Nouvelles communications
New Communications
Charles Péguy
New Communications
We publish these communications as they reached us before and during the holidays.
Largentière, 19 August 1900
To comrade Péguy,
I have received the collection of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine that you sent me, accompanied by a draft for eight francs. The draft has been paid. Today I am sending you five francs, because it is no hardship to me, and I shall send you further payments until I have made up the sum of twenty francs. I approve of your enterprise, if not of all your ideas, for I hold that it is good for everyone to be able to speak the truth as he thinks it. No doubt it is because so few people have a truth to think that so few speak one: some bring to the discussion the bad faith of apostles, others the cunning of politicians; you go after the former relentlessly, but the latter would well deserve their share too. Since you are collecting documents to illustrate the good faith of one side and the other, I commend the following two titles for pinning in your collection: Federation of the Socialist Party of the Rhône (affiliated with the Federation of Independent Revolutionary Socialists of France); — and this other: Workers’ Party of the Fifth Arrondissement of Lyon (affiliated with the F.I.R.S.). ^(1) It is a fine specimen of political Jesuitism, and may show you that bad faith and sectarianism exist on both sides of the Socialist Party: these members of one faction taking the label of the whole party — that is very fine; but this group taking the name of another faction in order to sow confusion in the minds of socialists — that is finer still. It is the same tactic as that of the Collectivist Students’ Group in Paris. — But the finest thing of all to cite would be this group’s manifesto, which is the expression of the most splendid hypocrisy one could hope to see, and in which, among other things, the programme is given as: to socialise the substance of principles by radicalising the means. Read: to invoke the socialist programme while passing oneself off as a radical. O Zévaès, how many groups could claim thy name!
Best regards, Marius Moutet
^(1) Several persons, being insufficiently familiar with the alphabet, may fail to perceive the full irony of this juxtaposition. We remind these citizens that F.I.R.S. stands for nothing less than the Federation of Independent Revolutionary Socialists. We remind them that the bare expression “Workers’ Party” belongs to the Guesdists by usage and tradition. We eagerly seize this opportunity to recall that these cahiers are no less free of the Independents than they are of the Guesdists. — We intend one day to publish a socialist alphabet for the use of beginners.
Châteaurenard, Monday 20 August 1900
My dear Péguy,
From this little town where I am on holiday, I must send you a word. Anyone reading my previous letters would imagine I am a difficult sort who finds fault with everything. I find fault with what seems to me wrong, and that seems to me more important than applauding noisily at what seems to me right. Otherwise I would applaud the happy idea the Aurore has had of giving us Zadig, then Le Père Goriot. I had not read Zadig. I had not read Le Père Goriot. Everyone talks about them. But who has read them? Likewise the Petite République did very well to give us Equality by Bellamy and even Life Sentence, an Australian novel. That is always better than Borgia! by that poor Michel Zévaco. — While we await the Triboulet by the same author.
Jean Terrier
If I ever join old Bérenger’s League against the licence of the streets, M. Octave Mirbeau may boast of having contributed to that outcome by a considerable sum.
Jean Terrier
Châteaurenard, Tuesday 21 August 1900
I cannot refrain from sending you this article, which I read in this morning’s Aurore, and which is exactly Dreyfusard in its method:
TO WHOSE PROFIT? We readily believe the nationalists capable of anything. We refuse, until their responsibility is proved, to proclaim them guilty of everything, and we regret the haste of certain of our colleagues in seeking among the members of the League of Coppée and Lemaître the authors of the Exposition panic. We shall wait for facts before bringing so grave an accusation against adversaries — however stupid or villainous they may be. It seems to us insufficient to say: “The nationalists have done everything and are still attempting everything to turn the national success of the Exposition into a governmental defeat. It is their party that stands to profit from catastrophes (due to the ignorance and negligence of the polytechnicians of the Exposition); they will do everything to provoke them.” This reasoning holds together, but it is only reasoning. There was a time when the slightest explosion was followed by round-ups of revolutionaries. At the first gas tap left open by a clumsy cook, people cried anarchist attack. Why imitate such methods? There are bandits, forgers, and murderers in the nationalist camp. But that does not prevent the possibility that those responsible for the panic of the day before yesterday are, perhaps, simply pickpockets dreaming of a big score. Has the investigation looked in that direction? For our part, every time we see one of these alarm-raisers moving through the crowd, we shall believe he is after the contents of our pockets rather than the form of our government, and laying hands on him will seem to us the first of duties and the most useful of precautions. We can discuss it afterwards. If he turns out to be a voter for our Municipal Council, we shall be neither surprised nor saddened. But before branding the wretch a “nationalist,” we shall wait for the beginning of an investigation to have proved that he deserved such an epithet. Thargelion
I felt a truly great happiness when I saw that our friends were returning to sound methods.
