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 MAUVAIS REVE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1950 in France]. First published in English in 1953 as Night is Darkest

            Un Mauvais Reve had an odd history. Originally it was going to be a larger part of his earlier novel Un Crime [reviewed on this blog]; but his publishers thought it would be too long, so they told him to re-write it. Only some years later did he pick up what he had meant to write originally. Georges Bernanos died of cancer in 1948 and Un Mauvais Reve was published in 1950. There has been some controversy as to whether Un Mauvais Reve was not yet completed and it is true that the novel that we now have is divided into two parts, the second part being relatively short. Unlike many of his novels, Bernanos does not set this novel in a rural town, though there are some sequences out of the city near the end. Most of the novel is set in Paris, and the major characters are sophisticated – or at least they think they are. Given the milieu, some reviewers have suggested that Bernanos was deliberately copying the style of the likes of Andre Gide and other writers who were always looking for prestige. But what he is really doing is mocking himself, as we shall see later. Note too that this novel does not deal with religious ideas – at most, towards the end of the novel there is a brief moment when a priest goes by, but that is all. One other point – the English title is Night is Darkest. This does not really say what the original French title means. Un Mauvais Reve means A Bad Dream and we are left to consider much of the novel is a bad dream. So at last to one of my long synopsis.

            Monsieur Emmanuel Ganse is a novelist who has been writing for years. Indeed  many of his novels, which were once popular, are now seen by many as old-hat – but he thinks that he is still a major intellectual. [This is where Bernanos is deliberately mocking  himself.] He has three secretaries, the aging Madame Simone Alferi and two young men who are cousins, Olivier Mainvilles and  Philippe. The novel begins with Olivier writing a letter to his aunt in which he says that Ganse’s works are rubbish and he notes that Simone Alferi seems to know everything and all the nasty things that go on in Ganse’s home. But [conveniently] Olivier happens to leave his letter on Ganse’s desk… and of course Ganse finds it, reads it, and later in the tale he more-or-less rebukes Olivier without exactly firing him… but he is out of favour. Olivier is an orphan, but he is hoping that he will get a rich heritage from his grandmother. Meanwhile he has little income. Phillipe tells Olivier to be careful about how he goes because he has being using drugs, but Olivier says that he does not want to be “one of those mediocre puppets” who are trying to tell him what to do.

And it is at this point that we learn that Simone Alferi has had many men in her life… and Ganse had failed to seduce her. The fact is that she is currently Olivier’s mistress… and she takes in drugs galore, pumping in cocaine and frequently injecting herself… and Olivier is taking the habit himself.  I did say that there was a whiff of decadence didn’t I? Olivier is a resentful young man, thinking that he should have that heritage he longs for. He is, in fact, like Stendhal’s Julien Sored or Dostoievsky’s Raskolnikov – young men who think they are superior than other people and have the right to take whatever they want. By contrast, Philippe is a thoughtful young man, but always unhappy, wandering about and thinking of killing himself. On and off, both young men follow such fashionable things as Communism and Nihilism… Meanwhile Ganse, now unsure of his works, goes to see the psychiatrist Lipette. The psychiatrist basically tells him that his novels are really mere versions of himself.  Ganse has a different view, and says so. “I haven’t got faith. I was born and I shall die a free-thinker and a rationalist… I can pull myself together”… but after this talk the phone rings and we learn that Philippe has just committed suicide.

There follows a kind of flashback about how Philippe killed himself. It was in a room where young rowdy men were talking about Anarchism and Communism. Both Olivier and Philippe leaned towards Anarchism, but Philippe shot himself elsewhere after talking with Olivier . And how does Olivier react when he hears of Philippe’s death? He says that “I don’t care a damn about Philippe when all is said and done! He has committed suicide to annoy and humiliate me. Yes I know how stupid that sounds. I tell you he killed himself for no other reason” But later he starts thinking that he might kill himself. Not sure what to do, Olivier goes on a very long walk. It rains, it is cold (it’s winter). He thinks things over… but after he has woken in a hotel, he still wants to take a long journey… what really is his purpose in life? He has still not worked it out…

