Diary of a Country Priest Read online

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said gently. ‘They suffer from the same illusions. The only difference is that the beggars don’t have my nun’s perseverance. They give up at their first attempt, on the pretext that the experience of a ministry contradicts their own knowhow. They’re like snouts looking for jam. A Christian community can’t live on jam, any more than a man can. The Lord didn’t write that we were the honey of the earth, my boy, but the salt. Our poor world is like old Job on his dung heap, full of wounds and ulcers. Salt on an open wound stings, but it also stops a body from decaying. Thinking you can exterminate the devil, your other hobby horse is to be loved, loved for yourselves, naturally. A true priest is never loved, remember that. And shall I tell you something? The Church doesn’t care if any of you are loved, my boy. The important thing is to be respected and obeyed. The Church needs order. Create order all day long. Create order even though you know that disorder will regain the upper hand the following day, because the way things go, night is bound to destroy our work of the day before – night belongs to the devil.’

  ‘Night,’ I said, knowing I was going to make him angry, ‘is when the monks are active.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he replied coldly. ‘And what do they do? They make music.’

  I tried to appear shocked.

  ‘I have nothing against those contemplatives of yours. To each his own. Apart from their music, they’re also florists.’

  ‘Florists?’

  ‘Absolutely. When they’ve done the housework, washed the dishes, peeled the potatoes and put the cloth on the table, they stick fresh flowers in the vase, it’s only natural. Mind you, the only people who might be shocked by my little comparison are idiots, because of course, there’s a subtle difference … The mystic lily isn’t the lily of the field. And besides, if man prefers a fillet of beef to a spray of periwinkles, it’s because he himself is a brute, a belly. In short, your contemplatives are very well equipped to provide us with fine flowers, real ones. Unfortunately, there’s occasional sabotage in the cloisters, as there is elsewhere, and all too often what we get are paper flowers.’

  He kept giving me sidelong glances without appearing to, and at such moments I think I could see, deep in his eyes, a great deal of tenderness and – how can I put this? – a kind of worry, an anxiety. I have my trials, he has his. But I find it hard to keep quiet about mine. And if I do not speak, it is less out of heroism, alas, than out of that reticence also familiar to doctors, so I’m told, at least in their own way and in accordance with the kind of anxieties that are specific to them. Whereas he will keep quiet about his own, whatever happens, and beneath his gruff rotundity he is more impenetrable than those Carthusians I passed in the corridors at Z …, looking as white as wax.

  Abruptly, he took my hand in his, a hand swollen by diabetes, but one that grips immediately and unerringly, a hard, imperious hand.

  ‘You may say I simply don’t understand the mystics. Oh, yes, you will say it, don’t pretend otherwise! Well, my good fellow, in my time at the seminary there was a teacher of canon law who thought he was a poet. He would put together these amazing constructions, with all the feet and rhymes and caesuras and what have you that you could wish for, poor man! He would have made verse out of canon law if he could. There was just one thing he lacked, call it what you will, inspiration, genius – ingenium – whatever. I don’t have genius. If the Holy Spirit singles me out one day, then of course I’ll put down my broom and my cloths – can you imagine that? – and go and spend time with the seraphim and learn music, even if I’m not in tune at first. But don’t be surprised if I laugh at people who sing in chorus before the Lord has even raised His baton!’

  He stopped to think for a moment, and his face, even though turned towards the window, suddenly seemed in shadow. His very features had hardened as if he expected from me – or perhaps from himself, from his own conscience – an objection, a denial, whatever … But he regained his composure almost immediately.

  ‘What can I do, my boy? I have my own ideas on young David’s harp. He was a talented young man, that’s for sure, but even his music didn’t preserve him from sin. I know perfectly well that the poor pious writers who churn out Lives of the Saints for export imagine that ecstasy is a kind of shelter, that a man is as safe and snug there as in Abraham’s bosom. Safe! … Oh, of course, nothing is easier sometimes than to climb to those heights: God carries you there. You just have to hold on tight and, if need be, know how to get back down again. Don’t forget, though, that the saints, the real ones, were quite uncomfortable on their return. Once caught out in their high-wire act, they began by begging that it be kept secret: “Don’t tell anyone what you’ve seen …” They were a little ashamed, don’t you see? Ashamed of being their Father’s spoilt children, of having drunk from the cup of bliss before everyone else! Why should they? No reason. Just favouritism. The first impulse of the soul is to flee such states of grace. There are words in the Book that can be understood in different ways: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!” Not just into His hands – into His arms, His heart, the heart of Jesus! You have your little part in the concert, you play the triangle or the cymbals, I suppose, and suddenly you’re asked to climb onto the platform, you’re given a Stradivarius and told, “Go on, my boy, I’m listening.” Brr! … Now come and see my oratory, but wipe your feet first, because of the carpet.’

