Torture Garden

by Octave Mirbeau

  The heart of Torture Garden is the relationship between the narrator, and the mistress whom he meets while going into exile. The narrator, like other Mirbeau anti-heroes, is a typically corrupt product of a society in which all moral authority – parental, educational, juridical and political – is a mere show, the one true motive in human affairs being the determination to “get the better of people”. This narrator, however, is an utter incompetent – though he allies himself early in life with the cynical Eugène Mortain, who rises to become a Minister of France, he remains a mere pawn, pathetically unable to take advantage of the opportunities for personal advancement which are presented to him. When he has become an embarrassment to his one-time friend he is persuaded to pass himself off as a scientist in order that he might pursue his supposed researches in Ceylon. His subsequent meeting with Clara, who persuades him to go with her to China instead, is a crucial diversion from the geographical Orient to the exotic Orient of the French literary imagination.

  The significance of “The Orient” to French writers of the nineteenth century – by no means only those of a Romantic stripe – can hardly be underestimated. Several of them undertook pilgrimages of a kind, though only a few (Rimbaud being the most celebrated example) got further than North Africa. Some, including Gerard de Nerval, wrote up these adventures, but no documentary account of actual exotica could possibly offer more than the feeblest echo of the lush Orient of the imagination. Even the more conscientiously-inclined writers who dabbled in such fantasies – Flaubert in Salammbô (1862), France in Thais (1890) and Pierre Louys in Aphrodite (1896) – had little difficulty in investing their milieux with a special kind of magic, and the further the imaginative spectrum extended eastwards the lusher and gaudier the imagery grew. Where prose fiction was concerned China had been most extravagantly evoked, albeit by proxy, in Theophile Gautier’s Fortunio (1838), whose absurd hero establishes an El Dorado of imported Chinoiserie on the outskirts of Paris only to destroy it and return to the East because he cannot tolerate the perfidies of civilized women. The perfidies in question were a subject of keen interest to Mirbeau, as Le Calvaire had demonstrated, and he must have found Fortunio as interesting as Gautier’s more famous novella “Une nuit de Cleopatre” (1838; tr. as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”), whose elaborate commentary on the erotically-charged callousness of its heroine provided a model for Clara. Mirbeau was as much a dissenter from Gautier’s brand of self-indulgence as he was from Sade’s, but Gautier is similarly significant as a precursor of Mirbeau’s allegorical imagery.

  It is through Clara that the narrator is eventually brought to confront the true nature of the forces which have shaped him, not only in the form of the Garden to which she takes him but in her response to it, which fuses the vicarious excitement of witnessed cruelty with the excitement of erotic arousal in such a way that her visit culminates in a kind of orgasm whose aftermath (after the conventional fashion of post-coital triste) leaves her temporarily sated and briefly repentant. It is, of course, all too much for the narrator to bear – and yet his rebellion against it is (as Clara observes) far more a matter of cowardice than moral rearmament, for the seeds of a similar corruption are already within him and might already have germinated were it not for his simple incompetence in the business of getting the better of people. The reader is tacitly asked to weigh very carefully the moral quality of his or her own response.

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  Mirbeau published four more novels after Torture Garden: Le journal d’une femme de chambre (1900; tr. as The Diary of a Chambermaid); Les vingt-et-un jours d’un neurasthenique (1901); La 628.E8 (1907) and Dingo (1913) (another, Un gentilhomme, was published posthumously in 1920, three years after his death). The first of these is the work for which he is best-known in England, though like Torture Garden it tends to be regarded as a semi-pornographic work. It attempts to repeat the essential message of Torture Garden in a more realistic mode, following the adventures of a young girl as she bears witness to the depravity of a sequence of exploitative employers, becoming gradually more cynical as she does so, ultimately – and inevitably – ending up as corrupt as they are.