Jean Terrier
Monsieur,
You, and the friends whose remarks you take pleasure in reporting, all have an evident concern for the exact word — a concern far greater in your case than any concern for conciseness. Then why do you entitle “brief reply to Jaurès” a reply that is far from brief? — for the critique of a three-line paragraph runs to two pages, the critique of a five-line paragraph runs to five pages — pardon, six pages — and finally the commentary on one page of text gives rise to a veritable autobiography.
Another remark. Your friend takes offence at the expression green boughs. It is true that this is an old cliché of poetic romance; but he adds that at most they are boughs that are green, which is rather six of one and half a dozen of the other. Well no, they are not even boughs that are green at most; they are not green boughs at all: they are old dead dried-out branches, gathered from the ground. If the old woman had green boughs, it would mean she had broken off young shoots from the trees, which would have exposed her to the wrath of the forest wardens. Besides, green wood is hardly good for starting a fire. There, it seems to me, is the essential criticism to make, if one insisted on criticising a detail in the fine whole that this image forms.
Forgive these two reflections, made in haste, by a person who, having little leisure, had to read the brief reply in question in two sittings.
Madame Simon Ledrapier, Elbeuf
Perbosc, near Verdun (Meuse), 25 July 1900
Citizen,
I believe you do well to address yourself in particular to schoolteachers — on condition, of course, that you choose carefully, and it is likely that your mailing lists are not drawn up at random. Your cahiers — which address themselves only to a few, for we teach people to read, but alas not well enough for the popular mass to read fluently in your cahiers — your cahiers, I say, would need to be taken up again in a popular form that could bring them within everyone’s reach. Ah! that is very difficult. — And yet that is what must be done, and no one has been able to do it. I have thought about this often, and your cahiers have made me think: Here is something made for the few; one need only transpose it for the people. Someone will be found, I hope, to make the transposition. Ah! how urgent it is to replace with this serious propaganda the bad propaganda of the newspapers — I mean even the best of them.
Here are two addresses: M. Moutinet, schoolteacher at Montaire, Meuse. M. Bessancourt, schoolteacher at Corroyer, Meuse.
The first of these friends told me of a neighbour of his who had the following idea: he buys a good book and lends it on condition that the borrower undertakes to lend the book in his turn, and so on. This is an excellent application of the simple and well-known idea of Franklin. I regret not knowing the name of this good citizen; but he will come to know you through the friend whose address I give you, if you are able to send the cahiers to the latter.
COMBEROUGIER, schoolteacher
Châteaurenard, Thursday 23 August 1900
Is the method gaining ground, step by step? In this morning’s Matin — or, as one says, in this Matin — I read under the heading Readers Write this letter, which reproduces neither the opinion of the Matin nor my own:
ENGLISH OPINION Paris, 20 August 1900
Dear Editor,
Your article this morning entitled “Dewet’s Tactics” and ending with the capture of 4,000 Englishmen is an idiotic article. You are too quick to take your wishes for reality. Your journalistic sense is always at fault. Take a little of the reserve of your colleague the Temps and do not hasten to sing victory. The Boers are lost, do you hear? Lost! All your misplaced sentimentality — since it must inevitably remain without effect and since you are meddling in affairs of no immediate interest to your country — will change nothing. If you so desire the freedom of oppressed races, begin by setting the example yourself and evacuate: 1st Algeria; 2nd Tonkin; 3rd Madagascar — three possessions where you have succeeded only in implanting customs officers, civil servants, and derelicts, the dregs of your population. I salute you. B. Wells
The Matin has begun to publish quite often — under this heading in particular — exchanges between individuals in which the arguments for and against are honestly set forth. Is the method gaining ground, step by step?