And then we find ourselves in a very different situation. This is where we come to Part Two of the novel. Away from other characters, Simone Alferi decides to commit murder by killing Olivier’s grandmother who has not yet given him his inheritance. So she sets off by herself through different places [mainly rural] leading to Olivier’s grandmother… and this part of the novel gives us every step she takes. Indeed Bernanos describes the mountains and fords and small hamlets and railway-stations that she passes through. And of course  pumping in cocaine and frequently injecting herself as she goes her way. She is sure of herself… but then don’t junkies think they know what they are doing? And here she passes briefly a young naïve priest and they say some polite words, but naturally she hates priests. And she gets to the house where Olivier’s grandmother lives and…

Now wait a minute. Did you really think that I am going to tell you how it ends? This is exactly what I said when I reviewed Un Crime. It is a crime story but, like a good whodunnit, you have to work it out for yourself and what it all means. At the same time, I have to suggest that this novel was probably not fully worked out by Bernanos before he died. So we are left hanging. And yet please remember the title of the novel - Un Mauvais Reve meaning A Bad Dream. Simone Alferi’s journey could be just a bad dream, the type  of thing that would go through the mind of a disordered brain – like that of somebody who uses too many narcotics… like Simone Alferi.

            Un Mauvais Reve did not sell well when it was first published. If Monsieur Ouine was an enigma, then for some readers Un Mauvais Reve was even more baffling. Was it a crime story or was it a psychological study? Certainly the novel contains many conversations of the style where there is much pretentious philosophy used by young men including the ideas of Olivier and unhappy Philippe. This can be irritating for most readers. And yet I still see Un Mauvais Reve as one of  Bernanos’s most interesting novels. On one level he was ridiculing his own works – not because he was refuting his works, but because he was making it clear that all writers can have their pompous moments. But more importantly he was doing what he had never done before. He was dealing with the decadent Parisian intellectual writers who write to no purpose and he was aware of the type of the nihilism that many young Frenchmen took up after going through both the First and Second World Wars. 

 

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. 

MONSIEUR OUINE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1943] First published in English in 1945 as The Open Mind.

 

When I set out to read all of the novels by Georges Bernanos I hoped that it would be an easy task; but, as I read my way through them, I found it was sometimes a very difficult chore. The most difficult was Les Tenebres [Joy], which seemed to be mainly made of philosophical conversations. And now I hit Monsieur Ouine, which is also something of an enigma. Some context: Bernanos spent nine years, on and off, writing Monsieur Ouine. It took him so long because he was preoccupied with other matters. First, he was more and more aware of growing nihilism and Nazism and Communism. Then he wrote his long polemic Les Grands Cimetieres Sous La Lune condemning the violence Franco used in the Spanish Civil War. And as the Second World War developed he wrote a number of long essays calling for real democracy. He was still living in Brazil and one of his sons had joined the Free French. Monsieur Ouine was published quite quickly in England after it had been published in French, partly because he had stood out against those in France who collaborated with the Nazis. But his tone was often pessimistic.

Monsieur Ouine is difficult to read for a number of reasons. First, as many reviewers have pointed out, there are too many characters who disappear after having being introduced for no purpose. Second, there are deaths, some of which involve murder… but in many cases we are never told how or why or who committed the crime. Bernanos seems to have wanted to round it up after dealing with it for too long. The novel is set in the very north of France, bordering Flanders, in a very small town called Fenouille; so some characters can still speak the Flemish language but they speak French. There is also something different from Bernanos’s novels. In his two best-known novels, Sous le Soleil de Satan and The Diary of a Country Priest the major character is a priest who does his best to help and encourage his flock, even though they often ignore him. In Monsieur Ouine there is a priest, but he is not the main character and he is both pessimistic and hoping he will soon be sent somewhere else.

So to a brief synopsis. Philip – often nicknamed Steeny – is an angry 14-year-old boy. Naturally he is interested in girls but his romantic attempts don’t go far. He is more angry because his mother died early and he has been given different ideas as to where his father had gone - was he killed in the [First] World War… and later gossipers say that his father went mad in a psychiatric hospital. So Steeny has to live with distant cousins – mainly old women and others who hang-on. He hates it. 

