Octave Mirbeau’s fierce 1897 defence of Léon Bloy, the outcast genius of French letters. A biting literary essay on poverty, faith, and the price of artistic integrity in 19th century Paris.
I journey forth to meet my thoughts in exile, within a great column of silence.
—Léon Bloy
The other day, at an elegant gathering of men of letters, the conversation turned to Léon Bloy and his latest book, The Woman Who Was Poor. Around this work, the cowardice of some, the spite of others, and the sheer incomprehension of the majority have created a vast zone of solitude and silence—rather like the cordon drawn round a house where someone lies dying of the plague. The gathering consisted entirely of frightfully celebrated personages: doting feminists and doughy psychologists, their necks throttled by triple-knotted cravats, their buttonholes blooming with every conceivable legion of honour. These gentlemen “shift at least ten thousand copies” of their drearily smutty little tales, which set chambermaids’ souls aflame—chambermaids being the only souls nowadays who still dare confront the unconfrontable and dismal tedium of modern life.
Needless to say, Léon Bloy was thoroughly savaged. They accused him of every baseness, heaped every disgrace upon him. Anyone walking in unprepared would have thought they were discussing some criminal who had invented a new form of horror. Clearly, had Léon Bloy beaten women with his walking stick at the Charity Bazaar, violated tombs, or chopped small children into pieces, instead of being guilty of a beautiful and painful book, they would have spoken of him with more indulgence and less indignation. They reproached him for his ingratitude, his pride, his unpardonable poverty. Several pushed their literary and psychological acumen so far as to deny him any talent whatsoever, any style at all. The supreme comedy came when a sort of literary hairdresser—who flounders in his sentences like a cockchafer fallen into a pot of liquid pomade—crushed Bloy with a single blow by invoking Blaise Pascal. Finally, all the old legends that once crucified the author of The Desperate Man, which seemed to have been slumbering in editorial dust, were gleefully resurrected. I shan’t name these worthy gentlemen, for though they are all illustrious, they haven’t really got names—or rather, they all share the same monosyllabic, disagreeable name you know perfectly well, which amounts to having no name at all.
A young man who wore no dinner jacket, bore no decorations—not even from the Queen of Romania—and who hadn’t yet opened his mouth, declared:
“You’re rather hard on a man whom Barbey d’Aurevilly esteemed and loved.”
But the name d’Aurevilly rang out in that company like something already distant. A rather contemptuous smile was seen to play upon the lips of those illustrious personages. And that was all the memory of that great, solitary, regal soul could summon forth.
I too shall follow that young man’s example, and it’s in remembrance of d’Aurevilly that I shall speak of this outcast: Léon Bloy.
⁂
The case of Léon Bloy is truly unique in what we are pleased to call “literature.”
Here is a man of rare verbal power, the most sumptuous writer of our time, whose books occasionally attain biblical beauty. You won’t find in Chateaubriand, nor in Barbey d’Aurevilly, nor in Flaubert, nor in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, prose more architectural, richer in form, more expertly and supplely modelled. In certain pages of The Desperate Man, beyond the off-putting violence and disproportionate curses, he has risen to the highest peaks of human thought. To paint beings and things, he has often found astonishing, lightning images that illuminate them profoundly and forever. With what indelible strokes has he not drawn the glorious X— and “his freedman’s awakenings”? Speaking of a wicked man, sad and cowardly, a poltroon at rest, he writes: “Yet when he’d drunk a few glasses of absinthe, his cheekbones blazed at the top of his face like two cliffs on a night of wicked seas…” He has a poor girl say: “My life is a countryside where it’s always raining…” The same girl, weak and ill, recounts how she struck a man nearly to death who tried to rape her: “When I hit Monsieur Chapuis, I thought an oak tree was growing in my heart…” I quote from memory, at random. Léon Bloy’s books teem with such things… Some are incomparably grand and noble. They spring from his pen on every page, quite naturally and effortlessly. He exists in a permanent state of magnificence. Read this invocation from The Woman Who Was Poor, which I find without searching, simply by opening the book:
“I am your father Abraham, O Lazarus, my dear dead child, my little child, whom I rock in my Bosom for the blessed Resurrection. You see this great Chaos between us and the cruel rich man. It’s the uncrossable abyss of misunderstandings, illusions, invincible ignorances. No one knows his own name, no one recognises his own face. All faces and hearts are clouded like the parricide’s brow, beneath the impenetrable tissue of Penitence’s combinations. We don’t know for whom we suffer, and we don’t know why we are in delights. The pitiless man whose crumbs you envied and who now implores a drop of water from your fingertip could only perceive his indigence in the illumination of his torment’s flames; but I had to take you from the Angels’ hands for your wealth to be revealed to you in the eternal mirror of that face of fire. The permanent delights on which that damned soul counted won’t cease, indeed, and neither will your misery end. Only, Order having been restored, you have changed places. For there was between you two an affinity so hidden, so perfectly unknown, that only the Holy Spirit, visitor of dead men’s bones, had the power to make it burst forth thus, in endless confrontation!…”
Even in the frenzy of insult, he remains magnificent; he can say of himself that he is a “jeweller in maledictions.” He sets excrement in gold; he mounts the black pearl of spittle on precious metals, preciously wrought. When he reaches this level of goldsmithery and chasing, excrement itself becomes a jewel. No one has the right to smell its original odour anymore, and all can smear their faces with it without shame.
