A biting satirical portrait by Octave Mirbeau (1896) of the pompous Vicomte Melchior de Voguë, self-proclaimed ‘sublime thinker’ of French letters. Mirbeau’s wit skewers literary pretension with devastating irony in this classic piece of Belle Époque satire.
After six months of unheard-of scheming, repeated overtures, and negotiations broken off and resumed a hundred times over, I was at last granted the extraordinary and miraculous honour of gazing upon the august countenance of Viscount Melchior de Voguë. This event—which all the gazettes of Europe report with erroneous details, I might add—took place on a Saturday, that day so favourable to history’s surprises. Shall I confess it? The glacial reception I received from this great man, his dry physiognomy, the empty solemnity of his general bearing quite threw me at first.
“You wished to see me, sir,” he said, not without all too visible disdain. “Very well!… But here’s what I declared to our intermediary—I feel I should remind you, to avoid any misunderstanding: ‘Let him come! But I shan’t speak… I shall tell him nothing… My dignity demands that I remain silent before him, as in the Chamber… He shall merely see me in my apparatus as a sublime thinker… Yes, in his presence, I consent to think sublime things… That, I can do… When he enters my study, I shall hold in my hand a skull, or a crown, or an old sword, and I shall draw from it—mentally—all the sublime reflections that such noble, bygone, and sorrowful objects must suggest to a mind like mine!’ Do allow me, however, to assume my position, as I wasn’t expecting your visit quite so soon.”
He seized from his desk an old ducal coronet, which served him as a paperweight, weighed it in his right hand, and, his brow sadly propped against his left palm, summoned to himself profound thoughts and sublime symbols.
After I had admired him for several minutes:
“It’s quite beautiful,” I admitted, “most impressive, very dramatic… But the sublime, with its usual props—broken crowns, dusty skulls, ancient tombs—don’t you find it has its dangers at times? Just look at Monsieur Mounet-Sully… There’s rather a lot of dross in his sublime… And yet he knows his business!… Ah, the sublime! When it works, it’s Hamlet… and then we shiver to our marrow… Yes, but when it fails… it’s Joseph Prudhomme, Monsieur le Vicomte… And that’s a terribly, terribly ridiculous thing!…”
“My sublime never fails, sir,” replied M. Melchior de Voguë, setting down the crown which was bothering him on an armchair. “It’s of superior quality, so perfectly oiled a mechanism that it can run non-stop for months on end… Do feel, sir, I beg you, the resistant material of my sublime… All the rasps of envy, all the saws of mockery have worn their teeth down trying to bite into it.”
“Indeed!… And I applaud you for showing yourself in the spiritual décor that’s so familiar to you, and which best displays your particular brand of moral beauty. Still, don’t you fear the monotony of such a posture somewhat? Don’t you think it might be clever to reveal the other face of your genius as well?”
“What!” cried M. Melchior de Voguë, feigning surprise. “My genius has two faces?… You’re certain?… I’m not merely sublime?… I’m something more besides?… What else am I, then?”
“You’re an ironist too, Monsieur le Vicomte!…”
At this word ‘ironist’, M. Melchior de Voguë had grown sad, as though before an ancient royal sepulchre. One might have said the word reopened secret wounds within him. But suddenly, his thought scaled those heights where melancholy becomes Shakespearean and where the sadness of great souls takes on a Russian cast.
“My irony, alas!… I hadn’t thought of it… I don’t like to think of it… I am an ironist, it’s true!… but this state of mind, which doesn’t come to me naturally and spontaneously like the sublime, exhausts me extremely… I can’t manoeuvre my irony as I’d wish!… It’s terribly heavy, sir… it weighs a hundred and twenty thousand kilos… To lift it even slightly above the earth, my arms aren’t sufficient… I need jacks, winches, cranes, powerful levers. And it always falls back without managing to take flight, and what does it crush?… Flies!… A hundred and twenty thousand kilos of irony to crush a fly or to crush nothing at all—you’ll agree that’s giving oneself a great deal of trouble for nothing… No, I prefer being sublime all the time… I’m at ease in the sublime… It’s my natural element and, if I dare say, my true atmosphere… I shine there with a rare and marvellous brilliance… I shine, and indeed I Chateaushine!…”
I took advantage of this delicate pun to overcome, through flattery, M. Melchior de Voguë’s last resistances.
