Octave Mirbeau Archive
Written: 1900.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
At last I have received a letter from Monsieur Jean. It is very dry, this letter. From reading it, one would think that there never had been any intimacy between us. Not a word of friendship, not a particle of tenderness, not a recollection! He tells me only of himself. If he is to be believed, it seems that Jean has become an important personage. That is to be seen and felt from the patronizing and somewhat contemptuous air which he assumes toward me at the beginning of his letter. In short, he writes to me only to astonish me. I always knew that he was vain,—indeed, he was such a handsome fellow!—but I never realized it so much as to-day. Men cannot stand success or glory.
Jean is still first valet de chambre in the house of the Countess Fardin, and at this moment the countess is perhaps the most-talked-of woman in France. To his capacity of valet de chambre Jean adds the role of a participant in political manifestations and of royalist conspirator. He manifests with Coppée, Lemaitre, Quesnay de Beaurepaire; he conspires with General Mercier,—and all to overturn the republic. The other evening he accompanied Coppée to a meeting of the “Patrie Française.” He strutted on the platform, behind the great patriot, and held his overcoat all the evening. For that matter, he can say that he has held all the overcoats of all the great patriots of this time. That will count for something in his life. Another evening, at the exit of a Dreyfusard meeting, to which the countess had sent him to “smash the jaws of the cosmopolitans,” he was arrested and taken to the station-house for having spat upon these people without a country, and shouted at the top of his voice: “Death to the Jews! Long Live the King! Long Live the Army!” The countess threatened the government with an interpellation in the chamber, and Monsieur Jean was at once released. His mistress even added twenty francs a month to his wages, in compensation for this lofty feat of arms. M. Arthur Meyer printed his name in the “Gaulois.” His name figures also opposite the sum of a hundred francs in the “Libre Parole,” among the subscribers to the fund for a monument for Colonel Henry. Coppée inscribed it there officially. Coppée also made him an honorary member of the “Patrie Française,”—an astonishing society. All the servants in the great houses belong to it. There are also counts, marquises, and dukes. On coming to breakfast yesterday, General Mercier said to Jean: “Well, my brave Jean?” My brave Jean! Jules Guérin, in the “Anti-Juif,” has written, under the heading, “Another Victim of the Sheenies!” an article beginning: “Our valiant anti-Semitic comrade, M. Jean,” etc. And finally, M. Forain, who now is always at the house, has had Jean pose for a design, which is to symbolize the soul of the country. M. Forain thinks that Jean has “just the mug for that.” He receives at this moment an astonishing number of illustrious decorations, of serious tips, and of honorary and extremely flattering distinctions. And if, as there is every reason to believe, General Mercier decides to summon Jean for the coming Zola trial, to give false testimony,—the nature of which the staff will decide upon soon,—nothing will be lacking to complete his glory. This year, in high society, there is nothing so fashionable and effective as false testimony. To be selected for a perjurer, besides bringing certain and swift glory, is as good as winning the capital prize in a lottery. M. Jean clearly perceives that he is making a greater and greater sensation in the neighborhood of the Champs-Elysées. When, in the evening, he goes to the café in the Rue Francois I. to play pool for a turkey, or when he takes the countess’s dogs out for an airing, he is the object of universal curiosity and respect; so are the dogs, for that matter. That is why, in view of a celebrity which cannot fail to spread from the neighborhood over Paris, and from Paris over France, he has become a subscriber to a clipping-bureau, just as the countess has done. He will send me the smartest things that are written about him. This is all that he can do for me, for I must understand that he has no time to attend to my affairs. He will see, later,—“when we shall be in power,” he writes me, carelessly. Everything that happens to me is my fault; I have never known how to conduct myself; there has never been any sequence in my ideas; I have wasted the best places, without profit. If I had not been such a hot-head, I, too, perhaps, would be on the best terms with General Mercier, Coppée, Déroulède; and perhaps, although I am only a woman, I should see my name sparkling in the columns of the “Gaulois,” which is so encouraging for all sorts of domesticity. Etc., etc.
To read this letter almost made me cry, for I felt that Monsieur Jean is quite gone from me, and that I can no longer count on him,—on him or on anybody! He does not tell me a word of my successor. Ah! I see her from here, I see them from here, both of them, in the chamber that I know so well, kissing and caressing each other, and making the round of the public balls and the theaters together, as we used to do so prettily. I see him, in his putty-colored overcoat, returning from the races, after having lost his money, and saying to her, as so many times he has said to me: “Lend me your jewels and your watch, that I may hang them up.” Unless his new role of participant in political manifestations and of royalist conspirator has filled him with new ambitions, and he has abandoned the loves of the servants’ hall for the loves of the salon. He will come back to them.
