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.
JOURNAL D’UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1936] First published in English in 1937 as The Diary of a Country Priest.
There is no doubt that Journal D’un Cure de Campagne is the most widely read of all Bernanos’s novels. As soon as it was published, it was seen as Bernanos’s masterpiece. He was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Academie Francaise and the novel is still being published, not only in French but in many languages. Years after Bernanos died, Journal D’un Cure de Campagne was made into a film by Robert Bresson, very true to the novel but of course missing much of the priest’s thoughts. As the title tells us, this novel is written in the first person. What we read is what the priest thinks and writes. He has decided to write his diary during one year. This means a degree of artificial language presented by the priest when he gives us verbatim accounts of conversations he has had, but this is a common way of presenting conversations in novels. An alert reader will also be aware that the novel was written after the First World War, when many French people had memories of great loss.
The priest [who is not given a name] is a young man, about thirty-years-old. He has been directed to Ambricourt to be in charge of a parish. His church is a small church that was built in the 15th century. We are aware from the beginning of the novel that the young priest is in poor health. Is he perhaps suffering from tuberculosis or some other complaint? He has been in a sanatorium. His opening words are “My parish is just like all the rest. They are all alike. Those of today I mean… good and evil are probably evenly distributed…” He is aware that priests are not frivolous, but he is sometimes annoyed when priests are being too interested in pointless anecdotes. Some older priests see him as naïve. He soon knows that the land he has been sent to is flat and the surrounding fields are usually wet. He makes it clear that he himself came from peasant stock and he was not used to the upper classes. In fact his father owned a rather shabby pub and he often heard fights going on. When he was quite young he had read and admired Maxim Gorky’s account of his impoverished childhood. He has little money to feed himself but sometimes his Aunt Philomene sends him some money. His superior, who often speaks to him, is the Cure de Torcy who seems very worldly and at first the young priest thinks the Cure de Torcy is too interested in keeping order rather than looking after his flock. But he soon understands that his superior knows more than he thought. The Cure de Torcy talks about the decay of the church, how fewer people go to mass and some people go to confession only as a formality. But he also makes it clear that his mission is to look after people, even if they are rough, even if they are uncouth. Referring to the Nativity, the Cure de Torcy says “Bring down fresh straw for the ox, give the ass a rub down”. The message is that nobody is to be looked down upon, even the poorest … and at the same time, the wealthy have to be looked after in a different way. Later the Cure de Torcy gives to the young priest the most compelling lecture about poverty and their duty to always look after the poor. The young priest seems at first not to know how most people get their food. So the young priest writes in his diary “I have undertaken to visit each family once every three months at least. My colleagues consider this excessive, and indeed such a promise will be hard to keep, since first and foremost I must not neglect a single duty. People who set themselves up to judge us from some remote distance, sitting in a comfortable office where they do the same routine tasks every day, cannot begin to realize how ‘untidy’, how scattered our daily work can be. We can barely manage our ordinary parochial round, the kind of thing which – when it is strictly carried out – makes a superior to exclaim ‘That’s a nice well-kept parish!’ There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible. Am I where Our Lord would have me be? Twenty times a day I ask this question..”
The young priest naturally has to deal with mundane things which are part of his work. He has to teach children the catechism… but they are often disrupted by an annoying little girl called Seraphita who learns her lessons very well but who often makes fun of him for the amusement of other children…. Yet much later in the novel it is annoying Seraphita who helps him when he is nearly lost. Of course he says mass regularly even if few are there; and he hears confession. There are other things that he does not fully understand. The Dean of Blangermont tells him off for not keeping accounts properly. He also tells him that he should not ridicule the rich and the middle-classes as they are also the backbone of the country.
Which brings us to that matter of the wealthy. The young priest has to deal with the people who live in the Chateau and he visits them. Mlle. Louse is the governess at the Chateau. M. le Comte owns many farms… and he is apparently promiscuous… yet he gets on well enough with most priests … though the young priest sees him as shallow. Mlle. Chantal - a young girl – hates her mother because she thinks her mother is the cause of the death of her brother. And Mlle. la Comtesse worries about both her husband and her daughter. The young priest has a hard time trying to speak with them.
