Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  Sébastien sat at the table, his back to the window and opened a schoolbook which he did not even attempt to read. His chin resting on his hand, his eyes grave, distant and dreamy, he mused at length on other skies, new friends, new teachers. Gradually, the objects in the room, the yard, the walls, all faded into the background, just as the things around us fade in the drowsiness of half-sleep, and the child saw himself transported into a land of light, a sort of enchanted palace, through airy vaults and colonnades where kind, charming beings glided towards him in a rustle of silks, whilst, incongruously, the vast bulk of his father moved about behind the blurred glass of the door separating the dining room from the shop.

  The days passed, full of various anxieties. Sébastien stayed at home and only went out accompanied by Monsieur Roch, who kept a careful watch lest any of his son’s friends managed to come near: ‘The Jesuits wouldn’t like it. Get away with you!’ he would shout at them when, surprised at not seeing Sébastien out and about, they came to find him at the shop. The apprentice, a lad of fifteen, was ordered not to speak familiarly to the boss’ son any more and to show him greater respect. ‘From now on, you call him Monsieur Sébastien. Things have changed,’ explained the ironmonger. Even on his own account he had judged it necessary and dignified to treat his neighbours with a new loftiness, to keep them at a distance, without, however, depriving them of the daily gift of his conversation. On the contrary, his eloquence grew by the day and became more and more extravagant. He cranked out the same old advice, preposterous aphorisms, magisterial judgements that merely threw the child into deep confusion. Exhausted with hearing him repeat at every moment: ‘I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear. Do you understand the full significance of what I am saying?’, their walks, visits and more frequent one-to-one conversations became a torment to Sébastien. Eventually, merely to escape it all, he started to long for the day of his departure. But alone in his little room in the evening, surrounded by familiar things of no consequence but to which he attached naive and precious memories, he would once again be gripped by terror of the school, and he would have liked the brutal hour never to come when he would have to say goodbye to all that had become an integral part of himself, half his flesh and half his soul. Thinking hurt him even more than the painful choices facing him. Since thinking had been introduced into his brain, he had become consumed with anxiety. By injecting the seed of a new life into him, this brusque violation of his intellectual virginity had also injected him with the germ of human suffering. His peaceful lack of awareness had been destroyed, his senses had lost the simplicity of their perceptions. The least word, object or fact, which before had had no moral significance or consequence, now, like a series of brutal slashes, opened up in his mind infinite and fearful horizons. All kinds of questions, pregnant with mystery, presented themselves before him, and he was too feeble to grasp them. Beyond the limits imposed by the physical reality of his childhood, he could see the rudiments of shifting ideas, the embryonic contours of life in the outside world, a whole unexplained, discordant machinery made up of laws, duties, hierarchies, relativities, each interlocking with the next, set in motion by a multitude of gears in which his frail personality would inevitably become caught and mangled. This caused him violent headaches and, sensitive child that he was, nearly drove him to a nervous breakdown.

  The house adjoining the hardware shop also belonged to Monsieur Roch. The post office was based there. The postmistress, Madame Lecautel, was the widow of an alcoholic general who, it was said, had died insane, and she was considered an educated, superior sort of woman. She was tall and thin and had a sad face, as if constantly suffering beneath the perpetual black of her widow’s weeds. However, compared to the local women, she seemed unusually distinguished, and she aroused the kind of respectful, gossipy sympathies that people accord to those who once led a brilliant existence and have now fallen into misfortune. She had a daughter, Marguerite, who was the same age as Sébastien. The two children had formed quite a warm friendship. Monsieur Roch, proud of this relationship with his son, encouraged him to visit her. On his son’s account, he outdid himself, showering Madame Lecautel with tiresome favours and treating her with obsessive politeness, gallantly referring to her as ‘my beautiful lodger’. None of this, however, made him any the readier to do the repairs she asked of him. For her part, sensing the state of moral abandon in which the boy found himself, reserved and silent as he was, Madame Lecautel had taken a motherly interest in him. It was agreed that every Thursday and Sunday he should spend a few hours at her house. Often, when the weather was fine, and her post office was closed, she would take him out for walks with her daughter.