 

Monsieur Ouine is a retired professor of foreign languages who lives with some eccentrics, like the old rake Anthelme. Monsieur Ouine has never married and has no cousins or family of any sort. But he always notes what people are doing and acts as if he is a sort of philosopher. Steeny sometime talks with him. It is Monsieur Ouine who talks to Steeny about death. He says “I’m going to teach you to love death… Death is so rich! A reasonable man discovers in death all the things which our shame and fear prevent us from asking anywhere else – even initiation into pleasure!... Remember this: you will love death! Indeed I fear the day may come when death will be your only love. If my poor bare little room has seemed so agreeable to you, it is precisely because death inhabits here. You have come to rest in her shadow without knowing it.”   

Later, a small child – a cow herd - is found dead in the bushes. Enter Dr. Malepine with, as usual, his sceptic swagger – he examines the child’s body as the fat and lecher Mayor Arsene and his wife Malvina watch. The child has clearly been murdered. An old woman who spreads gossip says that one of the people living with Monsieur Ouine had told her that Monsieur Ouine had something to do with the death. Gossip raves on and prejudice grows, but more thoughtful people are not sure.

At this time, Ginette, a middle-aged women, tells Steeny what she thinks about Monsieur Ouine. And another older woman, Daisy, gives Steeny a persuasive talk about his foolish ideas about women, making it clear to him that too many men think women are simply there to be used or ruled.

We also learn about the Flemish family lead by an old man – a rather ruthless one – who is nicknamed The Old ‘Un. His son Eugene is under a warrant of arrest for other crimes. Was it likely that he was the killer? But confusingly Bernanos frames it so that he could be referring to many misdemeanours. Are there other deaths? At any rate, Eugene’s girlfriend shoots him.

So far, the priest is rarely seen in this novel, apart from some bantering with Monsieur Ouine. Nobody ever goes to mass, but letters have been sent to the priest with their ideas of who had killed whom. The priest hands the letters over to Monsieur Ouine. But looking about this, on his own, Monsieur Ouine sees nothing as “the presence of human beings had never meant to him help or friendliness, but any coming-together filled him with vague uneasy disgust, the secret of which he could never confide…” He basically does not like most of the human race and avoids as many people as he can. Yet he has many ideas which he wants to pass to others.

And so there is what I regard as the climax of this novel. The little cowherd is being buried and there is a ceremony in the church. For the first time the peasants, the doctor and the few well-to-do attend the mass, but the priest does not give a comforting homily. Instead he condemns the congregation for their gossiping, their lack of charity, their back-biting and their lack of care. After this the Mayor and the Chief Inspector of Schools give their own secular pompous orations. The listening crowd are not impressed… at which point there rushes in an eccentric woman – her official name is Mlle. de Wambescourt, but everybody rudely calls her “Woolly-Legs”. She is notorious for seducing young men and she rides around madly on her horse. When she buts into the orations people throw lumps of dirt at her and chase her and almost kill her.

And so to the long aftermath. The doctor and the priest discuss what has happened. The Mayor realises that his oration was nonsense. The priest politely tells the Mayor that he did well in the circumstances and he admits that his own homily was very flawed. There is a long passage in which the doctor asserts that science and reason will save the world; but the priest says that without faith, more destructive things will come . [Remember Bernanos was writing when the Second World War was going in full blast… and clever scientists were producing more and more weapons of destruction…]

Young Steeny becomes less angry about the world  - a sign  that he is growing up as teenagers gradually  do.

But the last three chapters are focused on Monsieur Ouine. He is sick and dying. In his last words he says what amounts to his confessions. “I have opened myself, to nothing. I was a mere orifice, an intake, a swallowing up, both my body and my soul wide open to all sides. Among the many pastures from which I could choose, smothered like an ox in provender… and at times repellent, and usually despised by fools… I made no substance, either good or evil, one with myself. My soul is no more than a leather pottle full of wind.”. These are almost his last words.

