Octave Mirbeau’s brilliant satirical essay reveals how a hilarious case of mistaken identity turned a Parisian philosophy professor into a rural peasant for all of history. A witty exploration of how errors become ‘facts’ and myths become truth.
Everyone who “writes for the papers” and elsewhere makes mistakes daily. I have made them, like everyone else – the devil knows how many. I don’t mind admitting it, though my case is rather more ridiculous: I was always acting in good faith. Among these errors, some were deplorable and still leave me with regrets; others bring back such jolly memories that I’m particularly pleased to recall them, and would be devastated not to have made them. Written errors have this wonderfully ironic and noble quality: it’s through them, later on, that terribly learned persons and armchair commentators permanently establish history. There is something truly consoling for the poet in thinking that historical traditions and such are nothing but an endless succession of enormous jokes or enormous deceptions – far from the lying archives and illusory paperwork, he follows the wandering whim of his dreams.
Now, something has happened to me from which I can draw both vanity and amusement. I too have, through an error so enormous it amounts to a colossal blunder, contributed to firmly establishing a rather curious point of literary history and definitively fixing the biography of a famous man who can’t protest, being dead. The error I speak of, which I’m now powerless to correct despite being its sole progenitor, has become – through natural selection and much sooner than I would have imagined – a certain, authentic, irrefutable document. Since 7th December, it’s received official and solemn consecration that ranks it among indisputable facts. It now has historical value; it’s entered posterity; subsequent protests and motivated corrections, however precise, won’t change a thing.
Today, it’s accepted by contemporary criticism and future psychology that M. Caro – for it’s M. Caro we are discussing – was a countryman who lived in a cottage and wore clogs. Whatever anyone says or does, the Brunetières of the future will be obliged to refer to this highly unexpected state of mind and draw the moral conclusions it implies when they wish to evoke the figure of the gallant professor who charmed beautiful women suffering from amorous philosophy – a figure that once appeared only against backgrounds of opulent plush and spiritualist shoulders in Paris’s most notorious salons.
I can perfectly see some twentieth-century exam candidate answering when asked “What do you know about Caro?” The candidate will say: “Caro (Marie-Elme), born in Poitiers, French peasant. Wore a rabbit-skin cap, cultivated beetroot, and poached eels in the River Eure.”
Figaro readers may perhaps remember an article I published here exactly a year ago, titled “The Philosopher’s House”. I slip in that timid “perhaps” because the article was, apparently, quite touching. I learned this later from a very sensitive elderly lady who had been quite moved by it. But allow me to start at the beginning and tell the story in all its touching detail.
One day, I was strolling in Les Damps, a village picturesquely situated at the mouth of the Eure. An important local man accompanied me. As we passed along the riverbank by a little house nestled in greenery, the important man stopped, contemplated the house with what seemed a melancholy, regretful gaze. Then, heaving a sigh, he said:
“There – that’s where M. Caro lived.”
At first I was rather intrigued. And I too looked at the house. It was venerable and charming, this rustic dwelling, with its little garden, old windows, old angular gable, old walls draped in ivy and climbing plants. It had such a fine air of inner peace, of family joy; there was such silence around it, such sweet solitude; it expressed, beneath its ancient stones, a life so naive, so Edenic, that my soul, suddenly touched, was won over to bucolic ecstasies. And to complete the picture, not far from the door, familiar and biblical, a goat tethered to a stake, all white, grazed the tall grass.
Despite myself, I found that the name Caro, pronounced in such a landscape, had a rather false ring to it.
The important man replied rather drily:
“What do you mean, which Caro? Are there so many Caros? Don’t you know M. Caro? M. Caro who was a philosophy professor, who spoke so well, and who was talked about so much in the Paris papers?”
“Oh yes, yes,” I corrected myself, “that Caro I know well… And that’s where he lived? You’re sure?”
“Am I sure? Well, that’s rich! We were friends… I saw him every day.”
He added, in a voice suddenly grown sad:
“He died some time ago, the poor dear gentleman… And it’s a great pity, I tell you… Because he was such a good man… and simple… and kind to everyone… There’s someone who wasn’t proud.”
At length, in prolix phrases repeated a hundred times, he cited admirable traits from M. Caro’s country existence… Apart from hours devoted to intellectual work, he liked to mix with the humble, the unfortunate… Often, on the riverbank, he would sit near a fisherman and for half-days chat with him about simple things, following the motionless float on the tranquil water… Or he would go through the fields, taking an interest in the crops, enquiring after the health of the cows, the prosperity of the apple trees… Or else, in shirtsleeves, his philosophical head covered with a broad rush hat all russet with sun, he would weed his garden and transplant lettuces, far, ah! so far from Feuerbach, Büchner, Darwin, Spencer, and their desolate, barbarous doctrines.
