Octave Mirbeau’s powerful 1891 tribute to Jean Lombard, author of The Agony and Byzantium, who died in poverty despite his literary genius. A scathing critique of how society treats its artists and a moving portrait of talent destroyed by indifference.
A powerful and honest writer, a spirit haunted by grand dreams and magnificent visions, one of those very rare souls in whom we placed our hopes—Jean Lombard, a name that rings with masculine strength—Jean Lombard, author of The Agony and Byzantium, is dead. He died in unspeakable poverty, leaving not enough for a coffin at home, not enough for a crust of bread for those who survive him. Faced with the heartbreaking destitution of this wretched household, where a woman weeps—an admirable creature of devotion and goodness—along with three charming little children whose gaze must be unbearable to meet, one’s heart clenches and tears come to the eyes. So it’s true then, that in our time—this age of proliferating newspapers, reviews, publications of every stripe that “welcome talent and make reputations”—in this age when the most useless Theuriet or the most insignificant Delpit can make a living from their trade, can grow rich on their nothingness, it’s actually true that a courageous man, a formidable, superior, pure artist can starve to death whilst the table is laid for mediocrities and jokers, and once gone, leave his loved ones—who lived solely on his tenderness—nothing but a legacy of misery and grief? Such tragedies must explode from time to time—and how many go unnoticed—to make these frightful things, less rare than we think, seem credible and possible.
Paul Margueritte, who is not merely a novelist of great and delicate talent but a generous soul vibrating to all noble causes, and Édouard Petit, one of Jean Lombard’s dearest and most faithful friends, have made an eloquent, heartrending appeal to public charity on behalf of these four desperate beings, suddenly plunged into the darkness of an uncertain future—the first in L’Écho de Paris, the second in Le Mot d’ordre. This appeal has found an echo. A relatively substantial sum is now available to meet the most pressing needs; the Ministry of Public Instruction has spontaneously hastened to allocate five hundred francs in aid. Other assistance is promised, expected. That’s all well and good for today. But tomorrow—that dark tomorrow—what will it bring? One cannot pose this question without a deep shudder. Yet we mustn’t despair. As Édouard Petit said, “Lombard was one of us; his family shall henceforth be one of us.” It’s simply not possible that a chosen being, in whom burned one of the finest flames of thought of our time, should be treated worse by public charity than the lowliest actor who, grown old, need only extend his hand to have it filled with gold. It’s not possible that we cannot find a way to stir that charity which has worked so many miracles—often misplaced—on behalf of a sacred misfortune, one truly worthy of all respect and all pity.
Of working-class origin, Jean Lombard was entirely self-made. I want to note in passing a truth: the further we go, the more everything that emerges from universal mediocrity, everything that carries a force within itself—social force, thinking force, artistic force—comes from the people. It’s among the people, still virgin, forever persecuted, that the ancient vigours of our race are preserved and developed. Our bourgeoisie, exhausted by luxury, devoured by enervating appetites, gnawed by scepticism, produces only feeble offspring unfit for work and effort. Jean Lombard had retained from his proletarian origins—refined by prodigious intellectual labour, by a fierce desire to know, by tormenting faculties of feeling—he had retained the square faith of the people, their robust enthusiasm, their brutal stubbornness, their simplistic certainty in the future of beneficent justice. This is what allowed him to live his life—too short, alas, in years, too long and too heavy in the struggles where he constantly thrashed about. I wish all who read this article could read one of Jean Lombard’s books, The Agony, for instance. Some might possibly be shocked by that barbarous, polychrome style, forged from technical words taken from antiquity’s glossaries—though this style truly has great bearing, magnificent sonorities, a clash of colliding armour, of racing chariots, and something like the very smell—a strong smell of blood and wild beasts—of the ages it recounts. But it’s impossible that anyone wouldn’t be struck by the power of human vision, of historical hallucination, with which this plebeian brain conceived and reproduced the rotten civilisations of Rome under Heliogabalus and of Byzantium. It’s very grand and splendidly monotonous. Processions of men pass and repass in convulsive gestures of ovation, in beautiful martial attitudes of military parades, in troubling cortèges of infamous religions, in the breathless races of riots. How can one give, through words, an idea of something so formidable? It’s frenzied and gloomy; an entire people of shadows raised from nothingness.
