Calvary

I

I was born one evening in October at Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres, a small town in the department of Orne, and I was immediately christened by the name of Jean-François-Marie-Mintié. To celebrate in a fitting manner my coming into this world, my godfather, who was my uncle, distributed a lot of dainties, threw many coppers and other small coins to a crowd of country boys gathered on the church steps. One of them, while struggling with his comrades, fell so awkwardly on the sharp edge of a stone that he broke his neck and died the following day. As for my uncle, when he returned home he contracted typhoid fever and passed away a few weeks later. My governess, old Marie, often related these incidents to me with pride and admiration.

Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres is situated on the outskirts of a great national forest, the Tourouvre forest. Although it counts fifteen hundred inhabitants, it makes no more noise than is made in the fields on a calm day by the trees, the grass, the corn. A grove of giant beech trees, which turn purple in autumn, shields it from the northern winds, and the houses with pentile roofs, descending the declivity of the hill, extend far out until they meet the great valley, broad and always green, where one can see straying herds of oxen. The Huisne River, glittering under the sun, winds and loses itself in the meadows which are separated by rows of tall poplars. Dilapidated tanneries, small windmills scale its course, clearly visible among clumps of alders. On the other side of the valley are cultivated fields with straight lines of fences and apple trees scattered here and there. The horizon is enlivened by small pink farms, by hamlets one can see here and there in the midst of the verdure which appears almost black. Because of the proximity of the woods, the sky is alive with crows and yellow-beaked jackdaws coming and going at all seasons.

Our family lived on the outskirts of the town, opposite a church, very old and tottering, an ancient and curious structure which was called the Priory—an annex of an Abbey which was destroyed during the Revolution and of which were left not more than two or three faces of a crumbled wall covered with ivy. I recall clearly but without tenderness the smallest details of the places where my childhood was spent. I recall the iron gate in a neglected condition which opened with a creaking sound into a large court adorned by a scurfy grass plot, two shabby looking sorbs visited by blackbirds, some chestnut trees, very old and with such large trunks that the arms of four men could not reach around them—my father used to tell this with pride to every visitor. I recall the house with its brick walls, grim and crusty; its semicircular steps beautified by geraniums; its irregular windows which looked like holes; its roof, very steep, ending in a weathercock, which in a breeze made a sound like an owl. Behind the house, I remember, was a basin where muddy wake-robins were bathing or small carps with white scales were playing. I recall the sombre curtain of fir trees which hid the commons from view, the backyard, the study which my father built on the edge of the road skirting the property in such a manner that the coming and going of clients and clerks did not disturb the quiet of the household. I recall the park, its enormous trees, strangely twisted, eaten up by polypes and moss, joined together by tangled lianas, and the alleys never raked, where worn-out stone benches rose up here and there like ancient tombs. And I also remember myself, a sickly child, in a smock frock of lustring, running across this gloom of forsaken things, lacerating myself in the blackberry bush, torturing the animals in the backyard or for entire days sitting in the kitchen and watching Felix who served as our gardener, valet, and coachman.

Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead. Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick belfry laughs gaily into the blue; in place of the old house there now rises an elaborate Swiss cottage built by the new proprietor who, in the enclosure, has increased the number of colored glass balls, small cascades and plaster statues of Love, soiled by rain. But things and people are engraved so profoundly upon my memory that time could not apply a burnisher hard enough to erase them.

I want, from now on, to speak of my parents not as I knew them when I was a child, but such as they would appear to me now, completed by memory, humanized, so to speak, by intimacy and revelation, in all the crudity of life, in all the immediacy of impression which the inexorable experiences of life lend to persons too unhesitatingly loved and too closely known.

My father was a notary public. Since time immemorial it had been so with the Mintié family. It would have appeared monstrous, almost revolutionary, if a member of the Mintié family had dared to break this family tradition and had renounced the scutcheons of gilt wood which were transmitted religiously from one generation to another like some title of nobility. At Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres and the surrounding country, my father occupied a position which ancestral pride, his dignified manners of a country gentleman, and, above all, his income of twenty thousand francs rendered very important, almost unshakeable. Mayor of Saint-Michel, member of the general council, acting justice of the peace, vice president of the agricultural commission, member of numerous agronomic and forestry societies, he did not overlook any of the petty or ambitious honors which carry with them a sort of prestige and influence. He was an excellent man, very honest and very gentle—with a mania for killing. He could not see a bird, a cat, an insect—anything at all that was alive—without being seized with a strange desire to kill it. He waged a relentless trapper’s war on blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches and bullfinches. Felix was instructed to let my father know as soon as a bird appeared in our garden, and my father would leave everything—clients, business, his meal—to kill the bird. He would often lie in wait for hours, motionless, behind a tree on which the gardener had pointed out a little blueheaded titmouse. During his walks, every time he noticed a bird on a branch and did not have his rifle with him, he would throw his cane at it, never failing to say, “Oh, hang it! He was there this morning!” or “Hang it! I must have missed him for sure, it’s too far.” These were the only thoughts which birds ever inspired in him.

