Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics)

by Octave Mirbeau

  ‘I’m not to mix with you, we mustn’t be seen together. Father Dumont came over and promised Papa that he would keep an eye on me. But I’m still your friend anyway. I will speak to you sometimes when no one’s looking, you know. And no one has forbidden Bolorec to spend time with you. You can be Bolorec’s friend. He’s very nice Bolorec is. I’m off now because that priest is watching us. He’ll catch me if I spend too long chatting with you. Ah, well. Oh, and you’ll have to give me back the leather ball I gave you.’

  Sébastien did not cry. The pain of the blow was so intense he thought he was going to faint. He wanted to shout out: ‘Jean! Jean!’ but could not. His throat was tight, his head buzzing and empty, his limbs cold. He tried to take a step and could not. The ground beneath his feet gave way, crevices opened up. Red lights danced before his eyes. Jean skipped lightly away.

  The following day, the pupils went for a walk on the road to Elven. They stopped in the Kerral woods.

  ‘Did he promise you he would bring you here too?’ said Sébastien to Bolorec, who had not said a word since the start of the walk.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then afterwards you weren’t allowed?’

  Bolorec shrugged his shoulders and, apparently not listening, picked up a sliver of wood which he started to examine attentively.

  ‘And did you not feel hurt?’ Sébastien persisted.

  Bolorec shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t …’ explained Bolorec.

  ‘So you didn’t really care for Jean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And what about me? Do you care for me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you don’t care for anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t give a damn,’ replied Bolorec who had pulled a knife out of his pocket and had started to carve the piece of wood.

  And he added, calmly:

  ‘Not for any of them!’

  Sébastien then caught sight of the chateau, a large house flanked by turrets, sloping roofs, angular, disparate buildings, all lopsided and as sad as a ruin. Moss was eating away at the rooftiles, the walls were all cracked and stained; on the bald, mangy façade large areas of roughcast had flaked off; the sand along the avenues had worn away and was fast becoming clogged with scruffy grass and dead leaves, trampled by cattle, chewed up by heavy carts. The huge, rusty iron gates were surmounted by an escutcheon with the seal broken off, and it creaked in the wind like a weather vane. Near the chateau, hidden behind a scrubby clump of holly and separated from it by a ditch full of blueish, stagnant water, a low, damp, filthy farmhouse crouched, creating a square yard, a sort of open sewer, in which pieces of cut turf lay rotting on a thick layer of ancient dung. It gave off a stench of manure, of putrefying vegetation, a whiff of putrid humanity, unbearable, pestilential. All of a sudden, Sébastien caught sight of Monsieur de Kerral, a small, stocky man, red-faced and with a drooping, blond moustache, his legs gaitered in tawny leather. He had a whip in his hand and was tapping the tree trunks, whistling a hunting song. He combined peasant and gentleman, soldier and vagabond. Monsieur de Kerral came up to the priests, with a skipping gait like his son’s. He looked very like him in every way, but there was a harder look in his eyes. His clothes were both pretentious and unkempt; his black velvet jacket bore huge metal buttons depicting fleurs de lys in relief. Jean ran up, chattering, very proud to be seen by his friends in his own domain. The other pupils fell silent, a little embarrassed, and formed into small groups between the trees. They had been forbidden to chase squirrels or cut branches. Monsieur de Kerral, the priests and Jean made their way towards the house. High up on the stairway with its uneven steps, a woman wrapped in a red and green checked shawl stood waiting, her elbows resting on the wrought-iron railing. A shrill little voice could be heard:

  ‘Good morning, Reverend Fathers. How delightful that you chose Kerral for your walk.’

