A sharp, ironic essay by Octave Mirbeau defending philosopher Elme-Marie Caro against Parisian gossip. Through the lens of Caro’s modest country house in Les Damps, Mirbeau exposes the malicious myths spread by society journalists about this simple, kind-hearted thinker.
“Never assume that when a crowd chases a man, pelting him with stones, he must be a thief.” —
Jean Wier
The little village of Les Damps sits near where the Eure meets the Seine, on an arm of the river that cuts an island off from the main waterway—an island thick with tall poplars and abandoned osier beds, now overrun by a riot of vegetation. The grasses have grown tree-like, the wildflowers and river plants and creeping vines have proliferated so madly, have woven and knotted and tangled themselves together so thoroughly, that the island has become quite impenetrable in places. It gives one the impression of virgin territory, a mysterious jungle, a sort of savage Eden whose fierce, raw perfumes assault the village houses whenever the north wind blows. From the main channel of the Seine, hidden by the island’s bulk, you can only see the flat right bank, bare and exposing here and there the whitish wounds of chalky soil. Beyond that, the plain stretches out in peaceful squares of cultivation, dotted with clusters of aspens and solitary apple trees, rolling on to gentle hills with orange-tinted slopes crowned by forests, whose dark mass softens and veils itself in pale blue, seeming to vaporise with the mist that rises morning and evening from the water meadows and riverbanks. Villages scatter cheerfully along the foot of the hills in a single line, their red roofs and white façades blazing amongst the muted greenery. A bit to the right, the plain widens, the hills rise into mountains and suddenly part to reveal a distant space, all blue and pink—a deep valley vista that seems as shifting and ethereal as clouds. The view of this horizon is delightful to behold; it has an infinite sweetness, an opaline, exquisite light made all the more exquisite by the harshness of the foreground and the complexity of its tangled arabesques. In autumn, fog wanders through with its fleeting dreams and shifting mysteries wrapped in fine silver veils.
And there’s a calm that penetrates you, relaxes you, descends into the very depths of your soul to extinguish even the most carefully tended sufferings.
At the other end of the island, between the caprices of vegetation, through the trembling poplar leaves, you can watch the heavy tugboats glide past with their long trains of barges, vermillion hulls blazing in the sun. They glide between banks where no water shows, glide fantastically like fragments of burning buildings, like incoherent, truncated thoughts drifting one after another on the current of daydreams. And in the great silence that’s everywhere, nothing stirs in your mind any notion of human activity. The plain is too vast: man loses himself in it, blends with the earth; and on the near bank, good folk sprout from the grass, motionless as standing stones, engaged in vague and pointless fishing, whilst the cows, pink with sunlight, graze and stretch their drooling muzzles towards the water that slowly rolls the luminous abysses of reflected sky.
It was to this village of Les Damps that Monsieur Caro came each year for the six months of fine weather, happy to find solitude and silence in this chosen landscape. His neat little rustic house borders the road, facing a sort of esplanade carpeted with short, thick grass that runs down to the river and serves as the village square. A philosopher’s house—and not that of a society philosopher, as the Parisian gossip columns have so often portrayed M. Caro, preaching love amidst shimmering fabrics and lost amongst bare shoulders—but of a philosopher hungry for peace, in love with nature, a stranger to the miseries of urban vanities and base drawing-room glories.
With its little garden, its modest flowers mixed with vegetables, its absence of heavy luxury, its cheerful country air, its windows with their friendly gaze, and its old walls smiling through their green beard, this house moves me like an injustice. To see it so serene, so deliberately lost in this corner of countryside where the murmurs of Paris no longer reach—it saddens me. Between the legend of the man who lived here and the house itself, there’s an obvious contradiction. Either the house is lying, or the legend is false. And I feel the house doesn’t lie. Just passing by, you can sense that the souls who animated it must have been simple, gentle and good, and behind these walls one easily reconstructs a whole healthy life made of pure work and modest happiness. All around are peasants’ dwellings, scarcely less white and scarcely less luxurious-looking than this one. It distinguishes itself from its neighbours by the decorated whiteness of its curtains, by the fancy of its leaded windows, and by small embellishments that please the taste and vigilance of knowing housewives. Opposite, the esplanade unfolds; eel traps dry in the sun; children play in the grass and the barges drift gently at the end of their moorings on the river’s surface, which a light west wind is currently ruffling.
Try as I might to find, on this house and its surroundings, some sign that would reveal the man to whom the spite of newspapers, combined with salon gossip, attributed so many ridiculous traits and weaknesses, so much degrading complacency, so many petty curiosities—I find them nowhere. This shepherd of little plush souls, this gallant confessor of little hearts in padded satin, who dispensed his philosophy in vials of intimate perfume and on the pink skin of society dolls, who let his literature fall from the height of a powder puff, this cavalier servant of perverse frivolities, this plaything of aristocratic idleness—I search for his trace in vain.
I never knew M. Caro; never heard him speak nor met him in a salon; I can barely recall his features glimpsed for a second, from afar, in a crowd. I know him only through his works, whose philosophical spirit and literary tendencies I don’t care for, but which sometimes, amidst their superficial graces, charm me with real qualities of elegance and accents of genuine tenderness. Certainly, M. Caro was neither a great thinker nor a genius writer. With his doctrine of eclecticism that allowed him to deny nothing and affirm nothing, he knew neither the creative agonies of doubt nor the sublime conflagrations of faith. But all things considered, he was a distinguished mind, a tireless worker, worth less than the reputation his friends made for him, and better than the one his adversaries left him. Perhaps I’m under the purely physical influence of the mirage that things project, through sensibility, into the realm of the mind: perhaps this little house awakens inappropriate sentiments in me. But if it’s true that beings are explained by the things they loved, the legend dissipates at this tranquil threshold, wide open to nature’s fortifying joys. And the vines that run along the walls in rustic embroideries, and the trees that sway their golden harvest in the breeze, tell me how slandered was the man who chose this sage’s retreat to live the longest hours of his life and to be happy.
Returning from my walk along the river, I met an old fellow from the village and questioned him.
“Yes, sir,” he told me, “the day M. Caro died was a very sad day here. He was simple, kind, spoke to everyone, got involved in our little affairs to give practical advice. And we loved him very much because we knew it wasn’t for politics that he did it. Up at dawn, it was a pleasure to see him stride through the countryside, walk along the river, looking so happy to be here. Then he’d go back in and write all day. We’d see him again before dinner. He’d chat with the fishermen, sit on the bank. I’ve never seen a man less proud, and yet he had a superb position in Paris, so they said. Well, despite that, you felt at ease with him, you were happy to talk to him, because, you see, you could feel he was a good man. I’ve known some of those gentlemen… and merchants from Elbeuf, rich as Croesus and who dazzled everyone… and magistrates from Paris, and others… No, they weren’t M. Caro. And I’ll tell you… we’re not without reading the papers sometimes… and we saw they said this and that about M. Caro… rubbish, lies, that’s what… Those who wrote such things, in my opinion, they didn’t know him.”
But do we ever know the best-known men, especially nowadays when talents, consciences, and characters are increasingly delivered into the heavy hands of reporters, who are busy preparing for us a history more extraordinary than Father Loriquet’s?
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 