“Chateaubriand!…” I exclaimed. “Ah! So we’ve arrived there at last! And by what an ingenious detour!… He owes you a great deal?…”
“He owes me everything… If I hadn’t, through my style alone, restored his reputation, who would think of him today?… Diplomat, politician, writer and viscount like myself, one might say he was lucky to be reborn in this comparison… My celebrity rejuvenates his, corroborates it, continues it… or begins it again, as you prefer… But Chateaubriand has, compared to me, this inferiority of not having known Dostoevsky—which is his crime and his punishment—of not having been called Melchior, which is a magical name, as you know, and consequently predestined… True, he wasn’t called Melchior… and Madame Récamier must have keenly regretted it… Nevertheless, he wrote many fine works!…
“I, sir, don’t write them… I think them… You’ll admit that’s something rarer and more elegant!… Between ourselves, Chateaubriand had too much facility, too much abundance… He wrote rather haphazardly… I don’t like fecundity… it has something vulgar about it that lacks breeding… I need two months to write an article for Le Figaro… a month to think it, a month to write it… And my superiority lies in this: there’s nothing in my articles… You can tap on my articles… They sound hollow like a drum… but they sound… And that’s what the sublime is!…”
M. Melchior de Voguë was beginning to tire me with his sublime. I changed the subject.
“Haven’t you also invented a sort of religion?” I asked.
“That’s perfectly correct… Buddha… Christ… Mohammed… Melchior de Voguë… such is the lineage. I’m even somewhat the God of this religion… and I have worshippers too… Messieurs Maurice Pujo, Henry Bérenger, Desjardins… If they’re not numerous, they’re of quality and full of ardent youth…”
“Couldn’t you explain your religion to me in broad strokes?”
“One doesn’t explain religions, sir… One invents them. And then afterwards, they manage as best they can… The truth is, I invented this religion for the young…
“Yes, one day I discovered that youth needed a religion… But if you want some particular information, read L’Art et la Vie. It’s a rather tedious little review, completely steeped in my thought, which organises exhibitions of the Painters of the Soul. It’s very well documented on the ideal. It alone knows what the ideal is… But it doesn’t say… One must never say what one knows, and never know what one says… The sublime comes at that price…”
“I have two more questions to put to you, Monsieur le Vicomte… Your role at the Académie?”
“My role at the Académie is to have been elected to it… As a former diplomat, future politician, authentic viscount and laborious writer…”
“And as God too, no doubt!”
“As God equally, I had every qualification… I have another role at the Académie, that of jealously ensuring that no great writer penetrates it. And when I write in that light and charming style you know so well, that I would have voted for Napoleon Bonaparte, although he was in bad odour with women and popes, that’s yet another of those tricks my hundred-and-twenty-thousand-kilo irony plays on me, for I always vote, and always shall vote, for M. Costa de Beauregard.”
“Your role in the Chamber, Monsieur le Vicomte?”
“My irony again! What hopes I’ve given birth to!… Everyone went about saying: ‘At last, we’re going to have a man, a great man!’ I was to replace Lamartine at the tribune, as I’d replaced Chateaubriand in literature. The parties were all astir… The ministries were full of anguish!… Something would emerge from me that was a thing of beauty!… Well, no!… I decided that silence better suited my nature as a sublime thinker, and that what I might have said, it was in better taste, and more eloquent, to think!… Besides, speeches aren’t improvised. If, as a laborious writer, a newspaper article requires two months of my dogged work, I calculated that, as a laborious orator, a speech for the Chamber would demand at least six months… And then, M. Roche, whose humiliating electoral protection I’d had to endure—which was hard for a gentleman of my pride and contempt—didn’t want me to speak…”
M. Melchior de Voguë noticed then that he had spoken too much. He took up again in his hand the old ducal coronet that was grieving on the armchair, and returned to thinking sublime and profound things, silently.
I slipped away…
1896.
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