A biting satirical essay by Octave Mirbeau (1897) on the literary discovery of Ernest La Jeunesse, skewering critics, academia, and the state of French letters with characteristic wit and irony.
Well, well! It seems I have discovered Ernest La Jeunesse! Bold thinkers assure me of this, Paul Brulat confirms it, and here is yet another thing I will never live down. Woe is me! What foolish compulsion drives me to constantly discover things and people willy-nilly, at the risk of attracting excessive hatred, not to mention the terrible lightning bolt from Georges Duval’s devastating monocle and Torchet’s diabolical torch? So yes, I have discovered Ernest La Jeunesse; discovered him as the alchemist Brandt discovered phosphorus—without knowing it, which is far more splendid. But what will Gaston Deschamps say, who thought he had discovered him first? Or Larroumet, second? Or Doumic (ah! how dreary Doumic is in the evenings!), third? They won’t be pleased, for although they have dropped La Jeunesse now they are convinced this young writer has considerable talent and a bright future, they nonetheless claim—Deschamps from the front, Doumic from behind—the flattering remorse of having discovered him, each at their appointed time and rank.
I wonder how the history of this stirring discovery will ever be established, as it’s becoming as complicated as that of alcohol or gunpowder. Consider that the competitors for discovering Ernest La Jeunesse aren’t limited to this trio of jolly academics. They are as numerous as the Greek cities that once disputed the advantageous miracle of having given birth to Homer—those who today dispute the glory or regret of having discovered the beardless author of The Imitation of Our Master Napoleon; and they fully intend to stake their claims. Some memoirists, intimately familiar with the underside of our times, also insinuate that Anatole France and Maurice Barrès weren’t strangers to this much-contested discovery; but all things considered, they can’t quite believe it. They can’t believe it for strong reasons they won’t divulge and which are, apparently, irrefutable. Until this tangled question is clarified to everyone’s satisfaction, here I am once again with another discovery on my hands. Fortunately, I have strong hands, and one discovery more or less won’t embarrass me.
⁂
In life, things often work out far better than one expects. Without this memorable and providential circumstance whereby the discovery of Ernest La Jeunesse was exclusively attributed to me by uncompromising thinkers and philosophers of complete tranquillity, I would have forever remained ignorant, like Pascal, of where I come from and what I am, and also of the nature of Georges Duval’s immortal soul. It’s a beautiful soul and—I must bow to the evidence—I’m a rather sorry specimen. And here is how Georges Duval arrives at this double conclusion:
“Every morning,” Georges Duval recounts, “young men come to see me asking how one achieves instant celebrity. And I tell them: ‘Nothing could be simpler, my friends, or easier. You need only write that Victor Hugo is a scoundrel, Balzac a vulgar cretin, Corot a wretched dauber. Immediately you’ll have the friendship and protection of Octave Mirbeau, who will anoint you a genius. And Bob’s your uncle.’ No doubt Ernest La Jeunesse scrupulously followed this advice. Somewhere, I know not where, he must have covered Hugo, Balzac and Corot in thick mud and varied insults. Then Mirbeau must have said: ‘There’s my man, there’s my great man!’ And he bestowed glory upon Ernest La Jeunesse. You see, it’s within anyone’s reach… it’s an open secret, it’s elementary psychology; and things must be thus, otherwise how could it happen that everyone talks about Ernest La Jeunesse’s first book, whilst no one—mark this anomaly—has ever talked about mine, which are innumerable, and about everyone, even Balzac.”
This doesn’t outrage me; on the contrary, I find it amusing. I understand perfectly that Hugo, Balzac and Corot appear here only as figures of speech, and that in the mind of the truthful and conscientious Georges Duval, they are coldly usurping the place of Jean Rameau, perhaps, and perhaps also that of Georges Duval himself, of all the Georges Duvals of poetry, novels and painting. But no matter. They look splendid in the landscapes that Georges Duval paints with such a cheerful brush. Hugo, Balzac and Corot—it hardly matters that they have always been objects of my veneration and worship, growing more fervent by the day. What matters is that, thanks to these so honestly chosen tropes, it’s well established that I’m nothing but a public insulter; that if I mistreat someone, that someone is always, by that very fact, a man of astonishing genius, and that anyone I admire and love is merely a notorious and scandalous ragamuffin.