  The Diary of a Chambermaid has at least as much in common with Sade’s Justine and Juliette as Torture Garden has, but that is because it shares the same models, which are in this instance a group of English novels: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) and John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749; better known as Fanny Hill). By an appropriate paradox it was Richardson’s piously moralistic novel which Sade gleefully took as his model, carefully inverting its subtitle (Justine is subtitled les malheurs de la vertu; Juliette, les prospérités du vice). But all the earlier writers were seduced by their heroines in a way that Mirbeau never was; how much his detachment owed to his misogyny and how much to his journalistic objectivity it is difficult to say, but the fact remains that he was much more clinically analytical in his study of Celestine’s strategies for coping with the oppressive demands of men and the world than any of his predecessors.

  In the next two “novels” this clinicality is taken to such lengths that the books become collections of caricatures in prose, each presenting a grotesque gallery of perverse characters without any semblance of a plot; Dingo goes even further, taking as its viewpoint character a dog which proves ultimately untameable in spite of the efforts of its human masters to teach it civilized ways – a figure which Mirbeau uses to present a deeply ironic and calculatedly perverse self-image. In furtherance of this intrinsic irony, this last novel offers portraits of a few of its human characters rather more sympathetic than Mirbeau had ever offered before, and though it is clear throughout what the dog’s eventual fate must be this is in many ways the author’s most overtly hopeful novel.

  Mirbeau was, of course, right to see himself as a kind of metaphorical wild dog, ultimately unassimilable by the society in which he found himself because it could not contain or control the rage engendered by his instinct for natural justice. It was not so much that he was a radical, but that he was so bad-tempered about it. Had he been as slick and polished as Anatole France his work would have been more widely applauded and more widely liked. Even those whose own ideological views are utterly opposed to those of The Revolt of the Angels can find it an agreeable book to read, and a book full of nourishing food for thought, but Torture Garden – and almost everything else that Mirbeau wrote – was calculated to be provocatively disagreeable and essentially indigestible.

  Torture Garden is a horror story, not in the commonplace sense that it uses horrific threats to heighten suspense while its characters flee to safety, but in the more authentic sense that it confronts its characters with the horror of their own secret selves and will neither let them flee nor offer them any possible refuge or reprieve. It is, of course, an indecent novel, because it assaults the very notion of “decency” as a hollow sham. It is a novel which, as a certain prosecuting barrister might have put it, you might not want your wives or servants to read.

  For these reasons, Torture Garden has been unavailable in England for most of this century. In spite of the literary half-life which it has previously lived, however, it is an important book. It is important because it boldly dares to go where no book had gone before and where none has gone since. Perhaps that is because it overestimates the true extent of our hypocrisies, and thus has little or nothing to say to us, but perhaps – only perhaps – it is because it estimates the extent of our hypocrisies all too accurately, and offers a challenge which few of us are willing to meet.

  FRONTISPIECE

  One evening a few friends gathered together at the home of one of our most famous authors. After we had feasted bountifully, the discussion turned to murder – I no longer remember on what pretext. On no pretext at all, most probably. Only men were present: moralists, poets, philosophers and doctors, that is, everyone felt free to speak candidly and to follow their own fancies, obsessions or paradoxes with
out fear that this would immediately be followed by the sort of bewilderment and terror that appears on the outraged faces of our clerks at the slightest daring idea. Not that I mention clerks with any sense of contempt, of course, and I might just as easily have said lawyers or porters. I merely mean to delineate the average state of the French sensibility.

  With a composure as perfect as if he was about to express what he thought about the cigar he was smoking, a member of the Academy of moral and political sciences said: “You know … I genuinely believe murder to be the greatest human obsession, and that our every action derives from it …”

  We assumed this would be followed by a long exegesis, but he said nothing more.

  “Well, of course!” a Darwinian scholar declared. “Your words, my dear chap, express one of those eternal truths that the legendary M. de la Palisse expressed every day: murder being the very foundation of our social institutions, it is consequently the most imperious necessity of civilised life. If there were no murder government of any sort would be inconceivable. For the admirable fact is that crime in general, and murder in particular, not simply excuses it, but represents its only reason to exist … Otherwise we would live in complete anarchy, something we find unimaginable … And so, far from wishing to eradicate murder, it is indispensable to cultivate it with intelligence and perseverance … And I don’t know a better means of cultivation than laws.”