  More surprised than disappointed, Sébastien roamed through the wood, walked the length of the crumbling walls and the abandoned gardens, finding only the traces of what had been, the debris of things dead or fallen, buried beneath the brambles. Through the gaps between the branches of the oaks and pines, he glimpsed views of the moorlands, an arid, desolate, black terrain, dotted here and there with meagre little fields, their soil full of roots and stones, only tamed with difficulty, then bald hillsides on which windmills turned. He remembered Jean’s story of the bailiff’s clerk and the six dogs. Every detail which had made him laugh so much then came back to him, precise and this time painful. His heart tightened. Ah, how distant was his dream now. How he repented of having so obstinately nurtured that dream, not because that longing for magnificence had eventually led to these ruins, to this squalid setting, to that man, hunter of poor wretches, but because a new emotion was penetrating his soul and overturning all his ideas: something strong and warm, like a draught of wine. He had just seen Monsieur de Kerral and he hated him. He hated him and those like him. To these men, living amongst other men, like beasts of prey amidst game, and of whom his father had spoken and told him several times that they were to be admired and respected, he compared those of his own kind, who toil to meet their daily needs, small existences eked out side by side, helping one another, working together to achieve tomorrow’s hopes; and he felt proud to have been born amongst them, to represent their painful history, to reap the inheritance of their struggles. He found greater nobility in his father’s overalls, the neighbours’ smocks and tools, whose sound as they worked had been his lullaby as a child, than in the insolent gaiters, the whistling whip and the fleurs de lys of this Monsieur who had despised him, and along with him all the little people, all the humble folk, all the nameless ones, who have not killed and have not stolen. That comforted him. Faced with the image of inner decay evident in the chateau, which was collapsing stone by stone, and that soil, exhausted from having nourished men without pity or love, he felt true relief. He amused himself imagining behind those shaky walls, beneath those proud, toppling towers, which had never sheltered anything but wicked and barbarous opulence, a horribly sad life, more desperate than that of beggars, on whom, occasionally, the warm sun of charity smiles, a life outside life, lost in the gloom, overshadowed by the irreparable, whose final fall and ultimate death agony was brought nearer with every minute that passed. And this created in him a profound sense of joy, quite wild and terrible, this thought of justice, in which he felt the intoxicating savour of revenge shivering within him, revenge for his own misery and for all the miseries of his own kind. Whatever blood of the people flowed in his veins, whatever proletarian ferment brooded there, whatever centuries-long suffering and endless revolt had been deposited there by a long succession of ancestors, with their calloused hands and their backs bent in subservience, all of this was roused from its atavistic slumber and burst forth in his child’s soul, which, though ignorant and innocent, was large enough, even at that very second, to contain an immense love and immense hatred on behalf of all humankind.

  Noticing that he had become separated from his companions, Sébastien rejoined them, grave-faced, haunted by the idea that, from now on, he had a mission to fulfil. Without defining it clearly, without disentangling the means and the end, he could glimpse it, a fine, courageous commitment. First of all, he no longer accepted that the other children should reject him; he would be the one to reject them. He made up his mind to make people respect his father, his memories, the things he was fond of, and anyone who dared so much as touch on them, had better watch out. He had had enough of the submissiveness that rendered him small, humble, suppliant and fearful. He would no longer put up with the cruel suggestions, the offensive remarks, the scorn that had swamped him hitherto, nor would he be the plaything of a capricious, hostile crowd, he would not watch himself being pursued by it, like the bailiff’s clerk by Monsieur de Kerral’s dogs.

  ‘No, I’m not going to take it any more!’
he said out loud, kicking up the dead leaves as anger mounted in his head. ‘I’m not going to take it any more.’

  Bolorec was still in the same place, whittling his piece of wood. Two pupils nearby were pestering him with jokes which were neither very insulting nor particularly nasty, but Sébastien could no longer control his precipitate emotions. He yelled at them:

  ‘Leave him be! I forbid you to annoy Bolorec! He hasn’t done anything to you!’

  One of them advanced, hands on hips, threatening.

  ‘What are you wittering on about? Ironmonger, filthy ironmonger.’

  Sébastien leaped on him in one bound, knocked him over and slapped him several times, saying:

  ‘Every time you even think of insulting me, you will get the same … you and the others.’

  The beaten child got up in a pitiful state.

  ‘Yes, my father is an ironmonger,’ confessed Sébastien. ‘And I’m proud of him, mark you. He doesn’t set dogs on poor unfortunates.’