  In his current crisis, Sébastien felt a real sense of release in the company of his friend Marguerite. Some tender, protective instinct, engendered by the warmth of a gentler atmosphere, drew him strongly towards her. It was not that he became more talkative or confiding. He was too shy for that. Besides, given the tumult of confused emotions and undefined distress seething within him, he would not have known what to say or, indeed, what he needed to express. But the mere sight of Marguerite calmed him. Near her, his heart found peace, his aching head was soothed. Little by little, he rediscovered the pleasure of not thinking about anything any more. She was charming and full of inventively tender gestures. She had large, dark eyes that were almost too bright, too shining, and always circled by dark shadows, but they illumined her pretty face with the precocious but profound light of love. Her ways were not those of a little girl either, even though her language had remained childlike and contrasted with the knowing, almost perverse grace she emanated, the grace of sexuality that had burst too soon into ardent, unhealthy flower. Ever since she had learned that he would have to go away, she had become more attentive to him, more audacious in her gestures and caresses. She talked and talked, uttering sweet nothings that would fill her young friend with pleasure. Then, she would look at him with those big, possessive eyes, which awoke in the depths of Sébastien’s soul an obscure but powerful emotion, so powerful that it rose up within him, leaping and bounding, as restless as an imprisoned life demanding to emerge from the shadows. Sometimes it made his chest heave and his throat go dry. Her shoulders thrust back, her body swaying beneath her black, pleated, flounced smock, she would walk towards him with the movements of a pretty animal, smoothing her ill-kempt hair with her long, thin hands already veined with blue, and re-tie the knot in his tie. Her little fingers ran over his skin, light and supple, burning him like wings of flame, touching him with a thousand tiny caresses, leaving him almost faint with fear and joy. He felt intoxicated with her in fact. So intimate, so magnetic was the bond between her life and his that very often, if she bumped against the edge of a piece of furniture or pricked her fingers on a needle, he immediately felt the same physical pain.

  ‘Will there be little girls in the school you’re going to?’ she would ask.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘I would love to go with you and be with you always.’

  And her eyes grew larger and more brilliant:

  ‘So, there are lots of little boys, just boys … like you – as nice as you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘What fun that must be. I would love school.’

  Suddenly she would run to her mother, her face contorted, in tears:

  ‘Mama! Mama! I want to go with him! I do…’

  These all too brief hours spent in the company of this strange child bestowed a warmth on Sébastien which he took back home with him, but which evaporated as soon as he found himself once more with his father or alone in the chilly room at the back of the shop.

  He also suffered agonies of apprehension regarding that wild place, Brittany, that mysterious land of legend, about which Monsieur Roch, in order to prepare him, made him read gloomy, terrible stories. The harsh landscape, the tragic sea, the old haunted castles, the wicked fairies hovering above dark pools, the shipwrecked sailors shaking their matted locks like Caliban on the h
owling shores, all the fantasy and melodrama combined in his mind with his father’s lectures, conveying a dazzling, superhuman image of the Jesuits and their school. He would never get used to living in such a place, in daily contact with beings so removed from himself, of whom the most humble had the ‘unbearable radiance of a bishop’. Embroidering on Monsieur Roch’s hyperbolic comparisons, he pictured the Jesuits in an ecclesiastical blaze, wearing bejewelled vestments, haloed with incense, revered as Popes, unapproachable as gods. Ceaselessly torn between undefined fear and fleeting hope and deprived of his friends – the only pleasure that might have helped him through the difficult days of waiting – irritated by Madame Cébron’s daily fittings and worn down by his father’s hectoring, he was unimaginably unhappy. Apart from Thursdays and Sundays, he did not know what to do with the long days. There were no more games of hopscotch in the main square, no more rambles through the fields along the hedgerows full of birdsong and flowers, or by the river, where he used to follow shrimpers with their nets and, arms bare, his trousers rolled up to the knees, go deep into the water to turn over the stones beneath which the shrimps slept. What heartbreak for him, in the depths of that backroom or in his bedroom, to hear the familiar shouts of his friends, setting off on the prowl, seeming to call out to him.

  Sometimes, he took refuge in the gardens, just outside the town, near the cemetery. But even there he was unable to savour a single instant of peace. The absence of flowers or of shady trees, the dull flowerbeds, the absurdly artificial decorative features which, thanks to the ironmonger’s horticultural fantasies, were everywhere, reminded him inevitably of the heavy-handed invective, the laboured figures of speech, the prolixity and incoherence of his father’s rhetoric, which he had hoped to escape and instead encountered again increased tenfold amidst the silence. The cypresses, their grey summits peeping over the walls, the crosses on the graves, some hung with wreaths, only added a sharp sense of unease to his domestic obsession. Having paced the avenues a couple of times, between the boxwood borders adorned with ironwork snail-shells, painted with bright colours and alternating with diamond shapes containing the intertwined initials J.R., he returned home feeling only more miserable and more perplexed, a prey to painful doubt.

  Every day, after dinner, he also went to visit his Aunt Rosalie, a further torture to which his father condemned him. Stretched out near the window in a kind of bathchair, with some knitting in her hands, the old maid spent her sedentary life speaking ill of other people and tormenting her maid whom she kept bound in her service with promises of an inheritance. Her plump, soft, pallid face, like that of an old procuress, her chin and lips darkened by a few greying hairs, her ribald, malicious gaze, the cynicism behind everything she said, all embarrassed Sébastien, who, though still extremely innocent, could not help blushing at words he did not understand, but in which he nevertheless divined reprehensible meanings and shameful intent. Often, he found her surrounded by friends, old maids like herself; like her, they were both coarse and sanctimonious, obsessed with the obscene, and, in the guise of morality or injured virtue, they would invent local adulteries, imagine saucy stories, discuss the love lives of their cats, all the while themselves exuding the faint odour of soiled underwear and stale beds.