Your Jean Terrieu
27, rue du Lac, Ixelles, Brussels, 16 July 1900
Dear Monsieur Péguy,
We find interesting portions in your cahiers — the letters from provincial subscribers, schoolteachers and other young people, eager to rid us of ignorance and clericalism. But we are disappointed to find in these cahiers a second and even a third edition of the Mouvement Socialiste. The party and the organisation of the party and the opinions of the Party Leaders hold no interest for us and lead, in our view, to a tyranny otherwise more ferocious than the one we wish to destroy. Civilian militarism frightens us as much as the other kind.
Most cordially, Dumesnil Reclus
Monday 13 August 1900
Monsieur and dear comrade,
We have had here the nationalist lecture I mentioned to you — a private lecture, naturally: perfectly closed doors. We sorely regretted this, for Gaston Méry and Georges Berry let slip some choice specimens: No, there will never be a lasting peace between France and England, for between the two nations there lies a corpse — the corpse of Joan of Arc. The groups here have charged me with going to Paris on Sunday to ask Jaurès most urgently for a lecture. ^(1) The militants here love him dearly for his great heart and his breadth of ideas, as much as they detest the rigidity and intolerance of Guesde: in spite of everything, they retain toward Jaurès a certain mistrust on account of his bourgeois origins, and his present evolution toward opportunist and ministerialist socialism is about to reawaken in them the prejudice that had been weakening for some time.
Gustave Leblond
^(1) M. Gustave Leblond appears unaware that Jaurès habitually neglects to give lectures among the militants who do not slander him. He reserves his time and his eloquence for Guesdist groups and gatherings. — Note written before the most recent congresses.
Ouzouer-le-Plateau, Tuesday 26 June 1900
Come to my aid, O Péguy the Subtle. I have already told you that I have been working — two years already past — on converting to sound ideas my colleague in elementary mathematics, the excellent M. Joséphin Bourdieu-Lebalourd. He is an honest man, and although he is a militarist he has never invented gunpowder. I have an instinctive sympathy for citizens who have not invented gunpowder, because I have not invented it either. To each his own. Two years already past, then, I have been labouring at the salvation of M. Bourdieu. Two years is brief, and if each of us converted an honest man every two years, the Social Revolution would advance much more rapidly than by the infallible means officially recommended. The salvation of one citizen is well worth two years of work.
It was not easy. All through the Dreyfus Affair, whenever I tried to begin demonstrating to M. Bourdieu that the first court-martial had condemned the Jewish captain unjustly and illegally, M. Lebourdieu would begin by smiling: let us listen, he would say, let us listen patiently to the arguments of Saint Anselm. Then he would listen to me. This weekly jest earned me a weekly audience. Mathematicians love puns and other games of an uncontested wit. Every Wednesday morning — the day we both have class at eight o’clock — without appearing to do anything of the kind, he would arrive early. And I, without appearing to do anything of the kind, would arrive at half past seven. And winter and summer alike he would listen to me until the drum: let us hear the arguments of Saint Anselm.
At the three preliminary drumbeats he would interrupt me: Monsieur, he would reply, I cannot believe that seven French officers, legally assembled to judge one of their peers, committed a felony. Officers are honest men. My father, who died a recruitment commandant, was an honest man. He was worth more than all your journalists. My elder brother, who is still a lieutenant of dragoons at Lunéville, is an honest man. He lives more poorly and more harshly than all your journalists. My brother-in-law, who is an infantry captain at Melun, is an honest man. Last year he went into debt to spare his sergeant-major a disciplinary hearing over eighteen hundred francs gone missing. No, I cannot believe that seven French officers committed an infamy.