Is all that happens to me really my fault? Perhaps. And yet it seems to me that a fatality of which I have never been the mistress has weighed upon my entire existence, and has prevented me from ever staying more than six months in the same place. When they did not discharge me, I left, disgusted beyond endurance. It is funny, and it is sad,—I have always been in a hurry to be “elsewhere,” I have always entertained a mad hope of “those chimerical elsewheres,” which I invest with the vain poesy, the illusory mirage of far-away distances, especially since my stay at Houlgate with poor M. Georges. That stay has left me with a certain anxiety, a certain torturing necessity of reaching fruitlessly after unattainable ideas and forms. I really believe that this too short and sudden glimpse of a world which I had better never have known at all, being unable to know it better, has been very harmful to me. Oh! how disappointing are these ways leading to the unknown! One goes on and on, and it is always the same thing. See that sparkling horizon yonder. It is blue, it is pink, it is fresh, it is as light and luminous as a dream. It must be fine to live there. You approach, you arrive. There is nothing. Sand, pebbles, hills as dismal as walls. There is nothing else. And above this sand, these pebbles, these hills, there is a gray, opaque, heavy sky,—a sky which kills the day, and whose light weeps dirty tears. There is nothing,—nothing of that which one is looking for. Moreover, I do not know what I am looking for; and neither do I know who I am.
A domestic is not a normal being, a social being. He is an incongruous personage, made up of pieces and bits that cannot fit into one another, that can only lie next one another. He is something worse,—a monstrous human hybrid. He is no longer of the people, whence he came; neither is he of the bourgeoisie, among whom he lives and toward whom he tends. He has lost the generous blood and the artless strength of the people that he has denied, and has gained the shameful vices of the bourgeoisie, without having succeeded in acquiring the means of satisfying them,—the vile sentiments, the cowardly fears, the criminal appetites, without the setting, and consequently without the excuse, of wealth. With a soiled soul, he traverses this respectable bourgeois world, and, simply from having breathed the mortal odor that rises from these putrid sinks, he loses forever the security of his mind, and even the very form of his personality. At the bottom of all these recollections, amid this host of figures among whom he wanders, a phantom of himself, he finds nothing to work upon but filth,—that is, suffering. He laughs often, but his laugh is forced. This laugh does not come from joy found or from hope realized, and it shows the bitter grimace of rebellion, the hard and contracted curve of sarcasm. Nothing is more sorrowful and ugly than this laugh; it burns and withers. It would have been better, perhaps, if I had wept. And then, I do not know. And then, zut! Come what will.
But nothing comes at all,—never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
Madame is always the same; distrustful, methodical, severe, rapacious, without an impulse, without a caprice, without a particle of spontaneity, without a ray of joy upon her marble face. Monsieur has resumed his habits, and I imagine, from certain sullen airs, that he has a spite against me because of my severity; but his spites are not dangerous. After breakfast, armed and gaitered, he starts off on a hunting expedition, returns at night, asks me only to help him in taking off his boots, and goes to bed at nine o’clock. He is still awkward, comical, and irresolute. He is growing fat. How can people as rich as they are be resigned to so dismal an existence? Sometimes I question myself regarding Monsieur. What should I have done with him? He has no money, and would have given me no pleasure. And especially as Madame is not jealous!
The terrible thing about this house is its silence. I cannot get used to it. Yet, in spite of myself, I am beginning to glide, to “walk in the air,” as Joseph says. Often in these dark passage-ways, alongside these cold walls, I seem to myself like a specter, like a ghost. And I am stifling in it all. And I stay.
My sole diversion is to go on Sunday, after mass, to call on Mme. Gouin, the grocer. Disgust holds me back, but ennui, stronger than disgust, takes me there. There at least we are ourselves again,—all of us together. We gossip, we laugh, we tell stories as we sip our little black-currant cocktails. There we find a little of the illusion of life. The time passes. A few Sundays ago I missed a little woman, with running eyes and a rat-like nose, whom I had seen there previously. I inquire about her.
“It is nothing; it is nothing,” said the grocer, in a tone to which she tried to impart a certain mystery.
“She is sick, then?”
“Yes, but it is nothing. In two days it will be all gone.”
And Mam’zelle Rose looks at me with confirmatory eyes, which seem to say:
“Ah, you see, this is a very skillful woman.”