  ‘Jesuits!’ Aunt Rosalie would bellow, at the sight of her nephew. ‘I ask you, does this lad really need the Jesuits? Ah, if it had been up to me, I’d have signed you up for an apprenticeship, my boy! The Jesuits! It’s unbelievable. All this fuss merely to play the grand gentleman, to prove he’s rich. It’s just too … And I’ve warned him about showing off about his money, that father of yours … It’s easy enough to get rich when you sell for twenty sous something that only cost you two. Come here, you, nearer!’

  Sébastien would approach timidly, his elbows tight against his body, terrified of the two white bows that fastened the old woman’s frilled bonnet and stuck up on top of her head like devil’s horns.

  ‘Ha! Isn’t he a lovely little man?’

  She gripped his arms, twirled him like a top and fixed her sharp, spiteful little eyes on him:

  ‘Isn’t he a handsome little man? Just look at him, will you? What will the Jesuits do with that? Do you really think they will keep you with your oafish look and built the way you are? Certainly not. The moment they see you, they’ll start laughing and they’ll send you back here. Shall I tell you something? Shall I? Answer, you ninny, speak! Do you want me to tell you something?’

  ‘Yes, aunt.’

  ‘Yes, aunt!’ continued old aunt Rosalie in a mocking, sing-song voice. ‘Yes, aunt. Is this child stupid or something? Well now, your father, the dear thing, is an idiot, a great idiot. You understand? And you can tell him so from me. You can tell him: “Aunt Rosalie said you’re an idiot.” My God, a fool like that sends his son to the Jesuits and yet he’s so stupid he doesn’t even know how to clean a lamp properly. And he gets up to all kinds of filth with his maid at night.’

  She shrugged her shoulders scornfully and laughed a nasty laugh, while the eyes of the old maids glinted ambiguously.

  On his return home, ever more discouraged, the child would wonder if in fact he was not indeed too short, too ugly, too misshapen to be accepted by these terrible Jesuits, whom the old woman’s mockery invested with an even more troubling, more inexorable severity. He wondered if he really would not have been happier as an apprentice. For a full minute he wanted precisely that, then he did not. He did not understand anything any more, everything now seemed equally unpleasant to him. All he knew was that, in the persistent struggle between two opposing wills, in the incessant antagonism of resolutions taken and renounced, he had lost his peace of mind and his happiness. Pursued by his aunt’s words, dully troubled by the demoralising revelations that life brought him, more numerous with every day that passed, despite his revulsion at the old woman’s calumnies and his remorse for even listening to them, he felt his respect and affection for his father diminishing. In the hope of reinforcing the feelings of tenderness which his father now so thoroughly undermined, he got into the habit of watching him, in an effort to understand him. But he lost his footing in the void of the man’s mind, crashed against the barrier erected by that selfish heart, which rose like a wall separating their two natures. More by intuition than by reason, he discovered that no exchange of similar emotions, no intimacy based on mutual love was possible between them, so estranged were they from one another. Everything about his father’s actions and words disillusioned and wounded him. During meals, often interrupted by the shop bell clanging and the coming and going of customers, he noticed the way his father ate, greedily and messily, the noise he made drinking, a host of tiny details, which he was not yet capable of analysing properly, but which revealed his lax habits and inconsistencies of behaviour, so out of keeping with the rigid pomp of his principles; all this provoked in Sébastien an irritation which he found hard to conceal. He suffered genuine physical pain seeing the degrading manner in which his father treated the boy apprentice: the special dark, coarse bread allotted to him, the stringy, fatty scraps of food which Monsieur Roch threw to him as if to a dog and which the apprentice devoured in silence, ogling the fine slabs of meat and chunks of white bread his masters ate. He did not know what his aunt Rosalie meant by the ‘filth’ that his father supposedly got up to, but mulling obsessively over these words had led him to suspect him of blameworthy and dishonorable acts. Often, in the night, he would get up and press his ear to the thin partition dividing his room from Monsieur Roch’s and stay there for hours, listening, relieved to hear only a dull snoring, calm and regular, the nasal, guttural breathing of a man plunged into the profound sleep of a navvy. Nevertheless, the prestige of paternal authority, which, in the person who submits to it, is accompanied by a need for protection and instinctual confidence, was gradually fading, destroyed bit by bit by this watchfulness and also by a thousand little intimate, debasing habits, whose ludicrousness and vulgarity no longer escaped him, afflicting him as if they
had been his own. Hour by hour, the most precious parts of his own self perished; other feelings crowded into his heart, creating a new anguish, a bitterness and an unfamiliar sense of pity.