Now what are we to make of all this? It has been pointed out by a number of reviewers that the name Ouine could be read as  oui /non i.e, yes /no. In other words Monsieur Ouine is the type of intellectual who knows much but who never settles down to any stable idea. I take a guess [and only a guess] here but I wonder if Bernanos was decrying those in France during the Second World War who sat back and did not take sides…. Or possibly Bernanos saw Monsieur Ouine simply as a force of evil.

As I repeat, this novel is very difficult to read, with all the changes of characters and the uncertain ideas. There are moments of brilliance, but it is not one that I would give to somebody who wanted to know about the works of Georges Bernanos.

 

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. 

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 15^th 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

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. 

 

Somthing 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. 

“LES TENEBRES” by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1928). Published in English in 1948 under the name Joy, which was the name that Bernanos originally thought should be the name

            The French title of this novel, Les Tenebres, means The Darkness which forbodes something unpleasant or what is not clear. Why then was the English translation called Joy? Let me say the obvious. This novel is one of the most difficult novels I have ever read. It is written mainly as either conversations between two earnest people, or written in terms of the ideas that are going in the head of one character. Sometimes what they say or think can be almost cryptic. What is darkness? What is joy? Ideas can lead us either way.

            The setting is a wealthy mansion in Normandy, but it is falling to shabbiness. The father of the house is Monsieur de Clergerie who is an historian or at least fancies himself as one. His wife Louise has died and he is thinking of getting married again. His mother is a very old woman, mainly bed-ridden and often called Mama or “Granny”. His daughter Chantal has been taught in a convent. Monsieur de Clergerie wants her to organise things until he is married again. The family is of course Catholic and the priest who often visits them is Abbe Cenabre, but Monsieur de Clergerie also converses with the family’s doctor La Perouse who is sceptic and puts his faith in science... and basically Monsieur de Clergerie goes the same way.  In many ways it is a very unhappy family, their lives not fulfilled, and there is a large dramatis personae downstairs – Fernande the cook, a formidable woman; the unreliable maid Francine; and more fearful is Francois Fiodor who is Russian. He has escaped from the wars in Russia [for the record many “White Russians” headed for France when the Bolsheviks took over]. Fiodor does many odd jobs, but he also acts as chauffeur for Chantal -  and he seems to have an unhealthy eye for her.

            The focus of the novel is on the intellectual duels between Chantal, her father Monsieur de Clergerie, Abbe Cenabre and sometimes La Perouse. While Chantal is likely to be well off, she is often unhappy and sometimes she is tired and sick. She always remembers the wisdom she had learned from old Father Chevance when she was at the convent. Father Chevance always preached the need for charity. The old priest is now dead. Her father sees the ideas of Chevance as outdated, the thoughts of a foolish old man and unreal. So father and daughter debate. Says the narrative “ When Monsieur de Clergerie had insisted on his daughter’s taking charge of his household as soon as she left the convent, he did not realize what a weight such a responsibility was on such shoulders, nor that the daily supervision of six or seven servants, collected from the Devil where knew, and discharged as casually, was a rude and perilous school for a seventeen-year-old girl who would never be altogether the dupe of her own candour, more often hurt by what she guessed than by what she saw. But she had protected herself in her own way by a miraculous goodness, quietly and without any visible effort that can attract attention or inspire either praise or blame…”    And later when Chantal looks over her lot, she is “Too sensible to indulge in vain regret that would only tighten her bonds, she only longed to take up her daily tasks again, the exercise of her household duties –simple, categorical, authentic -  and, mortified, to re-enter that the universal asylum and only refuge for saints and  sinners, a disciplined life, where she looked to find peace, like a lamb lost in a storm…”   

While her father believes in science he has taken in many crank ideas. At one point he tells his daughter that human beings will soon be able to live for ever. Chantal trumps  him by saying says to him “Heavens, I should be happy to be old!  I should love to be an old woman with spectacles and a stick, quite, close to the cemetery and the little grave, knitting a woollen stocking with a wicked twinkle in her eye.”  The fact is that she love life, not speculations about life. Her father wants her to either marry or go into a convent, neither of which she wants to do; and he keeps thinking about the woman he hopes to marry, a rich baroness. Chantal, though she is thoughtful and devout, is not sure of the advice given by the family’s priest Abbe Cenabre. She can think for herself.