We would begin again the following week. But you know as well as I do how one converts an honest man to Dreyfusism. After telling me two hundred and thirteen times: No, I cannot believe that seven French officers committed an injustice — there came a day when M. Bourdieu did not tell me so a two hundred and fourteenth time. I add, for the understanding of what follows, that the blazing ignominy of Commandant Count had contributed most powerfully to this tremor of conscience.
Now I was serenely awaiting the usual Wednesday morning when yesterday, Monday, M. Bourdieu came to find me at home after his class, triumphant. I had a presentiment of disaster. Read this, he said, holding out a square of newspaper carefully cut into two pieces then glued back together. I read, stupefied, this announcement:
— The Orchidée Collection gives us this week an ultra-Parisian novel by Ernest La Jeunesse: Demi-Volupté. The Ollenstadt brothers, publishers, 5 rue Feydeau, have conceived and carried out — the clever fellows — the project of the illustrated novel… illustrated by photography from life. Savour the “from life”! The whole commercial and literary operation is right there. They have engaged men of letters: such as Xavier de Ricard, and… a good camera operator. This curious venture grips the general public, which adores strong sensations. The dear general public will be titillated by the spice of certain plastic poses of an incontestable realism, scrupulously captured by laborious instantaneous exposures. The artist… the photographer has shattered more than one plate to satisfy the client’s taste for… reality. Demi-Volupté, by Ernest La Jeunesse, thus becomes full voluptuousness, infinite voluptuousness, thanks to a slightly naughty lens. The author can alas count for only half the novel’s success, although he has not stinted the graces of his wit… and he has wit, that rascal La Jeunesse! But a good plastic pose is worth more than a fine chapter, just as a sonnet is worth a long poem. In sum, the Ollenstadt brothers’ venture deserves study. Nowadays people hardly read at all. The newspaper has killed the book and the bicycle is in the process of killing the newspaper. Let us also fear the photograph, for if the sun and the publishers get involved, it is to be feared that literature may suffer unfortunate eclipses. Poor men of letters!
— Don’t look so embarrassed, he said to me coldly: it is our friends at the Aurore who inserted this in their bibliographic memorandum this morning.
I stood there dumbstruck, as our friend Tharaud used to say. My colleague M. Bourdieu took cowardly advantage of my stupor: — Monsieur and dear colleague, he said ceremoniously, you repeated two hundred and thirteen times that Commandant Esterhazy was a wretch because he practised a certain trade that we hold to be ignominious in this Western Christian civilisation. I consent. Besides, when you say that this trade was in accordance with the customs of the army, you perform a clever misreading of the purport of a judgement or a proposition. Well then, I consent that Esterhazy is a wretch. But I will write your prize-day speech for you — which is a painful chore — if you can point out to me a single shade of distinction between the trade that wretched commandant practised and the trade no less lucratively practised by this Orchidée collection, this M. Ernest La Jeunesse, the Ollenstadt brothers, and indeed this bibliographic memorandum.
He left me on these menacing words. I have been searching ever since, but I have been unable to find a single difference. Must I write my own speech? Help me with your subtlety. Call upon, if need be, our famous friend Don Ruy the Subtle. I am spent. ^(1)
Anselme Legourd
^(1) Our friend Anselme Legourd had to compose and deliver his own speech, which was excellent, on the concern for truth in the history of French literature.