He was also greatly engrossed with cats. Whenever he recognized the trail of a cat he could not rest until he discovered and killed it. Sometimes on a moonlight night he would get up, go out with his gun and stay outside till dawn. You should have seen him, musket on shoulder, holding by the tail the cadaver of a cat, bleeding and motionless! Never have I admired anything so heroic; and David on killing Goliath must have had no more intoxicated an air of triumph! With a majestic gesture he threw the cat at the feet of the cook who said, “Oh! the nasty beast!” and thereupon started to cut it up, saving the meat for the beggars, leaving the skin to dry on the end of a stick, later to be sold at Auvergnats. If I dwell so much on details of a seemingly unimportant character, it is because during all my life I was obsessed with and haunted by these feline episodes of my childhood. There is one among them which has left such an impression on my spirit that to this very day, in spite of all the years that have gone by and all the sorrows that I have experienced, not a day passes without my thinking of it sadly.

One afternoon father and I were walking in the garden. My father carried a long stick ending in an iron skewer, by means of which he unearthed snails and limaxes that were eating up the plants. Suddenly on the edge of the basin we noticed a little kitten drinking. We hid behind a thick shrub.

“Child,” my father said in a low voice, “go quickly, fetch my musket and come back. Be careful the cat does not see you.”

And squatting down, he moved apart the twigs of the shrub so that he might observe every movement of the kitten which, resting on its forelegs, its neck drawn out and wagging its tail, was lapping the water in the basin and turning its head from time to time to lick its mouth and scratch its neck.

“Come on,” repeated my father, “be off!” I pitied the little kitten. It was so pretty with its tawny fur striped with silky black, its supple and graceful movements and its tongue, like the petal of a rose, which pumped water! I would have liked to disobey my father, I even thought of making a noise, I wanted to cough, to brush the twigs apart rudely in order to warn the poor animal of the danger ahead. But my father looked at me with eyes so severe that I walked away in the direction of the house. Pretty soon I came back with the musket. The kitten was still there, confident and gay. It had finished drinking. Sitting on its back, its ears pricked up and eyes shining, it was following the flight of a butterfly in the air. Oh, what a moment of unspeakable anguish that was for me! My heart was beating so powerfully that I feared I was going to faint.

“Papa! Papa!” I shouted. At the same time a sharp report was heard, which sounded like the crack of a whip.

“Damned rascal!” my father swore.

He aimed again. I saw his finger pull the trigger; quickly I shut my eyes and stopped my ears. Bang!! … and I heard a mewing, at first plaintive and then sorrowful, oh, so sorrowful that one might have said it was the cry of a child. And the little kitten jumped, writhed, pawed the grass and did not stir anymore.

Of an absolutely mediocre mind, tenderhearted, though he seemed indifferent to everything which did not appeal to his vanity or did not affect his professional interests, lavish of counsel, ready to render aid, conservative, of graceful carriage and gay, my father justly enjoyed the respect of everybody. My mother, a young woman of the nobility, had brought no fortune with her as a dowry; instead, she had brought with her powerful connections, a closer alliance with the petty aristocracy of the country, which was considered just as useful as an increment in cash or an acquisition of land. Although his powers of observation were very limited and he did not boast of any ability to read souls as well as he could read a marriage contract or explain the legal points of a testament, my father very soon realized the difference of birth, education and temperament which separated him from his wife.

Whether or not in the beginning he felt hurt on that score, I do not know; at any rate he never showed it. He resigned himself to it. Between him, who was rather awkward, ignorant and indifferent—and her, who was educated, refined and emotional, there was a chasm which he never for a moment tried to bridge, having neither the desire nor the ability to do so. This moral situation of two beings united for all time, whom no community of thought and aspiration ever brought in close contact with each other, did not in the least trouble my father who considered himself satisfied if he found the house well managed, the meals well regulated, his habits and idiosyncrasies well respected. To my mother, on the other hand, this condition was very painful and made her heart heavy.