  I don’t know much about furniture, but his room struck me as magnificent: a solid mahogany bed, a wardrobe with three highly carved doors, upholstered armchairs and a huge bronze Joan of Arc on the mantelpiece. But it wasn’t his bedroom the curé of Torcy wanted to show me. He led me into another room, this one very bare, furnished only with a table and a prie-dieu. On the wall hung a fairly hideous chromo, the kind you see in hospital wards, depicting a very chubby, very pink baby Jesus lying between the donkey and the ox.

  ‘You see this painting?’ he said. ‘It’s a gift from my godmother. I have more than enough to afford something better, more artistic, but I’d rather keep this one. I find it ugly, and even rather stupid, but comforting. We lot, my boy, are from Flanders, a country of big drinkers, big eaters – and rich … You don’t realize, you poor dark-skinned fellows from the Boulonnais, in your cob shacks, how wealthy Flanders is. The black country! Not much point asking us for fine words that make pious ladies swoon, but all the same we have a fair number of mystics, my boy! And not tubercular mystics, oh no. Life doesn’t scare us: good thick red blood beats in our temples even when we’re brim-full of gin, or when we fly into a temper, a Flemish temper, enough to lay an ox flat – thick red blood with a touch of blue Spanish blood, just enough to set it on fire. Anyway, you have your troubles, I have mine – they’re probably not the same. You may sometimes have your moments of doubt, but I’ve rebelled, and more than once, believe me. If I were to tell you … No, I’ll tell you another day, you look so bad right now, there’s a chance you’d faint. To get back to my child Jesus, just imagine, the curé of Poperinghe, from my region, in agreement with the vicar general, who’s a rebel himself, decided to send me to Saint-Sulpice. Saint-Sulpice, as far as they were concerned, was the Saint-Cyr of the young clergy, the Saumur, the École de Guerre. On top of that, Monsieur my father” (incidentally, I thought this was a joke at first, but it seems the curé of Torcy never refers to his father any other way: an old custom?) “Monsieur my father had made a fair amount of money and felt he owed something to the diocese. Only, good heavens! … When I saw that flaking old barracks smelling of thick broth, brr! … And all those nice boys, so thin, the poor devils, that even when you saw them from the front, they always looked as if they were in profile … Anyway, I and three or four good pals, no more than that, rattled the teachers, made lots of noise, silly things, really. We were the first at our desks and the first for meals, but outside that … real little devils. One evening, when everyone was in bed, we climbed on the roofs, and I wailed … loudly enough to wake the whole neigh
bourhood. Our master of novices crossed himself at the foot of his bed, poor fellow, he thought all the cats in the arrondissement had gathered in the Holy House to tell each other dirty stories. A stupid prank, I can’t deny it! At the end of the term, those gentlemen sent me back home, and you should have seen the marks! Not stupid, a good boy, kind-natured, and so on and so forth. In short, all I was fit for was keeping the cows. But the only thing I dreamed of was being a priest. If I couldn’t be a priest I’d die! My heart bled so much that the Lord let me be tempted to destroy myself – oh, yes. Monsieur my father was a fair man. He took me to see Monseigneur in his cart, with a little note from a great-aunt, the mother superior of the Ladies of the Visitation in Namur. Monseigneur was also a fair man. He immediately admitted me to his office. I threw myself at his feet and told him the temptation I had, and the following week he packed me off to his great seminary, a place that was somewhat behind the times, but sound enough. That’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I saw death at close quarters, and what a death! So I resolved from then on to keep my nose clean, to pretend to be stupid. Outside the service, as soldiers say, no complications. My child Jesus is too young to be very much interested in music or literature yet. And he would probably pull a face at people who are content to roll their eyes instead of bringing fresh straw to his ox or brushing the donkey’s coat.’

  He pushed me out of the room by the shoulders, and a friendly tap from one of his broad hands almost brought me to my knees. Then we had a glass of Dutch gin together. All at once, he looked me straight in the eyes, with a self-confident, commanding air. He was like another man, a man who doesn’t need to justify himself to anyone, a lord of the manor.

