A caustic and witty satire by Octave Mirbeau, mocking the vanity of literary fame and the spectacle of writers turned public exhibits at the 1900 Exhibition. This piece skewers the cult of notoriety over talent.
M. René Barjeau has just had, in Le Gaulois, a miraculous idea. This idea, which Barnum will regret for the rest of his life not having thought of first, consists of exhibiting our finest men of letters in special display cases at the 1900 Exhibition—not in wax or on canvas, which would be nothing miraculous, but alive, yes, ladies and gentlemen, alive! Philosophers and historians, poets and novelists, critics and playwrights, journalists of every stripe and size, each would have his place and would publicly exercise his functions, provided, of course, he could justify some sort of glory or decent connections. You will be able to see and touch! Men of letters at one metre’s distance, like the moon! Such is the programme.
You can imagine how the men of letters—ah! how well M. René Barjeau knows them!—leapt at this idea. Without even asking what sort of exhibition they were destined for, whether they would be required to show themselves naked, in dressing gowns, dinner jackets or period costume, immediately, all of them, save three, applauded with frenzied enthusiasm.
“Yes!… Yes!… A display case!… And careful labelling, and numbers, big numbers, on the chest, on the forehead, everywhere!”
And the display case became, the next day, a pavilion; and the day after that, the pavilion, judged too cramped and not grand enough, quickly transformed into a gallery, a vast gallery, a Gallery of Machines, whose decoration they are talking of entrusting to M. Frantz-Jourdain, that skilled and valiant architect of the Legion of Honour.
Much intrigued, and no less eager to gather clearer and fuller information, I paid a visit to M. René Barjeau. According to his custom, as L’Éclair revealed to us, the innovator was working at the back of an old convent, beneath clematis vines. With narrowed eyes and stubborn brow, he was manoeuvring little lead men of letters about on blueprints. I understood I was dealing with an admirable strategist, and my respect immediately grew with this observation. As soon as he spotted me:
“Ah! ah!” he said, rising… “And what do you make of this Sardou, who dares to abuse my idea?… It’s really too much!… I can understand Sarcey, who’s terribly depressed, as you know… and Scholl, who’ll die an impenitent fantasist!… But Sardou! Come now!… That’s not serious! Oh! if I’d offered him such a windfall back when he was living on black bread at a coal merchant’s… eh! he wouldn’t have spoken as he has done?…”
“Pardon me, dear master,” I ventured to interrupt… “perhaps, in those days, you wouldn’t have thought to offer him anything at all!…”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” replied M. René Barjeau with strong conviction… “In those days, not only would I have exhibited Sardou in my gallery of men of letters, but I’d have exhibited with him the black bread he was eating, and the coal merchant who lodged him!… But of course!… You understand nothing of my project?”
I admitted that some clarification on this project, which I admired as a whole but whose certain details of execution escaped me, would be infinitely agreeable. Then M. Barjeau, with charming condescension, had me sit beside him beneath the customary canopy of clematis:
“Well then! here it is,” he told me… “I’ve been accused by probably superficial observers, and who knows?… perhaps venomous ones, of wanting to exhibit, in the living and speaking form of men of letters, guess what? Ideas! Ideas, yes, sir… It’s absurdly comic! If that had been my intention, there’s no mockery I wouldn’t deserve!… Ideas!… First of all, it’s not among men of letters, believe me, that I’d have gone looking for that product… Besides, it goes without saying that one doesn’t exhibit ideas like seed beans in a sack, or anthracite samples in a glass dish. No, what I wanted—for I flatter myself on being an essentially practical and modern mind—what I wanted was to build a sort of temple to the glory of letters!… But pardon!… I see from your expression that you don’t have an exact understanding of what a true writer must be nowadays!… You’re not in the contemporary movement, that’s it!… For you, a true writer must write… he must expect satisfaction and success only from his works, have no other concerns than to ‘please himself’, as that prehistoric d’Aurevilly prehistorically recommended… Grave error, sir! A ridiculous opinion that lags behind the century with far too much anachronistic naivety!… We’ve made progress, damn it!… Literature, once specialised, has today become an omni-trade, if I dare say, a very complex trade, very much on display, where strength of talent and quality of production are nothing, nothing, nothing; where the polymorphic and continuous staging of the author’s life is everything, everything, everything!… Look!…”
M. René Barjeau quickly took from the table a little lead man of letters, which he twirled between his fingers with surprising skill:
“Look!… here’s X… His reputation is universal… I can even affirm that he’s absolutely illustrious… Now, you’ll grant me that his fame, which is immense, is not at all proportionate to his work, which is also immense, but immensely pitiful… Well! I’m sure; I read in your eyes that you find this unjust, or that you explain the enormity of this contradiction with a fatalistic word that makes no more sense than the thing it expresses: luck!”
“Certainly!” I declared.
“In which you’re quite wrong, and show yourself—excuse my boldness—an inferior psychologist. Where you proclaim: Injustice! I respond: Reward! Where you cry: Luck! I reply: Will!… Come now, sir, have you reflected, for a minute, on X’s persistent and terrible effort towards fame and success?… Do you know what his glory represents in cunning ingenuity, in brazen or hypocritical villainy, in publicity-seeking cynicism, in genius for intrigue?… Have you calculated what he must have expended in baseness, betrayals, carnivorous ferocity?… It’s been work of every minute, heroic tension, prodigious activity of all his worst instincts… Today, he’s paid!… Can you say he’s stolen a reputation acquired at the price of so much trouble, so many daily and exhausting struggles?… His merit seems to me all the greater, his reward all the more just because he had to impose upon universal attention a work of recognised mediocrity and rare imbecility.”
M. René Barjeau planted the little lead man of letters upright on a red fist that, in the blueprint, represented a sort of apotheotic and blazing pylon. Then, doctoral and good-natured at once, he continued:
“It’s no longer about creating a beautiful work, one must know how to organise beautiful publicity. And this publicity, sophisticated, refined, won’t directly concern the books, which would be crude and satisfy no one; it will encompass things foreign to literary work and will spread, preferably, over fashionable sports that a well-born man is likely to practise. Some have become famous because they boasted of their fine connections and never stopped enumerating their successes in select salons where, moreover, they weren’t received. Others drew their glory from making a display of their unsociability… Besides, there’s no absolute rule… All means are good, provided they’re extra-literary and one brings persistence and passion to them. The bicycle, the horse, painting, boats, are excellent things and very usefully employable; illness too, when presented in a touching or melodramatic fashion… Ah! sir, if I had the leisure at this moment to dismantle the glory of almost all our great men—the most undisputed and resounding—we’d discover at the origin even less!”
He rose, after having arranged a whole army of little lead men of letters on the blueprint, and while showing me out through the halls of the very old convent, he said to me:
“Do you understand now? What I wanted was to centralise, to totalise the infinite vanity and multiform ham-acting of our dear men of letters; to give their publicity fury a vaster field and a more swarming public, and to thoroughly imbue them with this truth that I intend, moreover, to engrave in golden letters on the pediment of our Gallery of Machines: ‘Ridicule doesn’t exist: those who dared to brave it head-on conquered the world.’”
1895.
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Léon Hennique Novel 