Mirbeau’s fierce satire on the desecration of literary masterpieces in the public domain. From Balzac’s Droll Stories ‘translated into modern French’ to school editions that butcher classics—a timeless warning about cultural vandalism.
Here is yet another document—and not the least curious—to add to the misdeeds inspired in unscrupulous but inventive industrialists by that splendid conception of the “public domain”, whereby anyone is free, indeed glorified, to dump any old rubbish at the foot of works by a writer dead fifty years.
In my last article, I showed you M. A.-F. Cuir, primary inspector in Lille, member of the Higher Council of Public Education, reducing the finest pages of the Human Comedy to a series of short and ridiculous school summaries… You know that M. A.-F. Cuir’s design is to replace Balzac’s too-heavy thought with lighter commentary of his own vintage, his, Cuir’s. At which a good correspondent, a schoolteacher at X…, greatly rejoices in a letter he sends me, for, says he, this is how they treat Molière, La Fontaine, Racine, Voltaire and generally all the great writers of France in every educational establishment worthy of the name. He cites the case of Tartuffe where Elmire finds herself metamorphosed into a young boy who forces Tartuffe to confess he has stolen jam from his benefactor Orgon’s cupboard. In expiation of which, poor Tartuffe is condemned to recite twelve dozen rosaries… And he writes: “Genius has this peculiarity, that it lends itself to all the combinations and adaptations of professors whilst losing nothing—or so little—of its primitive savour.” And later: “Our task is to make genius appealing and moral.” And finally, this excellent correspondent adds that it’s admirable we now possess a “readable” edition of Balzac, a truly popular edition where the works of this “uneven, often obscure, but interesting” writer are cleared of all the debris and dross that encumber them, no less than the too-elevated insights that bore the reader without enlightening him… He explains, moreover, somewhat arbitrarily but eloquently, that Balzac would be pleased with the generous initiative taken by M. A.-F. Cuir, for “these things, which are the mark of immortalisation, only ever happen to writers of genius or who count”. And it’s so true, he argues, that M. Jean Richepin, who is neither primary inspector in Lille nor member of the Higher Council of Public Education, was telling us the other day that Goethe only really understood his Faust in the French translation!… And how much better he would have understood and loved it had the translation been done by M. A.-F. Cuir! My correspondent ends his letter with two fine strokes, one charmingly aggressive, the other infinitely witty, which I don’t hesitate to reproduce though it costs my pride: “In any case, here’s an honour you’ll never have!…” And he also writes: “Besides, I know Balzac’s publisher personally… He’s a man of the finest intelligence… He absolutely doesn’t care what you and jokers of your sort might say about him… Through learning, taste and character, A.-F. Cuir is what you might call tough as leather…” I readily believe it, and how charming!
But today we have better, if possible, than A.-F. Tough-as-Leather, primary inspector in Lille and member of the Higher Council of Public Education… we have much better.
We have another fellow, a free man this time, who is connected to M. Georges Leygues and the Minister of Public Education by no descending hierarchy, and who answers to the more euphonious name of André Hélie. M. André Hélie, whose previous works I’m unaware of, and whether he has done any work other than this, which surely suffices for a man’s eternal glory, is publishing, with a publisher of twenty-five-centime books, the Droll Stories by the same Balzac, but translated by him, André Hélie, into modern French!… You read that correctly, didn’t you? Balzac’s Droll Stories, translated into modern French by M. André Hélie!…
And poor Balzac’s first name was Honoré. How fitting!
The Droll Stories, translated into modern French!… Here, let’s admit, is something that’s not banal and opens to the complicated and anxious imagination of translators new horizons, limitless horizons, if I dare say. Just as it ensures for the masterpieces of our language a distribution no one had yet thought of… I can perfectly well see a Racine, a Molière, a Diderot, and later a Renan or an Anatole France, translated into Belleville slang or Lower Norman dialect: into slang by M. Bruant, for instance, into dialect by M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, wouldn’t you say?… for the greater instruction of suburban pimps and good peasants of France, for it’s good that masterpieces, in whatever form, should permeate all intellectual strata. I also see perfectly well the immense and fruitful advantage one can draw from this conception of the classical masterpiece, the quick-change masterpiece, and all the adaptations to which it can be bent… Why relegate the books of the Marquis de Sade, of Andréa de Nerciat, to library hells henceforth? Couldn’t one, through learned translation, make them bedside books for pious nuns and young boarders? One need only replace the erotic scenes with scenes of religious exaltation, which is easy, and the too-liberal engravings with beautiful devotional images!…
But let’s not anticipate these future advances… and return to the special case of M. André Hélie, translating Balzac’s Droll Stories into modern French.
So rack your brains to write a delicious pastiche of Rabelais’s language only to be later translated into modern beer-hall French by a writer who obviously sees in these transformed tales only lucrative pornography and who is going to put them, stripped of their literary finery, naked and obscene, within reach of “all intelligences and all purses”, as the prospectuses say.
What would you think of the sinister fellow who would scrape the walls and mutilate the ornaments of a charming sixteenth-century dwelling to make it a twentieth-century modern-style house? And what else is this M. André Hélie doing, I ask you, in modernising The Droll Stories whose sole reason for being is to be what they are, that is, the reconstruction of a language we no longer write and which saves, through its perfume of ancient grace and the picturesqueness of its archaism, what the tales might have of too free and too daring in the language we write today?…
Can nothing really be done against such vandalism? And is this what they call the socialisation of works of art?
⁂
Another of my correspondents, who is also a professor, but a very distinguished professor of philosophy, and who doesn’t believe it necessary to make “genius appealing and moral”, submits an idea that might be good and become practical. In turn, I submit it to my readers who might find some pleasure in seeking a solution.
Here it is:
There exists an institution called the Censorship Commission, which institution does nothing except, like most institutions, draw monthly from the Republic’s budget sums that are moreover modest… which I don’t reproach them for, believe me… for everyone must live, and times are hard… When the Censorship Commission happens to do something by chance, it only ever does stupid things… So why does it imagine anyone in the world asks it to do anything at all!… I knew an excellent and very witty man, Émile Marras, who was curator of the Marble Repository. He at least had understood his function, which was to do nothing… And he never did anything. Sumptuously housed by the furniture repository, surrounded by the finest art objects, with a garden where he grew vegetables and an immense lucerne field where he could have grazed a cow, he was perfectly happy. At each change of ministry, he’d say to himself, without too much worry moreover:
“If a minister ever took it into his head to come and see for himself the strange paradox that is my function… I’d be done for…”
But ministers never came. They never go anywhere. And that’s exactly what the Censorship should tell itself… So nine-tenths of the time it’s perfectly useless, and for the rest, which amounts to only one-tenth, it’s harmful… Well then! couldn’t it be used for something, even something good? Why not employ it to preserve our intellectual domain?… Instead of intermittently and unreasonably banning plays of high social import like Georges Ancey’s These Gentlemen (I cite These Gentlemen because you might think I’m alluding to Damaged Goods), why shouldn’t it be something like a tribunal preventing people from laying hands on our great writers, whose works no one has the right to touch precisely because they belong to everyone?… Why wouldn’t it protect the common intellectual domain against attacks of the kind I have just described?
I offer this idea for what it’s worth. One might reflect on it and perhaps derive some benefit.
In any case, it’s truly extraordinary that a capitalist society, founded exclusively on property rights, declares itself powerless, even indifferent, when burglars so cheerfully, so unpunishedly strip the most precious treasure we possess: our history, our language, our masterpieces…
1902.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 