Something Old

   Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago. 

“UN CRIME” by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1935). Published in English in 1936 under the name A Crime.

Un Crime was the first novel by Bernanos to be published in the English language. Why should this be so? Because Un Crime is basically a detective story – a whodunnit – and detective stories were very popular in the 1930’s. An American imprint took it up. But why should  Bernanos write in such a genre in the first place? Simple. Bernanos had a large family to feed [three sons, three daughters] and his publisher suggested that he could make more money if he wrote a detective novel. So he did. But do not be fooled for, detective tale or not, Bernanos wove in philosophical and religious ideas as well.

Set in the mountain country of France, near Grenoble, there is a small town called Megere. The town’s priest has gone and a new priest is on his way to replace him. Oddly the new priest arrives at night and he has walked through a forest when he could have come through an easier road. The new priest is young and pale. When he comes to his presbytery he wants to sleep. He is directed by his house-keeper to his bedroom and he sleeps. Later he wakes in the night and he wakes the house-keeper. He says he had heard gun-shots. The house-keeper says she did not hear anything. But the two of them walk in the darkness to find what had happened. Firmin the constable has looked over the ground. A man has been killed in the nearby forest; and another man has almost been killed on the grounds of Madame Beauchamp – an old and wealthy woman who has recently died; and Madame Louise now looks after the deceased woman’s house. The man lying on the grounds is still alive but his blood is draining out and he cannot speak, partly because somebody has forced a stone down his throat. In due course he dies. As well as the gendarmes, there are now Frescheville – who is often called “the little judge” – and later a district attorney and a magistrate who are examining all the details and trying to work out who could have committed murder. Among the conversations, he understands that there is in Madame Beauchamp’s house an ex-nun, a secularized religion sister and a house-keeper. It is suggested that something shady has happened in the house.

People want to know what the new priest is like and they ask Firmin. He says “Well, Monsieur le maire, a mere boy with a maidenly expression, but according to my mind, more thoughtful than you’d suppose. You ought not to have left him up yonder, we should have taken our time.”

The priest tells Gaspard Andre, a young altar-boy, that he will not give mass on his first day in the town because, he says, he is sick and out of sorts and he stays in the presbytery. Even so, the altar-boy is impressed by the priest. And the police ask the priest to give his account of what he said he had heard shots in the night… but this takes things no further. There is much investigation into Madame Beauchamp’s house and the fact that there was a piston in the house that is now gone missing. A doctor is brought in and he looks at the corpses. Of the priest he says “… this priest has nothing womanish about him, on the contrary. Anyway I have not examined him; his pulse worries me, his expression is that of a highly strung patient, that’s all… like a great many of his fellows – I mean born priests – the feminine side of his nature is very pronounced…” Later Frescheville [“the little judge”] quizzes the priest about what he knew of the two men who died, but the priest has nothing to say. [Suggestion – there is at this point the possibility that the priest is holding back from given information because he has heard something in the confessional…]. However the priest does say that he could get relevant information from a woman in another town nearby. So off goes the priest… and he is never seen again…

 Frescheville and other inspectors look carefully over the information again. Why did the priest disappear so quickly? Why could he not be available even if he was in a different town? Frescheville interrogates Gaspard Andre, the altar-boy, about the disappearance of the priest and he does learn that the boy had helped the priest to find a route that could take him far from Megere. He sends the boy on his way, telling him to tell people where the priest might be… and he more and more comes to believe that the murders had much to do with the goings-on in the family of the late Madame Beauchamp. Now the officers, the judge and the police look over the area again and walk through the bush and see where events could have taken place. By now they are speculating about how or why the priest had gone. The  disappearance  seems to have something to do with a legacy which was going to be given to the church. It was another priest who, having heard of the disappearance of the younger priest, tells the judge about the legacy… and of certain scandals about the family that were common knowledge.

The boy and the priest are in the Basque country. The boy no longer believes in the priest. And….

 

            Wait a moment. I’m about to tell you about how the novel ends, and given that it is a whodunnit, that would be a grave thing to do [pun intended]. Surely a whodunnit is a game of wits for the reader, working out who the killer was. But to help you out, look at what Firmin and the doctor said about the priest, then think about it. Un Crime ends in a very awkward way, with Bernanos giving us a character who writes a long letter explaining who the priest was and what this character had done.

            I said at the beginning of this review that “Bernanos wove in philosophical and religious ideas as well”.  This is true in one sense. Bernanos does give us, in this small town, a collection of people who represent what France was like in the early ^20th century – that is, Catholics and sceptic rationalists. There is no anger between the priests and the doctors and the law. Their status is simply accepted. And Bernanos does show that both can sometimes be wrong.