  Someone protested.

  “Come now!” the scholar exclaimed. “I thought we were among friends and could speak without hypocrisy!”

  “Feel free! …” agreed the master of the house. “Let’s take due advantage of the one occasion we shall be allowed to express our most intimate ideas, for in my books I have, as you have in your own spheres, been able to present the public only with lies.”

  The scholar made himself more comfortable on the cushions of his armchair and stretched his legs, which had gone to sleep through having been crossed for too long. His head thrown back, arms hanging down and stomach soothed by good digestion, he propelled smoke rings towards the ceiling.

  “In any event,” he answered, “murder is quite able to propagate itself … Strictly speaking, it does not result from one or another particular passion, nor is it the pathological form of degeneracy. It is a vital instinct lying within us all … that is within all systematically organised beings and which dominates them, in the same way as genetic instinct. Most of the time this is so true that these two instincts combine so well with one another, are so totally mingled together, that somehow they constitute a single and identical instinct. Thus it becomes impossible to know which one drives us towards giving life and which towards taking it back, or to distinguish which of them is murder and which love. An honourable murderer who killed women, not to steal from them but to rape them, once confided in me. His sport was to make the spasm of his pleasure coincide exactly with the other’s death spasm: ‘In such moments,’ he told me, ‘I felt like a god creating the world!’ ”

  “Ah!” exclaimed the famous writer … “If you are going to look for your examples among professional murderers!”

  The scholar replied gently: “But all of us are more or less murderers … I’m sure that intellectually we have all experienced analogous sensations to some degree. We may curb the innate need we have for murder, or attenuate physical violence by giving it a legal outlet – whether through industry, colonial trade, war, hunting or antisemitism – because it is dangerous to abandon oneself to it immoderately, outside the law. In any event, the moral satisfaction drawn from it is not such as to make it worthwhile being exposed to the ordinary consequences that follow – imprisonment, arguments in front of judges (always tiring and devoid of scientific interest) … and finally the guillotine …”

  “You’re exaggerating,” interrupted the first speaker. “Murder is dangerous only for murderers lacking elegance and spirit – those impulsive brutes who are devoid of psychological insight … An intelligent and reasoning person may, with imperturbable serenity, commit all the murders he likes. He is assured of impunity … The superiority of his schemes will always prevail over habitual police investigations and, let’s admit it, against the feebleness of criminal investigations in which examining magistrates take such delight … In this business, as in all others, the small pay for the great … Dear chap, you’ll surely accept how many crimes go undetected …”

  “And tolerated …”

  “Yes, tolerated … that’s what I was about to say. Even so, you’ll admit that the number is a thousand times greater than those crimes that are uncovered and punished, about which the papers babble with strange prolixity and such a repugnant lack of wisdom? If you admit that, accept too that the gendarme is no bogeyman for intellectuals of murder …”

  “No doubt. But that’s beside the point. You have avoided the question … My point is that murder is a normal – and not at all exceptional – activity in nature and among all living beings. Therefore, it is unacceptable for society, on the pretext of governing people, to assume the exclusive right to kill them, to the detriment of individuals in whom, alone, this right lies.”