Friday 13 July 1900
Dear comrade,
Glancing at the Socialiste that a friend of mine receives, I have just noticed that it contains a letter from citizen Baume absolutely different from the one the Petite République published on the same subject a few days after the Chalon interpellation: whereas Baume, in the letter published by the Petite République, refused only Deschanel’s invitation, in the letter published by the Socialiste he also refuses Millerand’s. I am aware that the form of each letter is different, since the one in the Petite République is addressed to Deschanel and the one in the Socialiste is addressed to the members of the Consultative Commission of the Bourse du Travail, so that there is perhaps no forgery in the bourgeois sense; but the fact remains that: an official decision, issued by the official representatives of the Parisian proletariat, has been altered by one or the other newspaper. If the fault lies with the Socialiste, it is certainly pointless to mention the matter in your cahiers, that newspaper having reached such a degree of dishonesty — the affair of Marx’s works — that it is a waste of time to try to reform it; but if it is the Petite République that is in the wrong — I think it will be easy for you to verify — and if the editors of the Petite République are truly honest, they can only have acted thus blinded by the so-called demands of active life, and it falls to your cahiers to cry out to them: look out! Show them that sincerity alone is socialist and that sincerity alone can therefore be useful to the cause, for, as Jaurès said very well in one of his recent articles, by accustoming the people to lies, to gratuitous slander, we cultivate a soil that will be perfectly ready to receive the nationalist seed.
And this task — debourgeoisifying the socialist milieu — is urgent, for the present situation is very painful for the quite young people like ourselves who came to socialism out of disgust with the bourgeoisie and who are not sure enough of ourselves to risk, like the cahiers or like the anarchists, a purely individual action. Between demagogic Guesdism on the one hand — and, on the other, the Independents with their bourgeois methods and bourgeois theories (for the latter, see the articles of Turot and Fournière in the Petite République, of Rouanet in the Revue Socialiste — articles that the Temps or at the very least the Figaro could have published) — who make us miss the real bourgeois, who at least had the merit of frankness and did not hide the smallness of their minds and the mediocrity of their morals beneath the fine name of social reformers — between the two camps we are tossed about, unable to settle in one rather than the other, so that our socialist faith itself is in danger of foundering; I assure you that such a situation is very painful. If the cahiers could pull us out of it, they would render us a great service. ^(1)
LOUZON, 14, Boulevard Émile Augier, Paris
^(1) These cahiers cannot and do not wish to pull anyone out of any situation, however interesting the person, however painful the situation. We merely collaborate with our subscribers. Free men get themselves out of difficulty freely, on their own. As collaborators, we ask our subscribers kindly to write very legibly, on one side of the page only, and always to give us exact and complete references. Never cite a newspaper without indicating the issue number.
I take this same occasion to point out to you the prosecution brought by the government against Dubois-Desaulle, and against which the Petite République has not protested — I do not even believe it has mentioned them. ^(1) In the issue of the Socialiste that I am sending you, I have also underlined an article entitled Tears and Regrets, where, beneath the habitual hateful tone of the Socialiste, one finds certain reproaches addressed to the Petite République that are incontestably well-founded, concerning the manner in which it often interprets certain social facts — in particular strikes — that it would certainly interpret quite differently if the government were not the same one. ^(2)
Louzon
^(1) Extract from the Temps Nouveaux of 7 July 1900: General Galliéni, upon his return to Tamatave, is prosecuting our comrade Dubois-Desaulle for his poster on military crimes against the convicts of Madagascar. For the trial, they have chosen Nancy, an ultra-militarist city. A certain Legros, captain commanding the second company of colonial disciplinary troops at Diégo-Suarez, claims to have been defamed. It appears that such people are defamable. — R. Ch.
^(2) We shall provide the documents and information that we have and are able to give on these interpretations in the second series of these cahiers, under the running title: from the first congress to the second. — At the moment we go to press, we can only draw our subscribers’ attention to the excellent initiative of the Petite République in publishing in full the two great speeches of Jaurès and Guesde at Lille.
Bellegarde, Monday 13 August 1900
I read in this morning’s Aurore, bibliographic memorandum: The success of Journal d’une Femme de Chambre, the masterpiece of our contributor and friend Octave Mirbeau, exceeds all our expectations. Our readers will moreover be able to judge for themselves the social import of this courageous book, from which we give, under the title “At the Employment Agency,” an extract on our front page. Published by Fasquelle, 11, rue de Grenelle.
