Abbé Durand shook his head. He reflected. He would like nothing better than to lighten my woes in accordance with his means, but there were hours...there were hierarchies...
“Come and find me here tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. I’ll get up early and do what is necessary beforehand. There’s no one more qualified than the person you’ll see tomorrow.”
He stood up, and I did the same.
“But this evening?” I said, with anguish.
“Prayer is the sovereign power against demons.”
He remembered that he was dealing with a sinner who did not even know the pater, and made me a sign to wait. He went into the sacristy and he came back with a little book.
“You’ll find the seven psalms of penitence there, and also the Pater and the Ave Maria. Say them as many times as you can.”
“Is it necessary to think at the same time about what I’m reading?”
That question astonished him. He reflected.
“Read the prayers. That’s sufficient.”
As I took my leave of him he slipped into my hand a small round object that I thought at first was a sou.
“Put that medallion around your neck this evening. It was given to me once, and it’s miraculous.”
As I went away with my book of prayers and my medallion it seemed to me that I had returned to the distant time of my first communion. I had been afraid of the Devil then, but the sentiment of my infantile purity rendered me invulnerable. If demons surrounded me, there were also angels to combat them. Now, I had lost all my allies and the enemy was more powerful than ever.
I almost threw the book and the medallion into the street. They could not be of any help to me without the faith that I had lost.
At nine o’clock Abbé Durand was already on the threshold of Saint-François-de-Sales, waiting for me. He had been occupied with me, he said. He had informed the authority competent in a case like mine and we were awaited by an individual highly-placed in the Church.
On the way, Abbé Durand rubbed his hands. His desire to come to my aid was embellished by the satisfaction of playing a role and seeing a great theologian, a master of religious science.
I knew that every bishopric has an exorcist attached, even though exorcism is only carried out very rarely.
It’s to the exorcist that we’re going, I thought.
I was not mistaken. Père Théodore lived in a small detached house at the back of a courtyard, beyond the Avenue de Maine. We were introduced into a modest drawing room, well kept, into which a hint of Spanish ostentation penetrated in spite of its modesty.
“He’s a first rate man,” said Abbé Durand, who was intimidated. “A little severe at first sight, but first rate.”
The door opened abruptly, in a theatrical fashion. A fulgurant gaze traversed me and I saw a Spanish priest standing before me, examining me. He was Spanish in his teeth, his jaw and his flattened nose. He did not appear to have any flesh or muscle, nothing but bones. I was surprised not to discover, when he spoke, any foreign accent.
He made me an imperceptible sign of the head and he saluted Abbé Durand with a hint of disdainful arrogance.
“I’ve been fully informed,” he exclaimed. “Are you even baptized?”
At a gesture from Abbé Durand he turned to him and murmured: “There are some devotees who are so unconscious.”
I was resigned to everything. I replied that I had been brought up in the Catholic religion but that I had ceased to practice it a long time ago.
“How long”
“It was about my twelfth or thirteenth year that I lost the faith.”
“You’ve doubtless been educated in a lycée?”
“Yes, in a lycée.”
He showed me redoubtable teeth. I wondered if it was to bite or laugh. He uttered a muted sound, a sort of grunt. He was about to ask me other questions, but he changed his mind.
“It’s not worth the trouble of wasting my time if, as is possible...” He touched his forehead with his fingertip.
Then he sat down at a little desk and he wrote a name and address.
“Go see Doctor Tallier on my behalf. You’ll find him before noon. I’ll telephone him during the day. Come back to see me afterwards—tomorrow, for instance, at the same time.”
“Dr. Tallier? But I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m quite well.”
That assurance, however natural, appeared to exasperate him.
“The first condition, at the point you’ve reached, is obedience, an absolute obedience. If you don’t consent to abdicate your pride completely, there’s no point in coming back.”
The interview was terminated.
Outside, Abbé Durand breathed out like a man relieved of an oppression.
“I’ll explain to you,” he said as we walked. “Père Théodore’s minutes are precious. He’s a luminary of theology. The situation he occupies causes him to see many importunate individuals, and also people who—how shall I put it?—do not have their faculties in perfect equilibrium. So he’s obliged to defend himself, and as he has a vigorous nature, he sometimes appears abrupt. But he has a heart of gold, and I’m sure that he likes you already, without allowing it to appear. Go see Dr. Tallier. He mainly treats mental illnesses, but it’s a matter of a simple formality.”
I asked Abbé Durand whether he had any idea of what would happen the following day when I returned to Père Théodore’s house.
He hesitated. He did not know, exactly. Ceremonies of exorcism were very rarely carried out any more, but a theologian like Père Théodore knew so many things! I could not be in better hands. He concluded by saying: “Have confidence, and above all, be humble.”
I wanted to take Abbé Durand back by taxi, but he insisted on going on foot. He seemed to continue taxis as an unnecessary luxury whose ostentation was rather embarrassing. I left him regretfully. I would have liked to invite him to dinner, but I dared not. While taking account of the absurdity of that idea, I sensed clearly that nothing would have done me as much good as seeing that well-meaning priest eat, who transmitted forgiveness professionally and must heighten the message of God with the color of his human goodness.
