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. 

NOUVELLE HISTOIRE DE MOUCHETTE by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1937). Published in English in 1966 by J. C. Whitehouse.  The French title means New Story of Mouchette, but the English version  simply calls it Mouchette.

When I decide to review on this blog all the works of a novelist, I sometimes like to work methodically beginning with the novelist’s first novel and working my way to the novelist’s last novel. Thus I have done when I have written about George Orwell and F. Scott  Fitzgerald and others. But with Georges Bernanos’s Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette I make an exception. There is a reason for this. In his first novel Sous le Soleil de Satan, published in 1926, he introduced a character called Mouchette, a young woman who was driven to suicide, by her own hedonism. After Bernanos wrote Sous le Soleil de Satan he wrote a number of novels into the 1930’s; but the idea of a character called Mouchette stayed in his head. What exactly could have made a woman despair and kill herself?  Bernanos never assumes that only the wicked kill themselves. What had made her despair? So in 1936 he wrote Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette. But this is a very different Mouchette from the earlier one. She is a 14-year-old girl, and every so often there are sentences that suggest her world is in modern times. The earlier Mouchette was clearly set in the late 19^th century. The new Mouchette seems to be set somewhere in the 1920’s. Occasionally there are references to such things as movies, but they are very much in the background as [the new] Mouchette lives in a very rural place. And we soon understand that the 14-year-old girl’s life has been a very difficult one. Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette is short enough to be called a novella.

Mouchette’s parents are drunkards and her father is often violent. Their home is filthy and Mouchette’s clothes are tattered and/or grubby. She has to look after the baby because her mother is often too drunk to care. When Mouchette goes to school she is often mocked, not only by other girls [it is a girls school] but also by some of the teachers. She has a good singing voice but sometimes her voice breaks. The school-mistress tells her “You’re nothing but a savage… a proper savage. Even savages have their music – a savage one, of course, but still music…”  So she runs away from school, but rather than going down the road where the other girls walk home, she tries to get home through the forest. And the wind blows up. And it rains furiously. And she gets lost. Her clogs become wet and she falls into mud. She decides to stay under a tree and sleep there for the night, fearing what her parents will say to her. Her father would probably beat her. But she meets an old poacher called Arsene who happens to be epileptic, as well is a heavy drinker like her parents. He guides her to his shelter in the forest.. Mouchette is shrewd enough to see what sort of a man he is and sees him like the men she knows in her small town. “For years Mouchette had felt herself a stranger amongst the villagers, dark and hairy just like goats, whom she hated so much. Even when they were young they ran to unhealthy fat. Their nerves were poisoned  by the coffee they drank all day in their stinking cafes …”  Arsene is sober enough to tell his life story, but his story becomes nastier when he boast about nearly killing a man. Again, Mouchette is mature enough to see what he is. She had heard drunkards talking before. Suddenly there is a shot heard in the forest. Arsene goes outside to see what has happened. There are two more shots. When he returns he suggests that he has killed Mathieu, a warden who fines poachers. He drinks more. He falls down and goes into a sort of fugue… and when he comes to he starts fiddling with Mouchette – trying to seduce her. It is clear that he rapes her. She escapes from him and manages to get back home.

Her parents are both in their usual drunken state. She has to do all the chores, including looking after the baby. The house – basically a hovel - is as filthy as ever. The narrator says of her position “Those are lucky in whom the first sexual experience arouses remorse or at least some emotion violent enough to overcome the formless anguish and desperate nausea which Mouchette felt. She made a pathetic effort to think about her banal adventure, but managed only to accelerate the procession of wild images that flowed throught her brain. It was like one of those endless nightmares of uniform horror which, as a real alcoholic’s daughter, she often had to endure throughout a whole night and whose full memory only really came back much later…” Used to being beaten and misused, she understands that being raped was just another event that women and girls had to go through, just like being beaten. Her mother is now very sick, on the verge of dying.  Mouchette has to look after the baby more than ever, trying to feed the baby when there is no milk, when all the baby’s blankets are wet with urine, when the baby can’t stop crying. Her mother still calls for gin and howls and dies. She gets a little help from neighbours, but not much and sometime grouchily. In her mind she rebels. “The rebel beginning within her was a blind, dumb demon. Perhaps it did not deserve to be called a rebellion. It was rather an instantaneous, almost overwhelming feeling of her turning her back on the past and reaching the first decisive step towards her destiny.”

Because her mother has died, she is fed by some neighbours. She walks through the small town and meets Mathieu, the warden, and his wife. Mathieu laughs when Mouchette says he had been shot by Arsene. Had old Arsene shot twice only to let Mouchette think he was a great shooter and virile? [Or, as alert readers might think, was Arsene preparing to rape  Mouchette?] But Mouchette insists that Arsene is her “lover”. What other word has the girl got to explain what goes on between women and aggressive men?  Later an old woman helps to make a gown for Mouchette for when she goes to her mother’s funeral. The old woman at first speaks affably , but then she tells her own life story in detail. Mouchette listens but then she pushes the old lady away, not believing her stories and angered that she talk so much of death and the afterlife. After her experiences, she has come to the point where she does not have trust in anybody. Where can she go? She wants to be alone. She goes down to the river and thinks about dying. The last words of the novella read “Mouchette slid down the bank until she felt the gentle sting of the cold water on her leg and as far as the thigh. The sudden silence inside her seemed infinite, like the trapeze-artist reaches the top rung of the ladder. She will dissolved. She slid out into the water, pushing against the bank with one of her hands. She could hold herself up in the shallow water by the pressure  of one hand on the bottom. Then she felt the insidious flow of the water along her head and neck, filling her ears with its joyful sound. She knew that life was slipping away from her, and the smell of the grave itself rose to her nostrils.”

How is this tale connected with the other Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan? In that earlier novel, you might remember that Father Donissan did his best to get Mouchette buried in a decent way. Mouchette hated the Church and was destructively hedonistic, but nevertheless she had gone through many horrors that were not of her doing, and despair overtook her. In the new Mouchette, Bernanos gives us an even more extreme case. How can a fourteen-year-old girl survive when her parents don’t look after her, when she is often beaten, when she lives in filth, when alcohol rules the house, when she is ridiculed by other children and teachers and learns little at school and when she is raped? She is an alert and in her own way thoughtful, often seeing through other people’s negative behavior. But she has come to the point of trusting nobody – which leaves her on her own. She commits suicide. Once again, Bernanos shows us that we have no right to look down on people who have been through severe distress. 

Footnote: Before I had read any of the works of Bernanos, I had seen two films based on Bernanos’s novels. One was his most famous novel The Diary of a Country Priest and the other was Mouchette. Both films were directed by Robert Bresson who had often in his films dealt with Catholic ideas. Please note this was not propaganda. Other French film-directors like Francois Truffaut saw Bresson as one of France’s greatest directors. I saw the film Mouchette when I was a teenager. The film was released in 1967. As I remember it, the film Mouchette seemed to be set in modern times, but its story followed the novel very closely. The young actress in the leading role was Nadine Nortier. If the film had a flaw, it was that the young girl playing the lead seemed reasonably dressed; rather than the grubby ragamuffin in the novel. 

 

                               Nadine Nortier in the role of Mouchette