My mother was not beautiful, not even good looking, but there was so much simple dignity in her carriage, so much natural gracefulness in her movements, an expression of such broad kindness on her lips, somewhat pale, and in her eyes which by turns changed their color like the skies in April and shone like a sapphire, a smile so caressing, so sad, so humble, that one overlooked her forehead which was a little too high, swelling out under spots of hair irregularly planted, her nose all too large and her skin which was ash-colored and metal-like in appearance and which at times had an eruption of pimples on it. In her presence, as one of her old friends often told me, and as since then I sorrowfully realized myself, one felt at first slightly affected, then gradually carried away and finally violently possessed by a strange feeling of sympathy in which there was mingled a sort of affectionate respect, a vague desire, pity, and a longing to offer oneself as a sacrifice for her. Despite her physical imperfections or rather because of these very imperfections, she possessed the sad and irresistible charm which is given to certain creatures privileged by misfortune, and around whom there floats an atmosphere of something irreparable. Her childhood and her early youth were periods of illness and were marked by some disquieting nervous fits. But it was hoped that marriage, in modifying the conditions of her existence, would restore her health which the physicians believed was suffering only from an excessive sensitiveness. It was not so at all. Marriage, on the contrary, only developed the morbid tendencies that were in her, and her sensitiveness was heightened to such a degree that, among other alarming symptoms, my poor mother could not stand the slightest odor, without being thrown into a fit, which always ended in a swoon. Of what did she suffer? Why these melancholic fits, these prostrations, which left her huddled up on the lounge for entire days, motionless and sullen like an old paralytic? Why these tears which would suddenly choke her throat to suffocation and for hours roll from her eyes in burning streams? Why this disgust with everything, which nothing could overcome: neither distractions nor prayers? She could not tell, for she herself did not know … Of the causes of her physical ailments, her mental tortures, her hallucinations which filled her heart and brains with a passionate desire to die, she knew nothing. She knew not why one evening as she sat in front of the glowing fireplace, she was suddenly seized with a horrible temptation to roll on the fire grate, to deliver her body over to the kisses of the flame which called her, fascinated her, sang to her hymns of unknown love. Nor did she know why on another day, while taking a stroll in the country and noticing a man walking in a half-mowed meadow with his scythe on the shoulder, she ran towards him with outstretched arms, shouting “Death, O blessed death, take me, carry me away!” No, she knew not the cause or reason for all that. What she did know was that at such moments the image of her mother, her dead mother, was always before her, the image of her mother whom she herself, one Sunday morning, had found hanging from the chandelier in the parlor. And she again beheld the dead body which oscillated slowly in the air, she saw the face all black, the eyes all white and without pupils, she saw everything up to the sunbeam which, penetrating through the closed shutters, illuminated with a tragic light the tongue, stuck out, and the swollen lips. This anguish, these frenzies, this yearning for death, her mother had no doubt transmitted to her when she gave life to her; it is from her mother’s side that she drew, it is from her mother’s breast that she drank the poison, this poison which now filled her veins, with which her flesh was permeated, which fuddled her brain, which gnawed at her soul. During the intervals of calm which grew less frequent as the days, months and years passed by, she often thought of these things; and brooding over her life, recalling its remotest incidents and comparing the physical resemblances between the mother who died voluntarily and the daughter who wished to die, she felt more and more upon her the crushing weight of this lugubrious inheritance. She exalted in and completely abandoned herself to the idea that it was impossible for her to resist the fate of her ancestors who appeared to her as a long chain of suicides emerging from the depth of night, far in the past, and extending over ages to terminate … where? At this question her eyes became troubled, her temples grew moist with a cold sweat and her hands gripped her throat as if striving to grasp the imaginary cord, the loop of which she felt was bruising her neck and choking her. Every object seemed to her an instrument of fatal death; everything reminded her of the image of death, decomposed and bleeding; the branches of the trees appeared to her as so many sinister gibbets, and in the green water of the fish pond, among the reeds and water lilies, in the river shaded by tall herbage, she distinguished the floating form covered with slime.

In the meantime my father, squatted behind some thick shrub, musket in hand, was watching a cat or bombarding some vocalizing warbler hidden in the branches. In the evening, by way of consolation he would gently say to mother, “Well, dearie, your health is not always good. You see, what you need is some bitters, take some bitters. A glass in the morning, a glass in the evening. … That’s all that’s needed.” He did not complain of anything, he never got excited over anything. Seating himself at his desk, he would go over the papers which were brought to him by the city clerk during the day and sign them rapidly with an air of disdain. “Here!” he would exclaim, “it is just like this corrupt administration; it would do a whole lot better if it occupied itself with the farmer instead of pestering us with these small matters. … Here is some more silly stuff!” … Then he would go to bed, repeating in a calm voice: “Bitters, take some bitters.”