The success of the Journal d’une Femme de chambre does not in the least exceed our expectations: filthy books have always sold well. This Journal is neither a masterpiece nor a work. M. Octave Mirbeau has above all collaborated with the Aurore by furnishing it a rather considerable number of suspension points. I do not know whether M. Octave Mirbeau is the friend of the Aurore. I wonder in what way this novel, which is not a book, is courageous; M. Mirbeau risks neither his bourgeois fortune, nor any position, nor any esteem — for the Jardin des Supplices had long since cost him the esteem of honest people. He no doubt earns from it quite a lot of money and a good deal of a certain bourgeois glory that he appears to covet keenly — to speak a French analogous to his own. I do not like any filthy book. But I like still less a filthy book that pretends to have social import. Because I hate Tartuffery above all. Finally, the readers of the Aurore cannot judge the novel by the excerpt they are graciously given, because this excerpt has been skilfully chosen from among the rare clean passages. Mirbeau must have written his novel to test how far the spinelessness and herd mentality of his good comrades the journalists would go. It is deplorable that you have become one of them. At least through your silence.
Étienne Ronceret
Beaune-la-Rolande, Monday 23 July 1900
I read in this morning’s Aurore, book review:
Oh! no doubt Tartuffe and Basile will emerge once more, reeking of the violent odour of the bordellos they frequent and the adulterated incense of the sacristies, to cry scandal and denounce Mirbeau to the vengeance of some servile prosecutor, jealous of the laurels of the imperial Pinard who had the immortal author of Madame Bovary condemned for “offences against public morals”! Obviously, the great majority will buy and devour greedily the Memoirs of a Chambermaid not for the “substantific marrow” they contain, but for what has always constituted “the charm of the rabble” — or even of great ladies, like Madame de Sévigné, who knew how to blush agreeably behind her fan while listening to the reading of Panurge’s improper remarks. Agreed. Let the swine devour at their ease the seed that has fallen on the highway; the wind will always carry enough grains to the good earth bordering the road, and the harvest of ideas will be bountiful. A. B.
That is a lie, as the good country folk say. I am neither Tartuffe nor Basile, and I still find this novel disgusting — nothing but disgusting. The critical literature of this M. A. B. is even more disagreeable than M. Mirbeau’s prose. I find that it is precisely the act of a Tartuffe and a Basile to brand in advance as Tartuffe and Basile all the honest people who, disgusted by this novel, will say plainly that they are disgusted by it. What revolting demagoguery! Even granting the thesis of this M. A. B., a novel that poisoned the greatest number would be an evil act — like poisoning a public drinking trough in order to conduct a research in toxicology. I am no clericalist, but it is somewhat vile to attribute to M. Mirbeau’s outpourings the beautiful parable of the sower. Finally and above all, it is extraordinary that one cannot publish an ignoble volume without some fool immediately invoking the great Flaubert, Maupassant, and the great Rabelais. The imperial prosecutor who prosecuted Madame Bovary rendered a famous service to future journalists. I must thank M. A. B., who gave me the occasion to reread Madame Bovary. How severely healthy Flaubert’s work is. There is not in all of Maupassant what I would call a piece of filth. And even if there were authentic rubbish in the good authors, that would not prove that one must be, or that it suffices to be, foul in order to become one of the good authors.
Léon Verdieu
Our friend Bertrand Lesourd sent me from Semoy, the same day, these few words on the back of his visiting card: If I were an antisemite, I would write novels like the Journal d’une Femme de chambre and put them in all the popular libraries.
The following day I received a postcard and a letter. The postcard bore these simple words: If I were a candidate for the dictatorship, instead of being an unsuccessful candidate for the agrégation, I would write novels like the Journal d’une Femme de chambre and have them sold on the boulevards for two sous.
Daniel de la Targe, 45, rue d’Ulm, Paris
Of course they are talking about Flaubert again, they are going to talk about Maupassant again, they are talking about Rabelais again. I know that literary friends exist for the sole purpose of hurling paving stones. But M. Mirbeau would do well to have friends who would hurl at him, with a hand no less sure, paving stones a little less heavy.
