereas His triumph was a triumph for children, don’t you think? A stereotyped image, with the little boy on the she-donkey, the green branches, the country people clapping their hands. A nice, slightly ironic parody of imperial splendour. Our Lord seems to be smiling – Our Lord smiles often – and saying to us, “Don’t take this kind of thing too seriously, although there are legitimate triumphs, it’s not forbidden to triumph. When Joan of Arc comes back to Orléans, beneath the flowers and the banners, in her fine huque of cloth of gold, I don’t want her to think she’s doing the wrong thing. Since it means so much to you, my poor children, I have sanctified your triumph, I have blessed it, as I have blessed the wine from your vineyards.” And as for miracles, it’s really the same thing. He performed no more than were necessary. Miracles are like illustrations in a book, pretty pictures! But remember this, my boy: the Blessed Virgin had no triumph, no miracles. Her son didn’t allow human glory to come anywhere near her, even with the tiniest tip of its big savage wing. Nobody lived, suffered or died as simply or in such profound ignorance of her own dignity, a dignity that actually places her above the angels. Basically, she was born without sin, which made her remarkably solitary! A spring so pure, so limpid, so limpid and so pure, that she could not even see in it the reflection of her own image, an image meant for the joy of the father alone – oh sacred solitude! You see Cunning and Pride, those old familiar demons of man, whether masters or servants, those terrible patriarchs who guided Adam’s first steps to the threshold of the cursed world – you see them looking from a distance at that miraculous creature who is out of their reach, invulnerable and disarmed. Of course, our poor species is not worth much, but childhood always moves her to the core, the ignorance of children makes her lower her eyes – her eyes that know about good and evil, eyes that have seen so much! But it is only ignorance after all. The Virgin was Innocence. Do you realize what we are to her, we, the human race? Oh, of course, she hates sin, but she has no real experience of it, that experience that even the greatest saints, even the saint of Assisi, however seraphic he was, did have. The gaze of the Virgin is the only truly childlike gaze, the only true gaze of a child that has never looked up and seen our shame and our misfortune. Yes, my boy, to pray well to her, one must feel on oneself that gaze that is not completely one of indulgence – for indulgence does not go without some bitter experience – but one of tender compassion, of sorrowful surprise, of some other inconceivable, inexpressible feeling, which makes her younger than sin, younger than the race from which she has emerged, and although Mother by grace, Mother of graces, the youngest of the human race.’
Diary of a Country Priest Page 19
