Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1899 letter to a Belgian magistrate who banned his book The Garden of Tortures in Bruges. A masterful satire on censorship, hypocrisy, and bourgeois morality.
I have learnt, through a brief news dispatch and a letter from a friend that was scarcely more illuminating, that my book The Garden of Tortures has been seized from every bookshop in Bruges, along with works by Camille Lemonnier and Georges Eekhoud—fine companions in misfortune. One must conclude that Bruges-the-Dead isn’t quite as dead as they say, and that when it comes to arbitrary stupidity, she knows how to rouse herself and shake off the dust of her tomb.
Last year, The Bad Shepherds was banned in Antwerp—forgive me this small authorial satisfaction—at the height of its success. It seems the German shipowners, who rule the city and, like the Spanish before them, lay down the law there, couldn’t stomach such proletarian insolence. They were terrified that the dock workers who had attended this subversive performance had left the theatre and spilt into the streets singing. It’s all very well for shipowners when workers weep; it’s quite another matter when they sing. That suggests they are not content, for in the people’s songs there’s always, eventually, a demand or a threat. The good burgomaster of Antwerp understood this perfectly. He didn’t need a lengthy speech—even in German—to suppress my play. So he suppressed it. At least that was a reason.
But The Garden of Tortures? Why was it seized in Bruges? Nobody knows, and we are reduced to mere conjecture. The League Against Licentious Books, which denounced it to the Public Prosecutor, and the Public Prosecutor, who hastened to obey the League’s orders, must have thought it lacked obscene illustrations. No doubt they also judged that the book’s obscenity—since obscenity there is—was too sad and painful, and that it couldn’t serve as bedside reading for those fine gentlemen, those elderly gentlemen of Virtue, Law and Morality. Their senile lusts require other stews of lechery and redder spices. Besides, in a country governed by such a virtuous king, in a country so hospitable to the works of Sade and Nerciat, whose texts are illustrated with such plastically suggestive images; in this country, the classic refuge of all the world’s pornography, it’s only right that they should persecute a work whose sole ambition—failing an art it would have wished grander and more severe still—was to evoke forms of pain and pity.
Belgium really does spoil me.
She spoils me all the more because, apparently, I’m now threatened with the worst degradations and most deplorable catastrophes. If my friend is to be believed, I’m to be prosecuted and, naturally, convicted… Convicted to fines I won’t pay, to prison I won’t serve, to all manner of afflictive and infamous penalties customary in these sorts of judicial pantomimes. What’s more, to properly attest to the ignominy of my crime, I will be stripped, in this free Belgium, of the civil rights I don’t possess, as well as the electoral rights I equally lack and which, as a suspicious voter and modest sovereign, I have always found repugnant to exercise in France, where I still possess them in their entirety.
Oh Vandepereboom, what a pretty pickle I’m in!
What worries and rather troubles me in this sad affair, what truly complicates my situation, is that as a watched malefactor and dangerous fugitive, on pain of having Flemish coppers lay hands on me, I will no longer be able to purify my soul in the casinos of Ostend and Spa, rubbing shoulders with Brussels mashers and Aix-la-Chapelle dandies who make those roulette landscapes and shores of gallantry so elegant and enchanting… I will no longer be able to visit Bruges, whose silence, dead waters, ancient stones and melancholy carillons I love! Who would have thought Bruges would one day be so cruel to me? Oh dear little Hospital of St John, where so often, in your halls and beneath your cloisters, I have come seeking ecstasy before Memling’s divine canvases? Who would have thought, oh cemetery, less dead than the sepulchre of streets, canals and béguinages, less dark than the passing shadows and the hearts of old women whose waxen faces one glimpses behind lace curtains—pretty cemetery blooming like a garden of life—who would have thought I wouldn’t be able, next year, to bring to that tender and charming friend Georges Rodenbach the pious homage of my faithful friendship, the fervent worship and perennial flowers of my memory? And I will no longer walk the plains of the Scheldt where the tempest of your winds howls, oh Verhaeren! And I will no longer stroll in Ghent along those tragic canals whose black water reflects the pallor of the sick at hospital windows, oh dear Maeterlinck!
Hospital! Hospital! by the canal’s edge!
And I will never again see your hospitable house, oh Van Mons, and your admirable museum where one always trembles lest Morality should place its dirty hands and muddy veil upon the radiantly bare belly of Van Dyck’s Eve and upon Jordaens’ splendid and chaste Fecundity!
It’s quite certain that this seizure of my book, in a quiet corner of Belgium, is hardly a European event and will add nothing to the enormous and bloody history of Flanders… I also know it won’t divert public attention from what more directly concerns it, from the painful twists of the Transvaal war, for instance. Poet though I am, I’m not so vain… And if I speak of this humble incident—for I loathe speaking of what happens to me—it’s solely to say these two brief words to the man of justice who robbed my books:
Oh man of Justice and Law, you are a hypocrite. You know better than anyone, through your profession and the passions it reveals and indeed engenders, what love is. You know perfectly well it’s not always the little romance, the little tear, the little pain, the little flower plucked by theatrical lovers. You know it’s often something terrible, an atrocious pain of lust, a torture under which poor humanity groans in suffering. And why? Because love has been diverted from its purpose—which is the continuation of life, the perpetuation of the species—by the civil laws you serve and the religious laws to which you are enslaved… and these two laws, triumphant over nature, never go without one another. Through marriage—that is, through the organisation of wealth and transmission of property—your civil laws restrict and prevent love’s free expansion: they kill the germ of life in countless human beings; thus they accomplish a work of death. Religious laws, in their will to discipline and universal domination, have made love—that is, the eternal blossoming of life—into a bogeyman and a sin. Both, through the legal or moral shackles they place on love, have been the principal causes of the sexual perversions that afflict humanity and are a true crime against the Species. Is it pornography, then, incitement to debauchery, to show in their horror and pain these crimes that you protect, you and your Justice and your Law? Don’t you permit scientists, doctors, physiologists to study these diseases, to probe these wounds of love? Do you go into their laboratories to seize their scalpels, their retorts and their books, and offer them as a holocaust to bourgeois virtue outraged by them? Then why do you seize my book? We writers, we are not scientists, granted! We are almost all dreamers! I will concede that, though you know nothing about it. But where have you seen that dreamers haven’t brought their share of good to human progress? Scientists and doctors, confined to their sphere of action, limit themselves to seeking often illusory remedies in therapeutics. We seek those remedies, and perhaps those cures, in society—in a society remade more harmoniously to life’s needs, renewed at nature’s eternal springs!
But I can already hear the man of Justice, Law and Morality reply:
“What’s the point of all this? You’re wearing yourself out for nothing, my dear fellow… You know perfectly well what your crime is… Your crime isn’t offending little girls’ innocence or assaulting old courtesans’ modesty… No… your crime—and it’s unpardonable, and it deserves the most exemplary punishments—is putting Society face to face with itself, that is, face to face with its own lies, and also putting individuals face to face with realities! Come now, frankly, what do you expect us to become—me, my Justice, my Law and my Morality—if one day such a catastrophe befell us, and above our pale faces appeared the radiant new image of truth!”
Still, when I want to see Belgium again, the towers of Bruges, the delicate arcades of St John’s Hospital and the swans sleeping on the Lake of Love, I will have to request a safe-conduct… like Esterhazy!
1899.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 