The letter was longer:
Château-Gontier, Tuesday 24 July 1900
I read in yesterday morning’s Aurore:
BOOK REVIEW Les Mémoires d’une Femme de chambre, by Octave Mirbeau
When the first chapters of the Memoirs of a Chambermaid appeared in the Revue Blanche, alongside Émile Pouvillon’s exquisite novel Le Vœu d’être chaste, there was a unanimous acclaim for the author’s superb talent; but the general tone of the work alarmed more than one reader lacking the necessary perspicacity and deeply shocked all the hypocrites and charlatans whose library conceals a richly populated “inferno.” People were heard invoking the razor-shade of the terrible Marquis de Sade, whom one generally knows only by name, and recalling, apropos of Célestine, Juliette, or the Rewards of Vice, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue — the dreary heroines of two bad books that no one has been able to read to the end.
It is rather amusing that the gentleman journalist should have persisted in calling this novel the Memoirs of a chambermaid. From the Revue Blanche onward, the novel was called the Journal of a chambermaid. The journalist must have thought, obscurely, that Memoirs was grander, more historical. Did M. Gaston Méry not publish, as far as I recall, the Memoirs of Vacher? A nice bit of advertising in passing for Pouvillon’s novel. But there was no unanimous acclaim for the author’s superb talent. What is a superb talent? What is a talent? I believe there is no talent whatsoever in this Journal, and I shall demonstrate it as soon as I have time to spare. On the other hand, there was unanimity in recognising that the publication was filthy, and the good journalists, who have since gushed with enthusiasm, acknowledged that it was filthy. No extraordinary perspicacity was needed to notice this. It is the act of a Tartuffe and a Basile to brand in advance as hypocrites and charlatans the honest people who will have found this novel ignoble and who will say so.
I continue:
Mirbeau was bound to expect this. A similar explosion of prudishness, the same unleashing of feigned anger, had greeted his Jardin des supplices, through which our contributor B. Guinaudeau led and guided our readers, dazzled by so much harsh light but always held under the powerful spell of the writer’s lofty thought.
The anger we felt against the Jardin des Supplices was in no way feigned. We sincerely believed this volume to be filthy and that it revealed the antisemitic mentality of its author, just as M. Rochefort’s venomous spiders and M. Drumont’s sulphurous shirts confirmed that M. Rochefort and M. Drumont possessed the antisemitic mentality. Why did our journalists make much of the shirts and the spiders, if the same imaginings redound to the glory of M. Mirbeau? How we did exclaim over Rochefort and Drumont! Our contributor M. B. Guinaudeau is not easily disgusted. But that is his affair. “Powerful spell” and “lofty thought” are here merely the gross stupidities of comradely back-scratching.
I continue:
To tell the truth, the Memoirs of a Chambermaid were not composed especially for little girls who eat jam in slices of bread, nor for the readers of the Petit Journal and M. Georges Ohnet, nor for the idle and the imbeciles who delight in the bawdy tales of the Fin de Siècle. No, these pages in which so much smut and impropriety is heaped up, in which all the coarseness and brutality of the most sordid debauchery proliferate — these pages of social pathology, which seem written with the sharpened point of a scalpel dipped in corrupted blood — constitute, I say it in all sincerity, one of the most powerful works of the last ten years, on account of the lessons that spring from every line.