This resignation hurt my mother like a reproach. Although my father’s education was rather limited and though she did not find in him any trace of that masculine tenderness or fanciful romanticism of which she had dreamed, she nevertheless could not deny his physical energy and a sort of moral vigor which she envied in him, despising as she did its application to things which she considered petty and sordid. She felt guilty toward herself, guilty toward life so uselessly wasted in tears. Not only did she not meddle in the affairs of her husband, but little by little she lost her interest even in household duties, leaving them to the whims of the servants. She took so little care of herself that her chambermaid, good old Marie, who was present at her birth, often had to nurse and feed her, while scolding her affectionately, as one does a little infant in the cradle. In her desire for isolation she came to a point where she could no longer stand the presence of her parents, of her friends who, discomfited and repelled by her countenance more and more morose, by this mouth whence no word ever came, by this forced smile which was immediately shrivelled by an involuntary trembling of her lips—called, less and less frequently and ended by forgetting altogether the path leading to the Priory. Religion, like everything else, became a burden to her. She no longer put in an appearance in the church, did not pray anymore, and two Easters passed without anyone seeing her approach the holy table.

Then my mother began to lock herself up in her room, the shutters of which she closed, and drew the curtains together, deepening the darkness about her. She used to spend entire days there, sometimes stretched out on a lounge, sometimes kneeling in a corner, her head touching the wall. And she was annoyed by the least noise from outside; the slamming of the door, the creaking of old shoes along the corridor, the neighing of a horse in the court came to disturb her novitiate of nonexistence. Alas! What could be done about it! For a long time she had struggled against an unknown disease, and the disease, stronger than she was, had felled her to the ground. Now her willpower was paralyzed. She was no longer free to rise or act. Some mysterious force held her in chains, rendering her arms inert, her brain muddled, her heart vacillating like a little smoky flame beaten by the wind; and far from resisting, she looked for added opportunities to plunge deeper into suffering, relishing with a sort of perverted exultation the frightful delights of her self-annihilation.

Dissatisfied with the management of his domestic affairs, my father at length decided to take an interest in the progress of my mother’s illness, which passed his understanding. He had the hardest time in the world to make mother accept the idea of going to Paris to consult the “princes of science” as he put it. It was a sorry trip. Of the three celebrated physicians to whom he took her, the first declared that my mother was anaemic and prescribed a strengthening diet; the second diagnosed that she was affected with nervous rheumatism and prescribed a debilitating regimen; the third one found that “it was nothing” and recommended mental tranquility.

No one saw clearly into her soul. She herself did not know it. Obsessed with the cruel memory to which she attributed all her misfortunes, she could not unravel with clearness all that stirred obscurely in the innermost depths of her being, nor understand the vague passions, the imprisoned aspirations, the captive dreams which had accumulated in her since childhood. She was like a nestling bird that, without realizing the obscure and nostalgic forces which drew it toward heaven of which it has no knowledge, crushes its head and maims its wings against the cage bars. Instead of craving death as she thought she was, her soul within her, just like that bird that hungered for the unknown skies, hungered for life radiant with tenderness, filled with love; and just like that bird, was dying from this unassuaged hunger. As a child, she gave herself entirely, with all the exaggerations of her fervid nature, to the love for material things and animals; as a young girl she was given to love of dreams of the impossible, but material objects never brought her peace, nor did her dreams assume a precise and soothing form. She had no one to guide her, no one to set right this youthful mind already shaken by internal shocks, no one to open the door of this heart to wholesome reality, a door already guarded by chimeric shadows in her vacant state; no one to whom she could pour out the exuberance of her thoughts, her tenderness, her desires, which finding no outlet for expansion, accumulated, boiled within her, ready to burst the fragile mould poorly protected by nerves too jaded.

Her mother, always ill, singularly absorbed in that hypochondria which was soon to kill her, was incapable of intelligent and firm direction in the matter of her daughter’s education. Her father, all but ruined, put to his last shift, struggled hard to save for his family its ancestral home which was threatened; and among the young people about her—shiftless noblemen, vainglorious burghers, greedy peasants, none bore upon his brow the magic star which could lead her to her God. Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires. And later her marriage which had been more than a sacrifice—a business transaction, a compromise to improve the straitened circumstances of her father! … And her disgust, her revolt at feeling herself a piece of dishonored flesh, a prey, an instrument of man’s pleasure! To have soared so high and to fall so low! To have dreamed of celestial kisses, of mystic caresses and divine possessions and then … the end of it! … Instead of wide expanses, ablaze with light, where her imagination felt at home among the soaring flights of angels in a trance of joy and affrighted doves—there came night, thick, sinister and haunted by the spectre of her mother, stumbling over tombs and crosses with a piece of cord on her neck.