To-day I have learned at the grocer’s that a party of hunters found yesterday, in the forest of Raillon, among the briers and dead leaves, the body of a little girl, horribly outraged. It seems that she was the daughter of a road-laborer. She was known in the neighborhood as the little Claire. She was a little bit simple, but sweet and pretty, and she was not twelve years old! A rich windfall, as you can imagine, for a place like the grocer’s shop, where they had to content themselves with telling the same stories week after week. Consequently the tongues rattled famously.
According to Rose, always better informed than the others, the little Claire had been cut open with a knife, and her intestines were protruding through the wound. Her neck and throat still bore visible marks of strangling fingers. There was still to be seen in the short heather the trampled and trodden spot where the crime had been committed. It must have happened at least a week ago, for the body was almost entirely decomposed.
The assembled domestics relate a heap of things; they remember that the little Claire was always in the woods. In the spring she gathered there jonquils and lilies of the valley and anemones, of which she made pretty bouquets for the ladies of the town; she also went there to look for morels, which she sold on Sunday at the market. In summer there were mushrooms of all sorts, and other flowers. But at this time of year why did she go to the woods, where there was nothing left to pick?
One says, discreetly:
“Why had the father shown no anxiety regarding the child’s disappearance? Perhaps he did it himself?”
To which another no less discreetly replies:
“But, if he had wanted to do it himself, he had no need to take his daughter to the woods; come now.”
Mlle. Rose intervenes:
“It all looks very suspicious to me.”
With knowing airs, the airs of one who is in possession of terrible secrets, she goes on in a lower voice, a voice of dangerous confidence:
“Oh! I know nothing about it; I make no assertions. But....”
And she leaves our curiosity hanging on this “but.”
“What then? what then?” they cry from all sides, with outstretched necks and open mouths.
“But ... I should not be astonished ... if it were....”
We are breathless.
“Monsieur Lanlaire. There, that is what I think, if you want to know,” she concludes, with an expression of base and atrocious ferocity.
Several protest; others reserve judgment. I declare that Monsieur Lanlaire is incapable of such a crime, and I cry:
“He, Lord Jesus? Oh, the poor man! He would be too much afraid.”
But Rose, with still more hatred, insists:
“Incapable? Ta, ta, ta! And the little Jézureau? And Valentin’s little girl? And the little Dougère? Do you remember them? Incapable?”
“It is not the same thing; it is not the same thing.”
In their hatred of Monsieur they do not, like Rose, go so far as to make a formal charge of murder. That he outrages little girls who consent to be outraged,—yes, that is possible. That he kills them,—that is scarcely credible. But Rose stormily insists. She froths at the mouth; she pounds the table with her soft, fat hands; she cries, with excited gestures:
“Do I not tell you yes? I am sure of it.”
Mme. Gouin, who has been listening in a dreamy fashion, finally declares, in her meaningless voice:
“Oh! indeed, young women, in these matters one can never tell. As for the little Jézureau, it was a famous bit of luck, I assure you, that he did not kill her.”
In spite of the authority of the grocer, in spite of the obstinacy of Rose, who will not consent to change the subject, they pass in review, one after another, all the people in the neighborhood who could have done the deed. They find heaps of them,—all those whom they detest, all those of whom they have any jealousy, against whom they have any spite. Finally the pale little woman with the rat-like nose remarks:
“You know that last week there were two capuchins begging around here, who did not present a very inviting appearance, with their dirty beards. May it not have been they?”
A cry of indignation arises:
“Worthy and pious monks? The good God’s holy souls! It is abominable!”
And, as we take our departure, after laying everybody under suspicion, Rose, bent on establishing her theory, repeats:
“Do I not tell you that it is he? It is he, be sure!”
Before reentering the house, I stop a moment in the harness-room, where Joseph is polishing his harnesses. Above a dresser, on which bottles of varnish and boxes of blacking are symmetrically arranged, I see flaming on the pine wainscoting the portrait of Drumont. To give him greater majesty, undoubtedly, Joseph has recently adorned him with a crown of laurel. Opposite, the portrait of the pope is almost entirely hidden by a horse-blanket hung upon a nail. Anti-Jewish pamphlets and patriotic songs are piled up on a shelf, and in a corner Joseph’s club stands lonely among the brooms.
Suddenly I say to Joseph, solely from a motive of curiosity:
“Do you know, Joseph, that the little Claire has been found in the woods, murdered and outraged?”
At first Joseph cannot suppress a movement of surprise,—is it really surprise? Rapid and furtive as this movement was, it seems to me that, at the sound of the little Claire’s name, a sort of strange shock, something like a shudder, passed through him. He recovers very quickly.
“Yes,” he says, in a firm voice, “I know it. I was told so in the neighborhood this morning.”