Be that as it may, if those charged with educating us had any sense of what beauty is, if they understood the responsibility of their propagating mission, they would long ago have selected from this admirable writer’s works certain paragraphs, chapters or sentences to serve as models of eloquence. You will find none more impeccable or superb anywhere.
So there’s your man. Well then! Among the thousands upon thousands of scribblers whose works clutter bookshop shelves and the compartments—I almost said cellars—of bourgeois brains, Léon Bloy is perhaps the only one—the only one, mark you—who is forbidden to live by his trade. Not only can’t he live by it, but it’s a miracle he hasn’t died from it. Others, alas! whom he loved, have died from it, in his arms! He has known the agony of a poor child in his embrace, a child denied the two sous’ worth of pure milk that his father’s great talent wasn’t rich enough to buy for his innocent, fragile life!
Read The Woman Who Was Poor. It’s a book you will perhaps be told is badly made, lacking unity, composition, worldly psychology. Perhaps that’s true, but read it anyway, for it’s filled with incomparable things. And then, beneath the storm of invectives and vociferations, beneath the great bursts of intolerable pride—I grant you—you will also hear a heart bleeding in this painful book where every line is like the groan, the cry of revolt, and the final acceptance of that climb to Calvary which has been Léon Bloy’s life thus far.
Oh, I know perfectly well, everyone will claim this life is of his own making. His poverty, he forged it with his own hands. Through his intransigence, his pride, his fever for extermination, he has opened between himself and others an uncrossable space that no one dared cross, for there’s perhaps no one his invectives haven’t reached and marked in the face. He has made his situation so extreme that those who might attempt to defend him and publicly recognise the superior gifts, the unique gifts that make him such an exceptional writerly temperament, would be engulfed in the same hatred as he. All keep silent—some from spite, others so as not to appear complicit in his contempt, his disgust, his excommunications. There’s much cowardice in this silence, certainly; but there’s something else too, which makes the misunderstanding worse: Léon Bloy isn’t someone of our time; he is out of place in this century that stops its ears against the burning words of old prophets, the anathemas of old monks, or laughs at them as at a farce when it happens to listen. I often picture him as a John the Baptist crossing deserts, his mouth full of imprecations, or as some monk distributing anathemas and curses from a medieval church pulpit…
The national police oppose wandering apostolates: they call it vagrancy. As there are no more deserts, Léon Bloy has found himself a pit. He has dug his own grave with his hands; he has carved his body with liturgical ulcers, he has lined his pit with bottle-ends, nails, declamatory excrement to make it inaccessible, to be more naked, more alone with his holy humility and his holy pride, more alone with God. From this pit, he hurls at passers-by clods of light and eternity, golden hatreds, the most savage and magnificent language, heavy and penetrating as lava and meteorites.
The worst sadism for martyrs is to look like executioners: Léon Bloy has succeeded.
Confessor of Poverty, Death, Faith, fierce doorkeeper of the Gate of Life—there’s the man I have tried to admire this evening.
1897.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 