  “Quite right!” confirmed the amiable and verbose philosopher whose lectures at the Sorbonne drew a select audience each week. “Our friend is absolutely right. Personally, I don’t believe a human being exists who is not – at least potentially – a murderer … When I’m in reception halls, churches, stations, on cafe terraces, in the theatre, everywhere that crowds pass and circulate, I sometimes take pleasure in considering people’s features from the strictly homicidal point of view … From the way they look, the nape of the neck, the shape of the skull and the jawbones, from the zygoma of the cheeks, every part of their personality visibly bears the stigmata of that physiological destiny that is murder … This is not an aberration of my mind, but I cannot take a step without bumping into murder, without seeing it flaming beneath eyelids, without sensing its mysterious contact in hands extended to me … Last Sunday I went to a village that was celebrating its patron saint. In the public square decorated with leaves and floral arches and adorned with flags, every type of amusement familiar to popular celebrations had been assembled … And, under the paternal eyes of the authorities, a crowd of perfectly decent folk were having fun … The wooden horses, the roller-coasters and the swings attracted only a few people. Organs intoned their liveliest tunes and their most charming flourishes in vain. The festive crowd were drawn towards other pleasures. They used rifles and pistols, or simply the good old crossbow, to shoot at targets representing human faces. Others were throwing balls to knock over puppets dismally arranged on wooden bars. Still others struck a spring with a mallet causing a French sailor at the end of a plank to patriotically run through a poor Hova or a ridiculous Dahomean with his bayonet … Everywhere, under tents and in small illuminated booths, were simulacra of deaths, parodies of massacres, and portrayals of hecatombs … And how happy these perfectly decent folk were!”

  We all realised that the philosopher was well away, so we settled down to surrender to his avalanche of theories and anecdotes. He continued:

  “I even noticed that for some years these peaceful amusements have been steadily developing. The joy of killing has increased and become cruder as morality has mellowed – for morals do mellow, don’t doubt it! In former times we may have been less cultivated, but Sunday shooting-galleries were monotonously sorry things to see. You simply shot at a few pipes and eggshells that danced on top of water jets. In more prosperous establishments, they had a few birds, but made of plaster. What was the fun of that, I ask you? Now progress has come. It is desirable for any honest man to acquire, for two sous, the delicate and civilising emotions of assassination. Not only that, but you can also win coloured plates and rabbits … Instead of pipes and eggshells and plaster birds which smash apart stupidly without the slightest suggestion of anything bloody, the peddler’s imagination has substituted lifelike and carefully articulated and costumed figures of men, women and chil
dren. Then they make these figures gesticulate and move. An ingenious mechanism enables them to walk along happily or to flee in terror. They appear, alone or in groups, in natural scenery, scaling walls, entering castle keeps, falling headlong from windows, appearing from out of traps … They function just like actual beings, their arms, legs and heads move. Some seem to be crying, others to be paupers, or to be sick. Others are dressed in gold like princesses of legend. You can really imagine that they possess an intelligence, a will, a soul – that they live! Some even assume a pathetic or pleading attitude. They seem to be saying, ‘Have mercy! … Don’t kill me! …’ It is exquisite to feel that you are about to kill things that move, advance, suffer and implore! … Just to aim a rifle or pistol at them seems to bring the taste of warm blood to your mouth! What joy you feel as the shot decapitates these make-believe people! You stamp your foot as the arrow splits open cardboard bellies and lays low the little inanimate bodies in corpse-like positions! Everyone gets excited, is unable to stop, and encourages others … They confine themselves to words of death and destruction: ‘Kill him! … Get him in the eye! … Get him in the heart! … That’ll do for him!’ As indifferent as these delightful people remain to targets of cardboard and pipes, so they become elated once they aim at the representation of a human figure. Those who are clumsy get angry, not at their own clumsiness, but at the marionette they have missed. They accuse it of cowardice, heaping ignoble insults on it whenever it vanishes, intact, behind the keep door. They challenge it: ‘Come on out, you wretch!’ And they start shooting at it again until they have killed it. Consider these fine people … At that moment they really are assassins, beings moved simply by the desire to kill. The homicidal monster, which just a moment before had slumbered within them, wakes to the illusion that they are about to destroy something living. For the figure of cardboard, sawdust or wood passing back and forth through the scenery, ceases to be a toy or a piece of inert matter for them. As they watch it going backwards and forwards they unconsciously attribute it with circulatory warmth, sensitive nerves, thought – all those things it is so bitter-sweet to annihilate, so fiercely delicious to see drained away through wounds you have inflicted. They even go as far as to impute political or religious opinions contrary to theirs to the little figure, going as far as to accuse him of being Jewish, English or German, in order to add a particular hate to this generalised hatred of life, and so enhance the instinctive pleasure of killing with an intimately savoured personal vengeance.”