  Hearing the noise of the fight, a few pupils had come running. No one dared to reply and Sébastien was tugging at Bolorec to make him follow him, though he seemed not to have noticed anything.

  However, on the way back, Bolorec proved more expressive than usual. He said:

  ‘Next time, I’ll carve you a nice root and I’ll make you a whistle with a dog’s head or something on it. Sometimes, in the holidays, Papa takes me with him in the carriage when he visits the sick. I carved the handle of his whip. It’s two tibias, you know, bones, yes, two tibias with a skull at the end. I saw something like that in his study, on his desk and in his books too. His books are great, they’ve got people’s hearts and things … they’re like flowers. There’s nothing in the books here, it’s boring.’

  Moving closer to Sébastien, he spoke very softly, having made sure that no one could hear.

  ‘Listen, promise me you won’t repeat what I’m going to tell you. You promise? Well, you know how it’s the emperor who rules … well, he rules because he reinstituted religion. Did you know that? Well, the Jesuits want to overthrow him and bring back Henry V. I know for sure because Jean heard the Jesuits talking about it with his father. Well, I wrote to the government about it and they’re going to close the school. And then they’ll kill the Jesuits. And then everyone else. See!’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Sébastien, terrified.

  ‘Haven’t I just said so!’

  ‘And so we’ll go back home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And never come back to school?’

  ‘Never.’

  The rest of the route back was completed in silence. They did not notice the moorland clasped by the two arms of the sea, crisscrossed by rivers of gold, scattered with Biblical lakes, the moor slipping away into the distance in the evening tides, a rosary of mysterious islands, shaped like huge fish or wrecked boats. They did not notice the town either, where the shops were beginning to light up, nor the two girls, so pretty, standing in their usual place near the school. Both were thinking. And their thoughts were the same. They were thinking of beloved things at home, of familiar faces, but the huge door creaking open before them put those smiling images to flight.

  A few minutes later, Jean de Kerral came up to Sébastien in the yard, while they were getting back into line to go back into class. He asked him:

  ‘Did you see the chateau? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

  Sébastien did not reply and stared at Jean, his eyes hard. At the same time he thought of that man striking the trees with his whip, he thought of the dogs and the bailiff’s clerk. The emotions he had experienced in the wood at the sight of those walls, those turrets, now returned with renewed violence. Hatred drove him, turned him against Jean. He wanted to cry out: ‘Son of a murderer!’

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ begged Jean. ‘You’re mean. It’s not my fault, you know that. I’m very fond of you, it’s Papa who didn’t want you.’

  ‘Your father, your chateau, you …’ began Sébastien.

  But he stopped, troubled and defeated. Jean stood before him, so sad, looking at him with such surprised, gentle eyes, that his anger suddenly melted away. He remembered how he had come to him, kind, affectionate, when everyone else had turned away from him and scorned him; he remembered the vows they had exchanged. He said almost tenderly:

  ‘No, don’t say I’m mean. I’m fond of you too.’

  Sébastien was fascinated by Bolorec. His impassive nature disconcerted him; his smile, a kind of grimace in that soft round face, was ambiguous. He did not know whether he should admire him or fear him. Did he like him? He found it difficult to say. He was worried by the fact that Bolorec had never addressed a single affectionate word to him. He never played and could spend entire days without saying a word, and it was impossible to penetrate his silence. He could always be found carving wood or small pieces of soft stone which he collected carefully when they were out on walks. He was very clever at constructing miniature works of art, difficult and complex, boxes fitting one inside the other, cases, boat-riggings; he was an extraordinarily gifted sculptor: dogs’ heads, birds’ nests, Zouave faces with long, flowing beards, like the ones you see on pipes. However, he was a mediocre student and did not attempt to hide his reluctance to learn. He had a good memory and keen intelligence, but his body was slow, flabby, verging on the misshapen and he could almost be mistaken for an idiot. Then, all of a sudden, for no plausible reason, as if he felt the need to break those heavy, accumulated silences, he would talk and talk. He spoke in short, disorganised, disconnected sentences about outrageous things, often crude and embarrassing, extravagant plans to burn the school down, resolutions to escape by night, breath-taking escapes along the roofs above the walls; sometimes too, he would tell folk tales, naive and charming legends of the Breton saints, which his mother had told him. Afterwards he would lapse into his usual silence. What seemed inexplicable to Sébastien was that Bolorec disdained all insults and jibes. When the others mocked him or struck him, he did not even turn round; he simply walked calmly away, never complaining, never rebelling. In the end, this laconic attitude had worn down the major bullies, such as Guy de Kerdaniel. Now hardly anyone bothered him, other than the bully’s little lap-dogs, yapping round his ankles, knowing that they were in no danger. Bolorec and Sébastien, always together, had reached the stage of never mentioning it to each other. They spent recess seated under the archways near the music rooms and they never tired of listening to the nasal scales played on the violin, the skipping gaiety of the piano and the savage, raucous, brassy explosions of the trumpets and bugles.