  ‘Monks are monks,’ he said, ‘I’m no monk. I’m no father superior. I have a flock, a real flock, I can’t dance in front of the ark with my flock, who are just simple livestock – how would that make me look, can you tell me that? Livestock, neither too good nor too bad, oxen, donkeys, animals who pull and plough. And I have goats, too. What am I going to do with my goats? No way to kill them or sell them. A mitred abbot only has to pass the instruction on to the brother porter. In case of error, he gets rid of the goats in no time at all. I can’t do that, we have to come to terms with everything, even goats. Goats or sheep, the master wants us to give him back each beast in good condition. Don’t go thinking you can stop a goat from smelling like a goat, you’d be wasting your time, you might well fall into despair. My older fellow priests take me for an eternal optimist, an easygoing fellow, whereas youngsters like you think I’m an ogre, they think I’m too harsh to my people, too military, too tough. Both groups resent me for not having my little reform plan, like everyone else, or leaving it at the bottom of my pocket. Tradition! mutter the old. Evolution! chant the young. Well, I think man is man and that he’s no better than he was in pagan times. Anyway, what matters isn’t knowing if he’s good or bad, but who commands him. Oh, if only we had left it all to the men of the Church! Mark you, I’m not talking about the chocolate-box version of the Middle Ages: people in the thirteenth century weren’t thought of as little saints, and while the monks may have been less stupid, they drank more than today, nobody can deny that. But we were building an empire, my boy, an empire in comparison with which the empire of the Caesars would have been nothing but dirt – a peace, a true Pax Romana. A Christian nation, that’s what we would have made together. A nation of Christians isn’t a nation of hypocrites. The Church has nerves of steel, she isn’t scared of sin, quite the opposite. She looks it calmly in the face, just like Our Lord, she takes it on board, she accepts it. When a good worker works properly, six days a week, you can allow him a little merrymaking on Saturday night. Here, let me define a Christian nation by its opposite. The opposite of a Christian nation is a sad nation, a nation of old people. You may say the definition isn’t particularly theological. True. But it’s enough to provide food for thought for those gentlemen who yawn at Sunday Mass. Of course they yawn! Do you really think that in one wretched half-hour a week, the Church could teach them joy? And even if they knew the catechism of the Council of Trent by heart, they probably wouldn’t be any more cheerful.

  ‘Why is it that the days of our early childhood seems to us so sweet, so radiant? A young child has his sorrows like everyone else. After all, he’s basically quite helpless against pain and illness! Childhood and extreme old age should be the two great trials of man. But it is from his sense of his own powerlessness that the child humbly derives the very principle of his joy. He relates it to his mother, don’t you see? Present, past, future, his whole life is in a look, and that look is a smile. Well, my boy, if they’d let us get on with it, the Church would have given men that same sense of absolute security. Of course, everyone would still have had their share of problems. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy: we’ll never be strong enough to overcome the devil! But man would have known that he was the son of God, and what a miracle that would have been! He would have lived, he would have died with that idea in his head – and it wouldn’t have been an idea learned only from books, oh no. Because, thanks to us, it would have inspired manners, customs, distractions, pleasures, even the humblest necessities. It wouldn’t have stopped the worker from scratching at the soil, the scholar from digging into his logarithm table or even the engineer from building his toys for adults. Only we would have abolished the feeling of solitude, we would have torn it from Adam’s heart. With their bevy of gods, the pagans weren’t so stupid: they at least managed to give the world the illusion of a rough and ready harmony with the invisible. But the trick is pointless now. Outside the Church, a nation will always be a nation of bastards, a nation of stray children. Obviously, they still have the hope that they’ll be recognized by Satan. Not a chance! They’ll have a long wait for their little black Christmas! Let them put their shoes in the chimney! The devil is already weary of leaving behind piles of machinery that are out of date as soon as they’re invented, now all he leaves are tiny packages of cocaine, heroin, morphine, some filthy powder or other that doesn’t cost him very much. Poor fellows! They will have wearied even sin. Not everyone is good at amusing himself. The cheapest of cheap dolls keeps a child happy for a whole season, while an old man will yawn over a toy that costs five hundred francs. Why? Because he’s lost his childlike spirit. Well, the Church has been given the task by the Lord of maintaining that childlike spirit in the world, that innocence, that freshness. Paganism wasn’t the enemy of nature, but only Christianity enlarges it, exalts it, puts it within reach of man, of man’s dreams. I’d like to get hold of one of those awful scientists who call me an obscurantist. I’d say to him, “It’s not my fault if I wear an undertaker’s suit. After all, the Pope dresses in white, and the cardinals in red. I’d have the right to walk about dressed as the Queen of Sheba, because I bring joy. I’d give it to you for free if you asked me. The Church has joy at her disposal, the whole share of joy reserved for this sad world. What you’ve done against her, you’ve done against joy. Do I stop you from calculating the movement of the equinoxes or from splitting the atom? But what would it profit you to manufacture life itself if you’ve lost the meaning of life? All you’d have left to do would be to blow your brains out over your test tubes. Manufacture life as much as you want! The image you give of death is gradually poisoning the thoughts of the poor, it casts a shadow and slowly drains the colour from their last joys. It’ll keep going as long as your industry and your capital allow you to turn the world into a fairground, with machines that go round at dizzying speeds, brass bands blaring, fireworks going off. But wait, just wait for the first quarter of an hour of silence. Then they will hear the word – not the one they rejected, the one that said quietly: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life – no, the one that rises from the abyss: “I am the door forever closed, the road that leads nowhere, I am untruth and perdition.”’