The young priest becomes very sick and it is a Dr. Delbende who examines him. Dr. Delbende is a man who likes shooting in the fields. He explains why he is not a Christian – he is an atheist. He talks about unnecessary pain and gives the priest some pain-killing drugs. This does ease the priest for some time, and he is told that he should eat more as he has almost been starving himself… And then Dr. Delbende is found dead in the fields where he is said to have had his gun caught in a bush and it killed him. Surprisingly Dr. Delbende was a good friend of the Cure de Torcy. The young priest suggests that the doctor might have committed suicide. The Cure de Torcy says “God is the sole judge” and says Dr. Delbende was “a just man”. At the very least, it is a warning about underrating people instead of being charitable. It leads the young priest to reflect on his own flaws. “No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test, its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly within me the joy of prayer – perhaps for ever, who can tell? – may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation with the worst convulsions of despair… but my faith is still whole for I can feel it….” This is a stage when the young priest has doubts about his calling… and he is sent an anonymous letter telling him to leave the parish. It could be anyone. Maybe it could be a very angry woman called Mm. Ferrand who thinks something has been stolen from her… but it could be anyone. He is aware of evil in human beings.
At the Chateau, Mlle. Chantal continues to hate her mother. She believes that Mlle. la Comtesse was the source of her brother’s death and she therefore always sides with her father. Whenever the young priest visits the Chateau to talk with her mother, Chantal tries to eavesdrop on their conversation. The young priest takes it upon himself to have a long conversation with the Comtesse. She has lost her faith in God. Although he is essentially a peasant and she is an aristocrat, he is able to get her to accept her daughter and understand her daughter’s anguish, right or wrong. She also again understands the workings of God. This is the longest conversation in the novel and it is very persuading. The young priest has spoken carefully and the old Comtesse also speaks carefully and intelligently. At first he thinks he has done something brilliant… and then he understands that pride is eating him up. His duty is to help and guide people, not to admire himself. More prayer is needed.
There is more trouble ahead. The old Comtesse dies. The Canon [the superior of the priests] says that M. le Comte wants the young priest to write an account of his conversation with the Comtesse. After all, it was only a conversation; not the hearing of confession. But the young priest cannot do it. He regards the conversation as personal and almost the same as confession. The Comte is angry because he had hoped the priest would have heard about how much money the Comtesse had; and he was also annoyed because the priest has spoken to his angry daughter. Chantal has tried to compromise the priest, but it did not work.…There are always problems with the rich.
Later, showing how difficult a priest’s life can be, the young priest has a conversation with a peasant who says that many people think he is too precise and fancy in his work; and warns him that he does not eat enough and he is fading away. Once again the Cure de Torcy tells him about what is needed to be a priest. On his own, the young priest thinks “We’re all called to the priesthood, I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off my taking each one of us back where he belonged in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o’ thousand years younger, but what of it? Time does not worry our Lord, He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born – from a human point of view – Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee – anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me, and so we were called, each in his own particular way… This isn’t theology I’m preaching… It’s simply my own imagination … it amounts to this: if the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers us eternally…” and here the young priest falls into thinks of his own situation.
He is more and more aware of his sickness. His nose is often bleeding As he walks though the forest he thirsts for a drink of water. It is Seraphita who gives it to him. She has matured… or is he realising that there is good even in people who are flawed. He thinks about the way he prays. “Of course I am ‘praying better’ . But I no longer recognize my prayers.”
He now has to go to Lille to be seen by a Dr. Lavigne. On his way there, a young soldier gives him a ride and he has very different attitudes from those of the priest. The young soldier is annoyed with the Church as it is not as strong as it used to be and it is not as nationalistic as it used to be. He pines for the likes of Joan of Arc. He is not aggressive when he talks with the priest, but he believes that the Church has collapsed… and when the drive ends, the young soldier is courteous. [ Here I think Georges Bernanos is giving a warning about those who confuse Christianity with nationality. As a priest should know, nationalism is not his calling.]
Dr. Lavigne examines him. Dr. Lavigne was once a morphine addict. He is an atheist as many doctors are; but nevertheless he is a very good doctor. He is able to show that the priest is not suffering from tuberculosis. What is slowly killing him is cancer of the gut… And now the priest has to consider what he can do in what will be his last days. One of the last people he speaks to is a poor working woman who says she is getting on even if she has little. He considers what he has done in his one year. Most of his parishioners have scorned him or have ignored him. His growing pain is slowly killing him. Yet something inside him says that he has seen good people, those who have helped him even if they weren’t really Christians; those who were growing; and he knows that he has done some good. Before he dies, his last words are “Grace is everywhere”. Nobody is to be scorned
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