“He was only happy here, with us folk… He only felt at home in his little house…” the important man concluded. “And it was a bore for him when he had to go to Paris for his lectures… So he’d come back quick as you like… Poor M. Caro… I don’t know how he was seen in Paris… Parisians are such odd people… But here, with us, he left only regrets and memories that won’t fade soon.”
As the man spoke, the little house lit up for me with a new light, infinitely sweet and pure, and a new Caro, transfigured and magnificent, gradually revealed himself there – a Caro purified, amplified, sublimated by nature, a heroic and solitary Caro, resigned to the slanders of the wicked.
“Yes, that’s it,” I said to myself. “Now, thanks to this little house that cannot lie, I see him as he really was… a saint… Ah! how I see him… And what dreadful sadness life is… All men and things are the reverse of truth. Who knows? Don Juan was perhaps chaste.”
After becoming indignant about the lies of legends, I returned home prey to thoughts of excessive generosity, my mind full of grandiose and vague rehabilitation projects.
That very evening, under the spell of emotion, I wrote “The Philosopher’s House”. With each line, each word, my enthusiasm grew. In my exalted desire to vindicate M. Caro, I believe I well remember exceeding the bounds of poetry. And in such circumstances, God knows moderation is good. I heaped around M. Caro’s purified image the noblest and most varied landscapes. I haloed him with virgin forests, infinite horizons, mysterious ponds, pearly mists, thunderous lights. In turn I showed him ethereal, aerial in pale dawns, violent against setting suns, striding over harvests, dominating haystacks, or lost in the brown furrow. Better still, I made him a sort of rustic god, face smeared with earth, back bent, hands calloused – the anthropomorphic and living symbol of the Earth. It was admirable. The article appeared.
What an awakening after that dream! What a fall from the heights of my revelatory verbs!
The next day, I learned I had got the wrong Caro. It wasn’t M. Caro (Marie-Elme), it was M. Ludovic Carrau, also a philosophy professor whom I hadn’t noticed, who lived in the little house at Les Damps. It was for M. Ludovic Carrau that I had tuned my lyre to that ultra-high pitch of pantheistic and vengeful poetry. I immediately rushed to find my man and heaped harsh reproaches upon him. At first he wouldn’t accept the evidence.
“But we were friends. I’m telling you. Oh!”
I showed him the proof. It was devastating. Then the peasant’s face fell apart, and all pale, all grimacing, he stammered:
“It wasn’t him… It wasn’t the great, illustrious Caro… the one they talked about in Paris… Oh bloody hell… and me, one day I gave him a carp… What an idiot!”
You can imagine how ashamed I was of this error. For several days I led an anxious existence, dreading the probable mockery and malicious corrections that would have much wounded my pride. However, nothing unpleasant happened. Apart from a few very learned colleagues who slipped a discreet and courteous allusion to this involuntary mistake into their articles, everyone accepted this new dogma of M. Caro’s transubstantiation quite well. And I consoled myself by thinking, not without pride, that I had set future biographers of the author of The Idea of God on an unexplored path, fertile in moral reflections and psychological interpretations of inestimable interest.
These predictions have just been realised beyond my hopes. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting such prompt and especially such lofty testimony to give this recent error such a brilliant character of historical indelibility.
On 7th December, M. Jules Simon delivered, at the annual public session of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, a very fine speech on the life and works of M. Caro. I couldn’t have fallen into better hands. M. Jules Simon is the inevitable man for all good causes; and he is easily moved. One might even say that being moved is a permanent and natural function with him. With his customary spiritual grace, M. Jules Simon has given us an explanation for this tender-heartedness that’s not without irony: it’s that he presides over all the charitable, economic, moral, maternal, infantile, working-class, bourgeois, aristocratic and religious organisations of our time. It’s a career. You can see his tender feelings have plenty to occupy them; but he still has some left over for the other acts of life, which are most numerous and varied.
The eulogy of M. Caro was, for M. Jules Simon, an incomparable occasion to display himself in all the beauty of his tender feelings. He didn’t miss it. After being moved by the science of the spiritualist philosopher, M. Jules Simon was moved by the unknown virtues of the admirable private man that M. Caro was. And to give his thesis the authority of a convincing example, he spoke, with tears in his eyes, of the rural tastes of one whom lying legend represented to us as a haunter of salons and boudoirs. And he spoke these words, which I quote verbatim:
“Monsieur Caro spent his summers at Les Damps, amongst the villagers by whom he was loved and respected, in a house barely more ornate than theirs, but where he found the most absolute calm…”
So there it is, definitive: M. Caro was a countryman. He lived at Les Damps among the villagers. There’s no going back on it. M. Jules Simon and I can do nothing now. From now on there’s a force against us stronger than truth, and it’s called History.
And you know, all of History is like that.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 14 December 1890
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
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