  He uttered these last words in a voice so sombre that I must have turned pale – or rather, turned yellow, which has, a
las, been my way of turning pale for some months now – because he poured me a second glass of Dutch gin and we talked about something else. His cheerful air did not seem false or even affected, I think it is his very nature, his soul is cheerful. But the look in his eyes didn’t completely match it. As I was bowing in farewell, he made the sign of the cross on my forehead with his thumb and slipped a hundred-franc note into my pocket.

  ‘I wager you’re penniless, the early days are hard, you can pay me back when you’re able to. Now get out of here, and never tell fools anything about the two of us.’

  ‘Bringing fresh straw to the ox, brushing the donkey’s coat’: these words came back to me this morning as I was peeling potatoes for my soup. The deputy mayor came up behind me and I got up abruptly from my chair without having had time to shake off the peel; I felt ridiculous. He was actually bringing good news: the municipality has agreed to have a well dug for me, which will save me the twenty sous a week I give the little boy who goes to fetch me water from the fountain. But I’d have liked to talk to him about his dance hall, because he’s now planning to hold a dance every Thursday and every Sunday. He calls the Thursday one ‘a family dance’: it attracts even the mill girls, and the boys enjoy plying them with drink.

  I didn’t dare. He has a way of looking at me with a basically benevolent smile, which encourages me to talk as if what I was going to say was of no importance anyway. Actually, it would be more convenient to see him at home. I have an excuse to visit him, his wife being seriously ill: she hasn’t left the bedroom in four weeks. From all accounts, she’s not a bad person and once upon a time, so I’m told, even attended services quite assiduously.

  … ‘Bringing fresh straw to the ox, brushing the donkey’s coat’. Well, perhaps. But the simplest tasks are not always the easiest. On the contrary. Animals have few needs, and always the same ones, whereas men …! I’m well aware that people like to talk about the simplicity of country folk. Being myself the son of peasants, I think they are actually terribly complicated. In Béthune, at the time of my first curacy, the young workers in our youth club, as soon as the ice was broken, made my head spin with their confidences, they were constantly trying to define themselves, you could feel they were overflowing with self-pity. A peasant rarely loves himself, and the reason he shows such cruel indifference to those who love him is not that he doubts their affection, but rather that he despises it. He certainly doesn’t do much to mend his ways. But nor does he have any illusions about the faults or vices he endures patiently throughout his life, having judged them irredeemable in advance, concerned as he is only with keeping those useless, expensive animals under control and feeding them for the lowest possible cost. And as it sometimes happens, in the silence of these always secret peasant lives, that a monster’s appetite keeps growing, by the time he’s grown old he can barely stand himself, and any sympathy exasperates him, because he suspects it of being a kind of complicity with the inner enemy that is gradually sapping his strength, his work, his fortune. What to say to these wretches? We encounter on their deathbed certain depraved old characters whose avarice may have been only a harsh revenge, a voluntary punishment endured for years with inflexible rigour. And up until their final agony, this or that word torn from them in their anguish still bears witness to a self-hatred for which there may be no forgiveness.