Octave Mirbeau’s biting 1889 essay on how society scorns great artists like Barbey d’Aurevilly during their lifetime, only to worship them after death. Features a satirical portrait of art inspector Roger Ballu’s comical flip-flop on sculptor Auguste Rodin.
It took us eighty years to discover that M. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly was not merely a man of great talent, but a man of lofty character. We even patiently waited until he was dead—properly dead, dead without any chance of resurrection—before stating these two blazing, belated truths in any formal way. Everyone does him justice now—no danger in that anymore—except for two hack writers who take considerable liberties with the august departed and paint his portrait “for a laugh”. Mind you, these two I’m talking about had once been summed up by d’Aurevilly himself in one of those devastatingly picturesque phrases of his that left an indelible mark on their vanity. Still, we are witnessing a heartening spectacle. Throughout his entire life, M. d’Aurevilly was disputed, attacked, insulted, ridiculed—precisely because of that same talent, that same character for which he is praised now that he is no longer here to hear the praise. When he was alive, all they had grant him was eccentricity, a love of ostentatious display, outlandish opinions, impossible trousers, wayward literature, and fabulous cravats. When this lofty, disdainful spirit shut himself away in the ivory tower of unpolluted beliefs and dreams, they called it sulky bitterness, tasteless originality. What didn’t they say? And there you have it—in four words, a man of such proud genius, such solid moral fibre, such admirable renunciation, judged by stupidity and ignorance. A man who gave us the most complete, most unfailing example of an artist’s existence, resigned to the point of calmly accepting obscurity and poverty. Today, through a reversal that only death can explain, everyone’s competing to find the most oratorical enthusiasm for burying him. Everyone wants to have known him, admired him, loved him; everyone wants to have gathered from his own lips—his brazen lips—the best anecdotes, the most brilliant witticisms. For isn’t it with words almost always distorted, with generally feeble anecdotes, that contemporary reputations are forged? And each person, in this funereal scramble over an illustrious and maligned corpse, tears off a piece of his shroud to pin to their buttonhole as a flower of vanity. They monopolise him, want him all to themselves. It’s the eternal story. It inspires more disgust than anger.
And I think of M. Roger Ballu. In the destinies of great men, which nearly all resemble one another, there are these unexpected complications, these bizarre minglings of names, these obscure and subterranean evocations, fertile in surprises of unspeakable melancholy.
M. Roger Ballu inspects something—I don’t know what, he doesn’t know what himself, probably nothing—in the Fine Arts. Have you reflected on what’s profoundly comic, extraordinarily incoherent about the situation of a man whose duty on earth consists of inspecting the Fine Arts? To me, it has the same effect as those absurd occupations revealed to us in music-hall songs. It seems to me that whoever “inspects the Fine Arts” exercises a function as improbable as that of the gentleman who “collected droppings from carousel horses”, or that other chap who, “on hot days, walked his sister’s dog”. Every time I think that there really exist special civil servants who “inspect the Fine Arts”, I can’t help making these sad comparisons, these mysterious analogies.
In his capacity as inspector of Fine Arts, M. Roger Ballu was charged—I no longer remember on what occasion—with drafting a report on Auguste Rodin, our great sculptor. For not only do they inspect, these inspectors, but they also draft. They draft, the devil knows what… Auguste Rodin was then known only to a few friends. His name, sung in little reviews read exclusively by those who write them, hadn’t crossed the sacred portals of the mainstream press. There was no current opinion about his art, no ready-made judgement, no idiot’s guide for Fine Arts inspectors, the great critics being as completely ignorant of him as possible. About M. Cabanel, M. Falguière and M. Bonnat, there was no shortage of opinions, and of the most varied kind; M. Roger Ballu would have had only the embarrassment of choice. But this was specifically about Auguste Rodin and no one else. There lay the difficulty. Not a shadow, anywhere, of an expressed opinion—I mean an honest and considerable opinion, an opinion printed in several million copies. M. Roger Ballu found himself quite stuck, for he has an upright conscience, and besides, he wanted to express a sound opinion, administrative and bureaucratically motivated. His instinct guided him—I dare say it saved him. He denied Rodin; he denied him from top to bottom. With equal courage, he refused him any kind of talent whatsoever. Once launched on this path, he even disdained to allow himself the smallest hesitation, the slightest reservation by which to catch himself later, in case Rodin wasn’t as devoid of talent as M. Roger Ballu said. No, he explained that “it didn’t exist”. Auguste Rodin rose, grew. His name pierced the veil of obscurity that the academic plaster-botchers and submissive critics were striving to make thicker, more impenetrable. Despite them, and little by little, attention fixed itself on this powerful genius who brought new forms of beauty, who, perhaps the first, swelled matter with cerebral life, and forced marble, trembling and suffering, to cry out with unexpected passion. One could still fight him; it was no longer permitted to ignore him. They decorated him… Then M. Roger Ballu, forgetting his report, became inordinately agitated, enthusiastic and organising. He presided over banquets, delivered eloquent toasts, spoke of independence, of broken tradition, of modern vision, of the future. In good faith, he believed he had just discovered Rodin. Rodin belonged to him; he belonged to him alone. And as M. Roger Ballu is a good sort, as well as a generous inspector, he consented to give him to the world. If that gentle and great artist had been inclined to it, M. Roger Ballu would have paraded him through the streets, through the cities, saying: “Look. This is Auguste Rodin… And I am M. Roger Ballu… And Rodin is mine.”
As M. d’Aurevilly hadn’t been decorated, he didn’t encounter any Roger Ballu. It was death that took charge of playing the role of glory’s monopolist. Besides, he despised glory, that tart who jumps about, recruiting at random, on the pavements of muddy humanity, her one-night lovers, quickly fallen back—for the space of a rut—into the agonies of nothingness. He knew other, nobler pleasures; more faithful ones, for he lived his dream, not for today’s living, nor for tomorrow’s living, but for himself. His whole life was cradled by gentle phantoms that his imagination created, that solitude rendered, in a way, tangible to him, and that were happier for him than realities which, even under gold and purple, show hideous bleeding wounds. Finally, his last years were illuminated by the admirable devotion of a woman, Mlle Read, who had appointed herself his sister of charity, single-handedly replaced the vanished friends—and precious few remained faithful to him—and who, through pious graces, delicate care, elevated intelligence, sublime lies, was able to make his final days tranquil and his death gentle. Let’s not pity him.
Octave Mirbeau, L’Écho de Paris, 3 May 1889
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