            So she goes walking around the estate, looking at nature, and she thinks about how she could do better in her relationship with her father while still keeping her integrity. For a brief moment she thinks of running away…. At which very point her Grandmother bursts through the bushes and runs into Chantal. Granny was supposed to have been looked after by the unreliable maid Francine who should have been giving Granny her daily walk in a wheel- chair. Chantal calms Granny, though she does think it is a bit of a chore. The old woman is not really thankful for Chantal’s help. Instead she talks about how the estate has been gone to the dogs over the years and she is still angry about the death of Chantal’s mother. Yet, chore though it was, Chantal has an odd feeling of joy in looking after her grandmother, even if she is a crotchety, grumbling old woman. She has a purpose in life. To her Grandmother , she says  “Don’t be afraid… now I am strong enough to carry you. I wish you were heavy, much heavier, as heavy as all the sins in the world. You see, I have just discovered something I have never known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God. We have something in common, and that is sin.” Once again, Bernanos is telling us that the human species is very flawed in what Christians call Original Sin.                

            Meanwhile downstairs the “help” are quarrelling and speculating about the family. The formidable cook Fernande is worried that Fiodor is somehow corrupting the unreliable maid Francine. Fiodor shouts back. In fact he says that everything is in a mess in this mansion and things will only be better when Chantal is in charge… though it is clear that he wants to be partly in charge himself.

            And that is the first part of the novel. 

Part Two begins with Chantal’s father being unsure that he really wants to marry again and he still has ideas for Chantal which she does not want. Monsieur de Clergerie is, however less sure about his own beliefs.  ‘His Entire work with its costly and deceptive bibliographic arsenal, his table, his outlines, his statistics, had probably all had their source in the ruminations of a timid and dreamy adolescent, incapable of overcoming the terrors, desires and disgusts of puberty…” Perhaps his daughter was right. At last Monsieur de Clergerie comes to understand what sort of a man he himself really is. The doctor and sceptic La Perouse tells him about the way young women behave... or at least that is what he thinks he knows.

La Perouse has a long conversation with the Russian Fiodor. It is obvious that Fiodor wants to influence Chantal. La Perouse tells him that he is a fool and he will probably commit suicide when his grandiose ideas come to nothing. At which point Granny rushes about saying that “a girl” had hurt her and slapped her around the face. She is referring to Chantal. Chantal is able to explain that she had to slap the old lady when she had become hysterical and she had calmed her down. Granny still thinks that she is in charge of the house and she has kept keys which she thinks make her the owner of the house. Chantal is able to persuade Granny to hand the keys over to her and she puts Granny peacefully to bed. By this stage even her father understands that Chantal is the best keeper of the house. There follows a long conversation between Chantal and La Perouse about how she should have dealt with the old lady. La Perouse introduces many ideas coming from Freud. Chantal deals with charity and real situations.

Yet in all this Chantal understands that Fear is worse than Death, for she has gone through a time of real fear and has been unsure about her beliefs. Fear wears you down and makes you too ready to give in to foolish ideas and destructive ideas simply because they are popular. She understands that one has to take risks, seeing the best in people and being aware of those who do not mean well. She is not naïve. When she talks with the house priest Abbe Cenabre she is aware that he is only half interested in his work, even almost half-way to being sceptical when he speaks of religion. The family now think matters in the house are now in order. But there is no happy ending in this novel. Crazy Fiodor kills Chantal before he commits suicide.

So, you immediately may ask, how is there Joy in this novel? And here you have to think carefully. The family too often think of Joy in terms of hedonistic good times and a life of ease. But in her own terms, Chantal sees Joy as keeping her integrity, keeping her beliefs  and not destroyed the lives of other people. This is true joy.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.

            Forgive me for making a rather crude comment that I sometimes feel like saying when I read some French literature. This does not mean all French novels, but it does apply to some French novels. Often intellectual French novelists like to have long discourses about ideas and philosophy in the midst of a narrative. This, I think, is true of Les Tenebres / Joy.    

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