Let Georges Duval rest easy. I won’t mistreat him, and I will say this:
There’s an incurable pain at the bottom of your soul, and the soul of all your kind—for I’m not addressing you alone here, and you are not Georges Duval here, you are Georges Legion—the inability to feel for yourself, to admire spontaneously, to love and hate, which is all one, with your own love. And don’t think I mean to limit this observation to a simple literary incident, fundamentally indifferent; I generalise and extend it to everything life can offer you in the realm of action. To feel, love, admire—you can only do so with your form master’s permission, and your admiration and love will never be anything but a repeated lesson or an imposition, instead of being the free, ardent, joyful exaltation of the individual in contact with beauty. Among the things imposed upon you, forced upon you to admire, many are already dead, or dying, or will die tomorrow, or existed only in the servile souls of poor fools. And you will admire them forever, and never will you rebel against your form master, or your admiration, or yourself, because you are a good little boy, a good little pupil, very nice, very well-behaved, very disciplined, and it would be unseemly for you to leave the dreary flock of your fellow detainees during the walk, to break ranks and go smell a beautiful flower that grew freely on the roadside embankment… And since you force me to it, I must explain myself regarding Ernest La Jeunesse, about whom, despite your assertions and information, I have never written anything, not even his name, and about his books, for which you reproach me—with what lofty protest!—for a propagandist enthusiasm that hadn’t had occasion to manifest or express itself until now.
If I haven’t spoken of Ernest La Jeunesse, it wasn’t through indifference, nor because his books didn’t interest me. Quite the contrary. Among current literary productions, where it’s almost always the same book reappearing—cruel bit player—under varied titles and signatures, I welcomed La Jeunesse’s as something different and new, in which I saw clearly outlined a fine writerly temperament, a curious and ardent intelligence; but one never has time to do what one would most like to do and what’s closest to one’s heart. In journalism, where space is so sparingly measured, and where the mode of periodicity leads to successive and involuntary eliminations, one cannot express the totality of one’s ideas, tastes or distastes, and in the duration between one article and the next, one’s best intentions have evaporated.
There was, in this first book by Ernest La Jeunesse, Les Nuits et les ennuis, an accent of lyricism and swashbuckling irony—some say heroic—that truly distinguished it from other books and pleased me greatly. But there was more than that. Not respectful, certainly, not even always fair, at least regarding some of our literary friendships, which are perhaps, after all, only habits, it wasn’t insulting either, nor, whatever people say, in any way pastiche, since the writer came to us with a style very much his own, which throughout the volume maintained a verbal unity, the original savour of his verve, and beneath the different figures and diverse souls he made evolve and speak before us, it was above all himself he was recounting. A work of malicious and denigrating criticism? No, not quite. Confession? Yes. And that’s why it was valuable and why we loved it.
Also a confession, The Imitation of Our Master Napoleon, confession of a soul still confused, vibrant, violent, searching for itself among revolts, troubling itself among lyricism, and which, though very young, though too young, has read much, seen much, felt much, desired much, and mocked everything a little, including itself, for want of being able to act according to the rhythm of its ambitions and will. If one insists on the explanation given in such bad faith, namely that this book is “a military and political history” of Napoleon, it certainly lacks unity, appears quite disjointed and incomprehensible. It’s comprehensible and poignant if one recognises that it has no other aim than to show us the state of mind of a young man and almost all young men of this generation, grappling with the platitudes, disgusts, miscarriages, with the crowds, armies, justices, politics of this time, whose centres of action, displaced, torn from their natural pivots, are who knows where and turn who knows what. Napoleon appears here only in distant episodes, in brief foreshortening, in the recession of his fateful heroism, his prodigious showmanship, his overworked, trampled crowds, always groaning, always marching, against a background of clamours, cannons, blood, agonies of peoples, resurrections of empires, only to make more palpable the nausea of our time which—supreme irony!—feeds on this terrible and overwhelming image of an Emperor, at the precise moment when it’s ready to abdicate everything and offers nothing more to the spirit of a young man, drunk on action and intellectual domination, than the dream of total destruction through anarchy, with the bombs of its solitaries, or through the coup d’état of the good adventurer, with the charges of his cavaliers, full of wine. The Emperor—isn’t he the bomb that succeeded?
I stopped before this book, and found it heroic at times, and always curious. In its apparent disorder, it’s unified, for the same thought of anxiety, revolt, and domination links all its dissimilar chapters, which go from the soul of a little woman to the sad souls of crowds and Parliaments; from the café where beer flows among aesthetics, to the scaffold where the imperial head drips, guillotined, fierce and tender, of a child with a hero’s heart. They go everywhere. And Napoleon’s shadow soars high above it all. And it’s lyrical as a poem, with a lyricism often superb whose mockery, grimacing here and there, doesn’t stop the flight towards the heights. The phrase is supple without clowning, sonorous without declamation, and full of happy images that engrave themselves in the mind.
I don’t know if this book will impose an Emperor on destiny; I only know that young people, amid the attacks and denigrations, read this book, worry, meditate and reread it. Their elder brothers, their sponsors in turn, shrug their shoulders and say: “We don’t understand. We really thought this little fool had made a good start and would be an honest entertainer. Too bad for him!” The young people pick up the book again. They have never wanted to be emperors, and they find themselves there, them and their dreams, their sadnesses, their ferment and their trouble. When they have finished, they suddenly feel firm, resolved and ready. For what?
1897.
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Léon Hennique Novel 