Now he is indifferent and placid. He rubs his harnesses methodically with a thick, black cloth. I admire the muscular development of his bare arms, the harmonious and powerful suppleness of his biceps, the whiteness of his skin. I cannot see his eyes under the lowered lids,—his eyes so obstinately fixed upon his work. But I see his mouth, his large mouth, his enormous jaw, the jaw of a cruel and sensual beast. And I feel a sort of light tremor at my heart. I ask him further:
“Do they know who did it?”
Joseph shrugs his shoulders. Half jesting, half serious, he answers:
“Some vagabonds, undoubtedly; some dirty sheenies.”
Then, after a short silence:
“Puuutt! you will see that they will not pinch them. The magistrates are all sold.”
He hangs up the finished harnesses, and, pointing to Drumont’s portrait, in its laurel halo, he adds:
“If we only had him? Oh, misfortune!”
I know not why I left him with a singular feeling of uneasiness in my soul.
At any rate, this story is going to give us something to talk about, something to divert us a little.
Sometimes, when Madame is out, and I cannot stand the ennui, I go to the iron fence by the roadside, where Mlle. Rose comes to meet me. Always on the watch, nothing that goes on in our place escapes her. She sees all who come in and go out. She is redder, fatter, flabbier than ever. Her lips hang more than they did, and she is more and more haunted by obscene ideas. Every time that we meet, her first look is at my person, and her first words, uttered in her thick voice, are:
“Remember my advice. As soon as you notice anything, go straight to Mme. Gouin; straight.”
It is a veritable obsession, a mania. A little annoyed, I reply:
“But why do you expect me to notice anything? I know nobody here.”
“Ah!” she exclaims, “a misfortune comes so quickly! A moment of forgetfulness,—it is very natural,—and there you are! Sometimes one does not know how it happens. I have seen some who were as sure as you are, and then it happened all the same. But with Mme. Gouin one can rest easy. So expert a woman is a real blessing to a town. Why, formerly, my dear little one, you saw nothing but children around here. The town was poisoned with children. An abomination! They swarmed in the streets, like chickens in a hen-yard. They bawled on the door-steps, and made a terrible hullaballoo. One saw nothing else. Well, I don’t know whether you have noticed it, but to-day there are no more to be seen, almost none at all.”
With a more slimy smile, she continues:
“Not that the girls amuse themselves any less. Oh! heavens, no! On the contrary. You never go out in the evening; but, if you were to take a walk at nine o’clock under the chestnut trees, you would see. Everywhere couples on the benches, kissing and caressing. It is a very pretty spectacle. Oh! to me, you know, love is so pretty. I perfectly understand that one cannot live without love. Yes, but it is very annoying also to have a lot of children tagging at one’s heels. Well, they have none now; they have no more. And it is to Mme. Gouin that they owe that. Just a disagreeable moment to pass through; after all, it is not like having to swallow the sea. In your place I would not hesitate. A pretty girl like you, so distinguished, and who must have so good a figure,—a child would be a murder.”
“Reassure yourself. I have no desire to have one.”
“Yes, I know; nobody has any desire to have one. Only ... But, tell me, has Monsieur never made advances to you?”
“Why, no.”
“That is astonishing, for he has a great reputation for that. Not even that morning in the garden?”
“I assure you.”
Mam’zelle Rose shakes her head.
“You are unwilling to say anything. You distrust me. Well, that is your business. Only, we know what we know.”
Peasants pass in the road, and salute Mam’zelle Rose, with respect.
“How do you do, Mam’zelle Rose? And the captain,—is he well?”
“Very well, thank you. He is drawing some wine just now.”
Bourgeois pass in the road, and salute Mam’zelle Rose with respect.
“How do you do, Mam’zelle Rose? And the captain?”
“Always vigorous, thank you; you are very good.”
The priest passes in the road, with a slow step, wagging his head. At the sight of Rose, he bows, smiles, closes his breviary, and stops.
“Ah! it is you, my dear child? And the captain?”
“Thank you, Father, things are going very nicely. The captain is busy in the cellar.”
“So much the better, so much the better! I hope that he has planted some beautiful flowers, and that next year, on Corpus Christi day, we shall have again a superb street altar.”
“You may be sure of it, Father.”
“All my friendships to the captain, my child.”
“And the same to you, Father.”
And, as he goes away, his breviary again open:
“Au revoir! au revoir! All that a parish needs is parishioners like you.”
And I go back, a little sad, a little discouraged, a little hateful, leaving this abominable Rose to enjoy her triumph, saluted by all, respected by all, fat, happy, hideously happy. Soon, I am sure, the priest will place her in a niche in his church, between two candles, with a nimbus of gold about her, like a saint.