It is false, it is stupid, and it is clumsy to give the impression that the honest people who cannot read M. Mirbeau are the same ones who read the Petit Journal and M. Georges Ohnet. It is to suggest that all honest people read M. Georges Ohnet in the Petit Journal, which is not rigorously true. It is false — but it is shrewd — to suggest that the idle and the imbeciles who delight in the bawdy tales of the Fin de Siècle cannot read M. Mirbeau’s novels. If one were to draw the region of these imbeciles and idlers, and separately the region of people who buy Mirbeau knowing what it is, M. Mirbeau is well aware that the two regions would very nearly coincide. That is precisely what he counts on for the large print run. Moreover, the gentleman journalist acknowledges this coincidence in his very last paragraph — the parable of the sower. No, I will go further, and I will say what I truly think: not only is the novel made so that scoundrels will tear the editions from one another’s hands, but the journalists’ reviews are Jesuitically crafted so that scoundrels will tear the editions from one another’s hands. This is easy to see. The journalists present the defence of the filth with insistence so that the attention of clients who can read may be profitably weighed down. See the middle of the paragraph under discussion. Let us be left in peace, then, with social pathology and sociology. M. Mirbeau alone and his sympathetic readers are pathological here. M. Mirbeau practises sociology much less well than M. Tartuffe practised theology. I add to my collection: written with the sharpened point of a scalpel dipped in corrupted blood. When one practises pathology, one also practises antisepsis. I pass over works — powerful — lessons — spring — line — in all sincerity: these are the inevitable courtesies of the poor journalist to the great lord of letters.
I continue:
For in these Memoirs of a Chambermaid, Mirbeau, surmounting every disgust — like the surgeon of some dark Saint-Lazare hospital — has patiently laid bare the most hideous of our social wounds: domestic service, with all its physical and moral miseries; domestic service, that modern slavery whose freed women form the great contingents of prostitution, free or cloistered, in the end merely changing their ergastulum.
Almost nothing to say here: however dark a Saint-Lazare may be, the surgeon takes great care not to dip the sharpened point of his scalpel in corrupted blood in order to produce writings. And when M. Mirbeau decides to undertake the social pathology of domestic service, his study will no longer resemble the Journal d’une Femme de chambre. I pass over what follows — provocative literature and bad French. I pass over the insipid or nauseating quotations. We arrive at the serious part of the article, the grand considerations:
Corruption is never total; there are men of good will everywhere, and, if they are lacking, “one makes them be born,” as M. de Tocqueville or Pailleron said — I no longer know which. It is total in the Memoirs of a Chambermaid, and Mirbeau, admirably documented, has depicted for us, from life, a foul world, a world without any admixture of men of good will, and he has seen truly. The Memoirs of a Chambermaid, I repeat, are not a work of imagination, but the history — let us say the natural history, so as to offend no one — of a class of French society at the end of the nineteenth century.
From these meta-historical attestations we fall back into nauseating quotations. Then comes the conclusion:
I give up stirring all this mire. One cannot force such poison down the throats of readers ^(1) unless one knows how to mask its horrible bitterness, as a Mirbeau does, through the magic of a prodigious art. But make no mistake: the Memoirs of a Chambermaid will never promote corruption, and will on the contrary inspire a horror of the vices daily celebrated by certain academicians who edit the maisons Tellier of Paris. Mirbeau has seen and observed an atrocious but real world; and he has put all his genius into making us share the disgust it inspires in him. His book will have a great social import. It is the terrible report of the bankruptcy, the moral bankruptcy of the upper contemporary bourgeoisie. Mirbeau inventories a whole world on its way to… the sewer; and makes us think of the new times that are being prepared. He has therefore produced a work that is highly moralising.
^(1) I did not put those words in the gentleman journalist’s mouth.
What would make the Tartuffery of this conclusion almost amusing is that the Revue Blanche continues to publish a large advertisement for the Journal — not the one of a chambermaid, but the one that is a newspaper and that our polemicists, as far as I know their habits, like to call the maison Letellier — an advertisement in which M. Octave Mirbeau continues to figure prominently among the Journal’s contributors, in second place, immediately after M. Paul Adam, immediately before M. Gustave Geffroy, accompanied by MM. Henry Bauer, Clovis Hugues, Lucien Descaves, and Madame Séverine, to name only those who concern us.
Louis Robert
I was forgetting: if I were a candidate for the dictatorship, or a simple soldier of antisemitism, I would also distribute on the boulevards bottles of absinthe at two sous.
Daniel de la Targe Bertrand Lesourd
The abundance of material forces us to defer to a forthcoming cahier the communications that have reached us during and since the holidays.