  ‘I would love to learn music,’ sighed Sébastien.

  And Bolorec would sing the Breton words of an ancient dance tune, swaying his head to mark the rhythm.

  Music was a deep and important source of pleasure to Sébastien. In the morning, he got up and, still half-asleep, attended the low mass, which was conducted in silence in the cold, bare, shadowy chapel, accompanied only by mumbling. The more bored he was by this and the more the multiplicity of religious observances that the pupils were obliged to pursue predisposed him to laziness, weakness, to disgust and an oppressive obsession with that sly, cruel God whom he hated, the more he looked forward to the high mass on Sundays. On that day, the chapel had a festive air, the altar decked with flowers, ablaze with lights reflected over and over in the gilt and marble, the officiates in their brocaded stoles and their lace albs, the great picture window opening out behind the blueish vapour of incense onto mystical paradises and, added to all that, the unearthly voice of the organ and the seraphic music of the choir, singing the beautiful refrains of Handel, Bach and Porpora: this was the triumph of his own God, his good, magnificent God, who was all beauty, all love, all harmony, all ecstasy. On Sundays, he truly felt close to God; he had a physical vision of him, touched his radiant flesh, his halo of hair, counted the beats of that redeeming heart from which forgiveness flows. Those melodies touched him physically, conquered
him spiritually and awakened something in his soul which pre-dated his being, coeternal with the very substance of his God, the seamless continuum of immortal metempsychoses. Whilst that music flowed forth he actually witnessed the birth of exquisite forms, thoughts and prayers metamorphosed into real shapes, like saints or lilies, that towered over him; he saw celestial landscapes made into paradises by a light that was at once mysterious and familiar, exploding into constellations of flowers, clusters of stars; he saw aerial architecture joining with the clouds, becoming a whirl of planets; a whole immaterial world blossomed, flowers bloomed and then disappeared in a rapturous exhalation of perfumes. Any tenderness or beauty he had experienced, all the stifled dreams and captive aspirations that had accumulated in his heart, everything was brought to life anew by that music; all this pure passion beat its wings, amplified, idealised, embellished by the purifying grace of love. Delicious, gentle tears flowed from his eyes; he was filled with a kind of sacred pain; his nerves were aflame with sensuality, a feeling so acute that sometimes he felt close to fainting or falling into a fit. When the terrible sound of the organ swelled, when the voices of the choir rose in exaltation, celebrating the miracle of the Eucharist, then he felt the same poignant emotion, the same overwhelming admiration he had felt once watching the sea in a storm. Then he had been left with an enduring sense of unearthly, sacred grandeur, his puny being was rendered supernatural and fused with the vast and the omnipotent, a feeling which returned there in the church, in even more powerful and austere form. He wished he could lose himself in those rolling waves of sound, allow himself to be lifted on that great tide of harmonies, where human brutishness vanished and even the weakest were treated gently, like the seagulls he had seen bobbing in the wake of a great ship, and he could let himself be embraced by the great musical swell. Stunned, exhausted, with the taste of incense lingering on his lips, the taste of the divine, Sébastien would return from the mass, as he had come back from that sight of the sea: weak, unsteady on his feet, retaining for many hours the heady, intense tang of salt on his lips.