Octave Mirbeau’s scathing review of Édouard Conte’s Les Mal-Vus – a sharp critique of French society’s hypocrisy towards outcasts, prostitutes and the urban poor.
Here is a strange and curious book: The Outcasts by Édouard Conte. A parade—sometimes comic, more often tragic, always gripping—of all that crawls unknown, misunderstood and terrifying in the underbelly of Parisian life. Prostitutes and pimps, every mask of the flesh trade, dealers in bizarre or terrible professions, the horror of what lurks, what lies in wait, and the burst of laughter from those who dupe; the many faces of misery in revolt, of misery resigned; the ingenuity of crime, of vice, of vanity, and the murder in so many eyes—Édouard Conte has captured it all in striking relief, in vibrant and profound etchings. But he hasn’t merely been the vigorous and sincere painter of this shameful yet touching world; he has been, I might say, its philosopher and intellectual historian. The quality of the drawing, the power of the colour, is matched here by the quality of thought. His gaze pierces appearances and penetrates the soul. There are soundings that make one shudder.
Our admirable legislators who imagine it’s enough to throw the hypocritical cloak of law over human wounds to heal them, our marvellous moralists who speak only of prison and guillotine, believing they will restore virtue to earth by preferring to sever heads rather than tackle questions—they would do well to read this book. And Senator Bérenger would do well to read it too, he who in his prostitution bill never considered that prostitution is virtually the only trade by which wretched women can live, and that in depriving them of this painful livelihood, it might have been charitable to suggest another. But to read such a book, which unveils so much shame, which calls for reflection on so many problems—that would be asking too much of moralists and legislators who content themselves with the few vague precepts circulating in cafés and salons. Well-fed, well-heated, well-pensioned, they prefer, in the peace of a pleasant, calm dwelling, to moralise and legislate on things they know nothing about and whose inexpressible melancholy they could never understand. And then, if danger comes and threatens the harmony of an existence sheltered from every shock, every jolt, there’s the guillotine, silencing voices that rumble too loudly. One can still sleep soundly in its red shadow.
The Outcasts, or at least those the author calls by that name, are the outlaws, those outside life itself, who survive on forbidden trades, always struggling through cunning or violence against a society that has rejected them, carving out from debauchery and crime the share of existence to which every human creature has a right, even when it’s denied them. Outcasts indeed, these fallen beings, the refuse of savage competition, wreckage of social storms, victims of inexorable heredity, swept along from everywhere and swirling in life’s eddies without hope—outcasts certainly, for we know only their sinister appearance and the picturesque scenery where they move. Very few, even among those who claimed to study them, dared descend into these shadowed souls. Édouard Conte has dared; and he has dared show us the little glimmer of humanity that shines so sadly, among so many frightening gazes, in the eyes of these damned.
From these harsh paintings rises a powerful stench of rot and blood. But pity rises too—not the sentimental, bleating pity peddled in romantic verses, but manly pity, the pity of a man who hasn’t feared to place his feet and hands in this filth and pus, and from the individual act, however horrible, however conscious it appears, has had the audacity to trace back to the great culprit, the great party responsible for all crimes, all social monstrosities: society itself. And it’s a poignant sensation that grips us, reading one of Édouard Conte’s monographs, written free of all stupid prejudice, all bourgeois bias—that of the pimp, for instance—to see how much ingenuity, tenacity, endurance and sometimes genuine heroism is spent on evil’s work and wasted, for want of a social organisation, a fairer distribution of wealth that would allow these detestable virtues and cursed energies to be used for good.
We mustn’t rush to condemn these poor perverted beings like a judge, for who knows what fatality spawned them, what they have suffered, what insurmountable barriers they have met on life’s terrible road? At the bottom of a man’s degradation there’s almost always a great sadness. The poison is in life itself, and far from diluting it, society with its laws of inequality, its terrors, its injustices, makes it ever more deadly. Every hour, every minute, thousands of human beings tired of being unable to break the shackles on their desires for joy, weary of following the regular, permitted roads where they receive only blows, where they hear only insults, go off one fine day down forbidden paths, seeking what society cannot or will not give them. And they find in crime the piece of bread and share of happiness that every man here below has the right to dream of. The split is made, but whose fault is it?
And really, looking closely, one can’t quite grasp the moral difference separating honest, regular people whom we respect and forgive everything from these vagabonds of murder, these industrialists of vice whose ignominy revolts and disgusts us so: the same desires, the same passions, and almost the same acts repeat from the depths where they swarm to the heights where the human elite shines. Only the scenery changes.
When one reads a book like Édouard Conte’s, when one witnesses, as he makes us witness, all the sordidness through which love is cooked up in marriage agencies—sordidness moreover identical to that presiding over the union of two respectable hearts in good bourgeois families—we ought to be less proud of ourselves and show a bit more pity for life’s fallen.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 