The days that followed were the bitterest that I have known; they were those of my veritable possession.
Dr. Tallier recognized that I enjoyed all my faculties and that my cure was not within his competence. Père Théodore had been informed of that when I presented myself at his home. He experienced a horrible satisfaction, betrayed by the noise of his teeth and the gleam in his eye. He made him recount my life story in all its details. While I did so, he interrupted me with exclamations.
“Always the sin of fornication!”
What brought his exasperation to its peak was the story of my religious anxieties and my participation in the Essene sect.
I was a major heretic, an enemy of the Holy Church! How many penitences would be necessary! And even then, he was not certain that they would be sufficient.
“Doesn’t God always forgive?” I asked.
His fury redoubled. Had I not heard mention of the unpardonable sin, which leads to eternal damnation? It would be necessary to fast, to pray, to repent.
Behind the house occupied by Père Théodore there was a charming little garden with box-trees and an acacia, and at the back of the little garden there was a door to a little chapel that opened on another street. It was to that unknown chapel that he led me, and prescribed that I should spend several hours there every day.
The chapel was not heated, and I shivered there. It was strangely bare and empty and there was nothing there but a large painted Christ, brand new, with a curly beard and a regular beauty. Blood was dripping from his hands and feet in little droplets that were in bas-relief. Sometimes the door opened and a kind of lumpen peasant in a monk’s robe, who also had a Spanish character about his physiognomy, came to prowl around me with a hostile expression.
“Here, at least,” Père Théodore told me, when I left him on the first eve
ning, you’ll be sheltered from any demonic manifestation. You’ll acquire the habit of coming here as to a refuge, the only one where you won’t suffer the afflictions of demons.”
Those words seemed horrible to me. So Père Théodore expected me to be coming back for a long time! So he thought that I might be the victim of manifestations of the spirit of evil!
“I thought,” I told him, “that my possession was internal, and that the Church rejected the possibility of demonic apparitions?”
I thought that indignation was about to make him leap up and that he would disappear before my eyes. Then he seemed to be gripped by a ferocious joy.
“Always the spirit of personal research, the source of all heresy! Oh, you think! Oh, you examine! You seek to know what the Church thinks instead of praying humbly and imploring your pardon. Wretch, who has sold himself to Lucifer and who hopes that Lucifer will not have the power to appear to him and torment him! Wretched and ignorant! Read Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, or even Bossuet’s Elévations sur les mystères.”
“And what will I see there?”
“You’ll see that they all believed in the interventions of the Evil One in human existence, and you’ll no longer wonder whether the danger you’re running is real. You’re skirting the abyss, and you’ll open your eyes to measure its depth. You’re going to fall! You’ve fallen! Every sin gives birth to its punishment at the outset. Satan is a form of the justice of God and if you need to see him in order to make penitence, well, you’ll see him, you’ll touch him, by night, lying beside you, and you’ll respire his odor.”
It was from that day on that various inexplicable phenomena were produced around me.
I know that the wood of furniture has a life of its own and that it creaks naturally. Warmth and humidity makes it contract, emitting sounds whose origin is not supernatural. But the creaking of my furniture became so regular and so strange that I had no doubt that it was expressing itself in a strange language at that the words were addressed to me. Fortunately, I did not have the key to that language and I refrained from seeking it. The furniture was silent until I went to bed, but as soon as I drew back my bedclothes and lay down with a hope of sleep it began to speak, and drove away slumber.
I plugged my ears with cotton, but that was not sufficient. I sold an old cupboard and my work-table, which appeared to me to be the organs chosen by the voices to express themselves. The noises diminished at first, but then emerged from the floor-tiles, the walls and above all the doors. I thought I noticed that the doors were noisiest when they were locked, and contended myself with closing them. Then without my being able to attribute the cause to any air current, they moved by themselves, as if pushed by the hand of an invisible visitor.
Mists formed on mirrors and faces were sketched in the mists. I veiled all the mirrors with pieces of cloth. I was obliged to change the pieces of cloth, which were handkerchiefs or pieces of silk because my gaze went to them mechanically and I saw in the designs of the silk the same sketches of faces. I replaced them with monochrome fabrics, but, although they were fixed to the frames with little nails, the fabrics trembled with inexplicable agitations, as if a head placed behind them had pushed them mischievously.
The books on my bookshelves also became a subject of obsession. I was obliged to think about some of them, always the same ones. Sometimes I launched myself abruptly toward one of those that I had sworn not to open again and started riffling through it feverishly in order to nourish myself with the sight of an engraving, dolorously to enjoy an image that frightened me.
First of all there was a work on Tibet with a reproduction of the devils of that country, taken from certain monasteries in the Himalaya. Oh, how much more terrible and infernal was the conception of evil disengaged from them than the one evoked by our rather comical Satans with their cloven hooves and their corkscrew tales. It must have been a damned artist who had created those eyes that only looked into themselves, that mouth devoid of lips, those mute features in which there was no possibility of redemption.
