A sharp satirical dialogue by Octave Mirbeau (1898) between a dying old man disgusted by press corruption and a younger visitor who maintains faith in revolutionary youth. A biting critique of media, politics, and social apathy in fin de siècle France.
Yesterday I went to visit an old man who has been ill for three months and hasn’t left his room. I know no one kinder or more delightful. Far from making him bitter, illness has somehow refined his goodness. And his mind remains intact—sharper than ever, perhaps, in that body besieged and shaken by suffering.
When I expressed surprise at his serenity, he told me a few days ago:
“When you think, as I do, about death… about imminent death, you’ve no longer the taste or time for hatred. On the contrary, you hurry to love—not your life, which means nothing to you now… but Life itself. It seems one only understands and loves it at the moment of leaving. And it’s a very sweet thing, I assure you, to go towards death like this, in the light!”
Yet yesterday I found him sad. Was he suffering more? Did he have secret sorrows? Was he tired of being almost always alone with himself? Was he being sincere when he spoke of his death with that calm voice, that peace which gave his pale face a kind of radiance? I questioned him gently.
“It’s nothing you’re thinking,” he said with a deep sigh. “I’m discouraged, that’s all! I want to love… to love all things and all people… and here I am, starting to hate again. I can’t read newspapers anymore.”
This cause of despair struck me as rather comically childish, and I was about to make a respectful observation to that effect when he continued:
“I can’t read newspapers anymore. It’s too painful! They leave something in my soul for the whole day—I don’t know what—something crushing, horribly heavy… like a nightmare!”
“Nothing could be simpler than escaping this nightmare,” I replied. “Just don’t read the papers, that’s all! There’s no shortage of fine books, thank God, that one can read and reread.”
“No doubt! But I’m not dead yet… I need to know what’s happening. I can’t be that disinterested! There are so many questions right now that fascinate and torment me! How else can I satisfy this perfectly natural curiosity except through newspapers?”
“And are you any better off for it? What do you find in newspapers but lies? How do you manage to learn anything at all?”
“Ah! It’s not the lies that upset me,” said the gentle old man. “If there were only lies, I wouldn’t be so sad… What do I care about lies, after all, since I have the gift of possessing—or at least reconstructing—the truth within myself? What drives me to despair is this madness for filth, this intoxication with mud that carries them away today! How can people—however base, however stupid—sink so low? How can they not have, for a single minute, any awareness of the work they’re doing, so exceptionally dishonourable and vile? Do they never reread what they’ve written? It seems to me that if they did, the blush of shame would rise to their faces! Do they even have the excuse of burning passion, of irresistible anger, as coarse minds have and express? No, not even that! It’s done coldly! Is it really possible that a human being can descend to such savagery, such ugliness, and do it coldly?
“When I’ve finished reading a newspaper, my soul is caked with disgust! I truly believe I’ve participated in a crime! Because we mustn’t deafen ourselves with excuses and pay ourselves with words—it really is crime that sprawls across the press, that howls and triumphs there! Amid the frenzies of insult, the epileptic fits of denunciation and slander, I clearly see rising up the very face—the ignominious face—of crime. My ears are haunted by these incessant calls for murder, these cries for death. They pursue me without letting go… For anyone who thinks, there really is, in these newspapers, a particular state of mind that is nothing other than the spirit of murder. I find it terrifying, painful and absurd! And I’ve lost my peace!”
And he added:
“A people is lost… a people is finished… a people is dead that tolerates these abominable brutalities, that not only tolerates them but delights in them!”
“No!” I replied. “It’s not a people dying… It’s a whole series of things and men departing! They’re going in convulsions and death rattles, quite naturally… But they’re going! Believe me, at the end of this tumultuous, frenzied and filthy agony, which will be long yet, which will be horrible perhaps, and perhaps bloody… there’s the immense joy of a new future, the certainty of a more beautiful life, or at least of an effort towards a more beautiful life! I have faith!”
“In whom? In what? The people are indifferent and defeated. They no longer believe in revolution, no longer get excited about justice, know nothing of beauty. They don’t even have a sense—I won’t say of their dignity: where would they draw it from?—but of their immediate interests. They’re something soft and flabby in the fingers of those who use them, the governor or the exploiter… I’m too old to be what they call a revolutionary, and I’ve seen too much, lived too much, not to know that revolutions can’t reconstruct anything because, in sum, they’ve never destroyed anything… They take human lives, but they leave intact the errors, prejudices, injustices, the stupidity! Yet I understand there’s much to be done, that everything’s to be done. But the people don’t want anything done. They don’t want to be dragged from the filth of their sty. When you speak to them of their happiness, they plug their ears and won’t hear anything; of their freedom, they immediately throw themselves headlong into lies and servitude, more deeply still!”
“I have faith all the same!” I said.
“In what? In miracles, then? But there are only voracious appetites on one side, and on the other, irreducible servilities.”
“I have faith in youth!”
“What youth?” said the old man, shaking his head sadly.
“Why, the immediate youth… today’s youth… the twenty-year-olds!”
“They don’t know themselves… They don’t know!”
“You don’t know them…”
“Literary types! Children!”
“And men! They’re quite different from those who came before… At least these ones engage with life! Unlike their elders, they don’t shut themselves up in dreamlands or ivory towers… They have passion, love of justice, the cult of beauty, the burning thirst for freedom, the imperious desire for action, hair and clothes like everyone else. They’re generous and brave. Their ideal is clear because it springs from nature and life. They’ve repudiated stupefying mysticism and vague symbolisms that glorified Impotence! No more pale and putrid virgins, mad or demonic heroes, no more knock-kneed princesses gliding over spiral clouds and seas, amid vermicelli architecture, with lilies in hand! Human realities, social realisations—that’s what they’re after… They no longer sing the intoxication of death, of non-being, of non-creating; they want to live, ardently, healthily, totally… They don’t hypnotise themselves gazing at their navel, that central point of nothingness… Quite the contrary, they communicate their fervour and faith to everything around them… they group together, not just in Montmartre cafés and Latin Quarter brasseries; they’re conquering the provinces, the cities, organising centres of action, of moral education; they’re creating newspapers, reviews, theatrical performances, centres of thought… Make no mistake… It’s a whole movement beginning, one that can only develop and grow, and whose result will be fruitful.”
The old man shook his head.
“They’re young,” he said. “But soon life will come upon them with its laziness, its pleasures or ambitions… It will quickly extinguish the flames of this fine generosity… Besides, the evil is too deep; its virus has too seriously infected the marrow of the social body for us to hope for a cure, or a change…”
I interrupted him sharply:
“One must never despair of a people—however rotten—when an intelligent and brave youth rises up to defend justice and freedom!”
“Oh! The future!” said the old man with a great painful gesture, surely thinking of death at that moment. “No one holds it.”
“Everyone sees it… The future is tomorrow’s present.”
1898.
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