The Agony is Rome invaded, polluted by Asia’s voluptuous and ferocious cults; it’s the obscene, triumphal entry of beautiful Heliogabalus, mitred in gold, cheeks rouged with vermillion, surrounded by his Syrian priests, his eunuchs, his naked women, his catamites; it’s the worship of the Black Stone, the unisexual icon, the giant phallus enthroned in palaces and temples, with astonishing prostitutions of empresses and princesses; all the frenzied rut of a delirious people, all a colossal, crashing, ironic madness sinking into massacres of Christians and the burning of Rome’s quarters.
Byzantium, which forms with The Agony the panel of a diptych with analogous developments and an identical catastrophe for a conclusion—but with a very chaste whole, not at all erotic as in The Agony—pits the Greens against the Blues under Constantine Copronymus, the loves of the child Oupravda, whom a conspiracy destines for the throne and whose eyes the Basileus has put out upon discovering the plot. There, all the resounding madness of the circus, all the gilded and bejewelled soldiers of the Empire, and seven quite extraordinary blind men of royal blood, proscribed candidates for the throne, who grope throughout the book with their vague hands, vainly disputing their pre-eminences. But Lombard’s books are so vast, so complex, that I couldn’t possibly explain them in a brief newspaper article. I can only give a superficial and quite inadequate impression. One must read them; above all, one mustn’t imagine that the writer limits himself to descriptions of temples, architecture, ceremonies, to evocations of strange rites and accursed customs. Certainly, Jean Lombard is a scholar: he knows down to the smallest trinket adorning the corner of a rich Roman’s triclinium; he knows the very name of the precious fabric that barely conceals the frenzied nudity of women and ephebes; he spares you no document, no characteristic reconstruction. But within the scholar who curiously relives an entire plastic epoch, there’s a profound thinker who observes and explains human passions in history’s uncertain distance, and who knows how to make them contemporary beneath the golden armour of Byzantine soldiers and the trailing robes of Asiatic priests of the sun, worshippers of the Black Stone. And how one regrets that this visionary who reads secrets on the effaced stones of temples as well as in men’s hearts couldn’t finish The Hungry Man, that social book where he would have fixed, in terrible colours, the history of our epoch as he fixed that of decadent Rome.
One can say that Lombard died of poverty and the difficulties of starting out. He suffered from gastritis; a chill came and carried him off. He was worn down by struggle, by work; the body too frail for so ardent a soul couldn’t withstand the assault of illness. Very proud, very dignified, never complaining, sustained by hopes constantly deferred, he had taken refuge in Charenton, in a poor fourth-floor flat, seeing almost no one. There he worked like a labourer, for he was terribly industrious. Everything suited him: library work, specialised articles on science or travel. He took whatever came along because one had to live. His brain contained a boiling, smoky encyclopaedia. He was the type of the eighteenth-century man of letters. Amidst these obstinate, varied tasks that were his bread and his family’s, never a compromise. He kept himself pure, intact, believing. Faced with critics’ indifference, with the relative and insufficient success of The Agony and Byzantium, he would say with good humour tinged with melancholy: “Bah… I’ll work even harder… and surely one day they’ll have to recognise the sincerity of my efforts and my worth… Because after all, I’m not just anyone.” Alas! The poor fellow died too soon.
What sad literary conditions today’s writers struggle in, amidst abject criticism that only stupidity delights, and an indifferent public that doesn’t know where to turn and lets itself be guided by it. And then there are too many writers. The mêlée is packed, hard, selfish. You can’t hear the cries of pain, the desperate calls covered by everyone’s howling. Every man for himself. We don’t know each other; we haven’t the time. We only have time to think of our interests, our publicity, our lives, so contested. Too many books appear, and the weeds that no one pulls, freely casting their proliferating seeds to every wind, choke the beautiful flowers growing in their deadly shade.
What I would also like to say is something about Madame Lombard’s very noble bearing. This is more intimate, and if I dare speak of it, it’s because I hope to awaken pity for this admirable creature in good souls. Madame Lombard, who is of the people, has to a very high degree respect for her husband’s “genius”—for her, you see, the word isn’t misplaced. In her distress, she doesn’t think of herself, she thinks only of him. Her sole fear is that Lombard’s name will disappear, that with the shovelfuls of earth they will have thrown oblivion onto the grave of the one she was so proud of, whom she loved like a saint, like a God. This woman, uncultured and devoted, feels that her husband’s talent, though she didn’t understand it, was something great, greater even than genius… Do you know anything more touching?
Octave Mirbeau, L’Écho de Paris, 28 July 1891
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