The Priory soon grew silent. On the gravel of its alleys one no longer heard the trundle of carts and carriages bringing friends of the neighborhood to the front entrance decorated with geraniums. The front gate was bolted in order to make the carriages go through the backyard. In the kitchen the servants talked among themselves in low voices, moving about on tiptoe as is done in a house where someone has died. The gardener, by order of my mother who could not stand the noise of wheelbarrows and the scraping of rakes on the ground, allowed the wild stock to suck up the sap of the rose bushes turned yellow, allowed the weeds to choke the flowers in the baskets and to cover up the walks. And the house with its dark curtain of fir trees resembling a funeral canopy which sheltered it from the west, with its windows always closed, with its living corpse which it guarded buried behind its square walls of old brick looked like a burial vault. The country folk who on Sunday used to take a stroll in the woods, no longer passed by the Priory without some sort of superstitious terror, as if that dwelling were an evil place haunted by ghosts. Pretty soon a legend grew about the place: a woodcutter told how one night, going back from work, he saw Madame Mintié all in white, her hair disheveled, crossing the sky high above and beating her chest with the crucifix.

My father locked himself up in his study more than ever, avoiding as much as possible staying in the house where he was hardly seen at times other than meal hours. He also took to making distant trips, increased the number of committees and societies over which he presided, found means to create for himself new distractions and business affairs far away from home. The Council General, the Agricultural Commission, the jury of the Court of Assizes were of great help to him for that purpose. When someone spoke to him of his wife he answered, shaking his head:

“Ah, I am very uneasy, very much wrought up over it. How will it end? I must confess I fear she may become insane. …”

And when someone expressed his unbelief:

“No, no, I am not joking. … You know well that it runs in her family, their heads don’t seem to be very strong!”

Nevertheless reproach never came from his lips, although he realized the embarrassing condition in which this situation placed his business affairs and which he ascribed to nothing but the irritating obduracy of my mother in not wanting to try anything that might cure her.

It was in these sad surroundings that I grew up. I came to this world a tiny, sickly child. What cares, what fierce tenderness, what deadly anguishes I brought with me! In the presence of the puny creature that I was, sustained by a breath of life so feeble that it could be guessed at only by a rattling sound in my throat, my mother forgot her own sorrows. Maternity revived her worn-out energy, awakened her conscience to new duties, to new sacred responsibilities which now devolved upon her. What ardent nights, what feverish days she spent bent over the cradle where lay something born of her own flesh and soul, and palpitating! … Ah! yes! … I belonged to her, to her only; it was not at all of this conjugal submission that I was born; I was not the fatal consequence of the original sin as other children of men are; no! she had always carried me in her womb, and like Christ I was conceived in a long cry for love. All her troubles, her terrors, her past sufferings she understood now; it was because a great mystery of creation was being enacted in her being.

She had great difficulty in bringing me up, and if I outlived all that had threatened me one might say it was accomplished by a miracle of love. More than twenty times my mother snatched me from the clutches of death. … And then what a joy and what a recompense it was to her to see the little wrinkled body fill itself with the sap of health, the rumpled face take on the color of shiny pink, the little eyes open gaily into a smile, the lips, greedy and searching, move and gluttonously pump the life-giving liquid from her nourishing breast! My mother now tasted a few moments of complete and wholesome happiness. A desire to act, to be good and useful, to occupy her hands, heart and spirit, to live at last took hold of her, and even in the most commonplace duties of her household she found a new, a passionate interest which was doubled by a feeling of profound peace. Her gayety came back to her, a natural and gentle gayety without violent outbursts. She made plans, pictured the future to herself with confidence, and many a time she was astonished to discover that she no longer thought of her past—that evil dream which vanished.

I grew. “One can see him getting bigger every day,” the nurse used to say. And with rapturous emotions my mother watched the hidden labor of nature which polished the rough places of flesh, giving it more pliant form, more definite features, better regulated movements and poured into the dimness of the brain just emerged from nothingness the primitive glimmer of instinct. Oh, how everything seemed to her now clothed in bright and entrancing colors! It was music of welcome itself, the benediction of love, and even the trees, formerly so full of dread and menace, were stretching out their branches above like so many protecting arms. One was led to hope that the mother had saved the woman. Alas! That hope was of short duration.