I looked for a long time at the face of the Tibetan devil, until I found a perfect resemblance of my own face therein.
I was also obliged to pick up another ancient folio book of travels in which there were, in all their aspects, the strange stone statues of Easter Island. Vestiges of extinct cults, sculptures carved by a people that had probably worshiped evil, nothing more cruel had been engendered by the human imagination. Those evil gods gazed at the ocean and one sensed that they were sad because, turning their backs to the land, they were nevertheless devoid of hope in the afterlife. I tore them out of the book of travels, scattered them around me, and identified myself with them. Between those accursed brothers, I contemplated on a stone shore an ocean of malediction.
I made the decision to burn all those books in my fireplace.
But when the creaking paused, when it was impossible for me to yield to the obsession of books, I still had difficulty sleeping because of another image. The memory went back to my childhood. I had seen it in an old publication called Le Journal Pour Tous.9 It represented a recumbent man whose hand overlapped the edge of the bed. He woke up because another hand had gripped his own, and his face expressed the greatest terror. The strange hand was long and pale and belonged to a kind of ghost that the illustrator had scarcely sketched, in order to leave to everyone’s imagination the concern of creating its horror.
What prevented me from sleeping was the dread that my hand might accidentally slip out the bedclothes while I slept, and be seized by that formless ghost, never to be released.
When I left home and went to spend several hours at the home of Père Théodore I had the pleasure of going past the church of Saint-François-de-Sales, where I had been welcome benevolently by the well-meaning Abbé Durand. I admired the old stones of the venerable threshold, the harmony of the construction launched toward the heavens.
That small joy was forbidden to me.
As I was going back at dusk and I turned the Rue Brémontier, I saw that the bearded archbishop who was standing motionless above the door on a stone pedestal had been dislodged, or had undergone a strange transformation. He had been replaced by a large ape. That ape was watching for me to pass by, for he agitated his animal jaw when I appeared and brandished in my direction the club that he was holding instead of the Episcopal crosier.
I retraced my steps precipitately and made a detour in order to reach my house.
That persecution of images and forms only increased with the augmentation of the hours of penitence. I spent in Père Théodore’s chapel.
I saw him every day. He sometimes prayed beside me. He fixed his inflamed gaze upon me then, and I sensed the divine wrath that enveloped me like a redoubtable cloud. For Père Théodore was only thinking about my chastisement. He saw nothing in me but an enemy of the Church, a heretic who would have been justly burned on a pyre in the Middle Ages. And, perhaps unknowingly, he resuscitated he ancient method of the Inquisitors. He had imprisoned me in the dungeon of fear. He put me on the rack with the questionnaire of confession. Before an ideal cathedral, in the Toledo of his dream, unable to burn me in reality, he burned me mentally with the fire of demons that he stoked up with his irritated speech.
But above all, he hated me. I symbolized in his eyes the sin of fornication. I was the opprobrium and the ugliness before which forgiveness recoils. As my sensitivity increased, I sensed his hatred in a palpable fashion, before even having crossed his threshold. It surrounded, like an aureole, his square cranium planted with black hair; it resonated in the sound of bones that he made as he walked; it emerged like a black current from the tip of his index finger as he turned it toward me. The chapel was so full of that hatred that it was even reflected on the mural of Christ, and altered the banality of his indifferent face.
That morning, when I rang Père Théodore’s doorbell, I did not find him in his drawing room, as usual. An old maidservant who was like a lily withered by the sap of her interior puri
ty, told me that he had preceded me to the chapel and that he was waiting for me there.
I passed under the acacia in the middle of the box-trees in the garden and I noticed that the ground, instead of being hardened by the morning frost, was soft and damp by virtue of the eternal mystery of spring. Against a wall, in a little pot, a geranium was displaying delightedly a variety of shades of orange.
I had scarcely sensed the sweetness that emerged from vegetables when they are happy than I had already opened the door of the chapel. It closed with an unusual sound and I was astonished by the light that illuminated the unknown place into which I penetrated. It was gray, and the vault of the chapel was low, having come down to the extent that I thought I would bump my head on it. Its arches made crushing semicircles and the walls were massive, as if they were formed by an accumulation of cyclopean blocks. The Christ had hunched up his arms and seemed corroded by a subterranean damp. I had just penetrated into a Medieval prison.
In the middle of the chapel, in front of the altar, four candles formed a square at the center of which was a prie-dieu. Père Théodore was holding a large book bound in black, and was scanning it with his gaze. He was nervously handling a metal cross with his left hand. Behind him, the Spanish peasant was standing motionless in an attitude that betrayed an effort of solemnity.
“We’re going to proceed today with the deprecatory adjuration,” said Père Théodore, authoritatively, and he made me understand with a gesture that my place was behind the prie-dieu, between the four candles.
I ought to have cried out: At last! and rejoiced in approaching the desired goal.
I gazed anxiously at Père Théodore and remained still.
An imperious glint passed through his eyes and he designated the prie-dieu to me again. I advanced slowly to the place he had indicated and had the sentiment that a great danger was suspended over my head.
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