A biting satire by Octave Mirbeau (1887) skewering Parisian contempt for provincial France. This sharp social critique exposes the absurd snobbery of Belle Époque boulevardiers who viewed anyone outside Paris as sub-human.
To hear our illustrious columnists tell it—and even those young chaps who aspire to join their ranks whilst sipping their twilight absinthes at Tortoni’s—there exist but two breeds of men in this universe, breeds as perfectly distinct and diametrically opposed as you could imagine: the Parisians, those marvellous creatures adorned with every virtue of the heart and every grace of the mind, and the provincials, those brutes who rather resemble marmots hibernating for six-month stretches in their burrows, or perhaps hedgehogs rolled into balls beneath heaps of dried leaves. When they wish to mark someone with irredeemable contempt, they pronounce with an air of supreme impertinence and priestly disgust: “Ugh! He’s a provincial.” And there you have it—a man utterly ruined in the eyes of the boulevardiers. One might easily enough expunge a conviction for theft; one never washes clean the stain of provincialism. It’s an indelible blemish. Now, we mustn’t forget that France contains more than thirty-four million people thus indelibly blemished—a moral situation that must delight the foreigner, as those grave writers who daily dissect European affairs are fond of saying.
This contempt and this fearsome ethnographic division we owe to one M. Nestor Roqueplan, who remains a deity in vaudevillian circles. This M. Nestor Roqueplan, whom they always trot out in their witty anecdotes as the very pinnacle of intellectual refinement, the passionate, brilliant, and charming virtuoso of scepticism, was a true believer in the Parisian. Through distilling his philosophy, he had discovered some mysterious substance that transformed the Parisian into an exceptional being, which he peddled to gawpers in perfume bottles labelled “Parisine”—a cure for provincialism. For M. Nestor Roqueplan, beyond Paris and its parisine—men, beasts, and things—nothing existed. Or if it did exist, it languished in such an obscure, embryonic state of being that one could confidently assert it didn’t exist at all. When he encountered a friend, he would ask: “Do you know anything stupider than a chestnut tree?” And the friend, usually M. Gustave Claudin, would toddle off, crushed by such prodigious wit, proclaiming to all the winds of journalism: “Ah! That Roqueplan, what a genius!” M. Roqueplan might have wished to vary the jest by including other trees, but the chestnut was the only one whose name he knew—probably because of that famous one on the 20th of March, which so tickled the chroniclers of that era, who are, mercifully, the chroniclers of our own. Perhaps he also believed chestnuts grew pre-roasted on the Auvergnats’ perforated metal plates—he believed so many things, this sceptic. Twice he was forced to leave Paris, and he was so irritated, so wounded, so outraged in his superiority and his made-up Parisian elegance by the odious sight of trees that weren’t zinc, flowers that weren’t paper, seas that weren’t green percale, harvests and horizons that weren’t painted in distemper on canvas rolls, that he began railing against nature, riddling it with feeble sarcasms, treating it like some old actress who had lost her appeal in the stalls. Through these practices, which reveal more naivety than perversity, he gained a reputation that endures to this day.
M. Nestor Roqueplan produced many disciples. Most are excessively notorious folk—some even excessively glorious—who lead public opinion and public taste by the hand, or by the nose, or by whatever appendage suits. As always happens, the pupils outdo their master, and one must admit, Roqueplan has been thoroughly surpassed. It’s fascinating to see how these observers of life understand the provinces and provincials. The portrait they paint of the latter and the tableau they create of the former are truly bitter.
The provinces are a sort of wasteland, swampy here, stony there, across whose surface nothing can be distinguished at first glance. It appears uninhabited. A death-wind has blown across this wretched place—unless, plausible hypothesis, Life herself, weary from creating so many marvels in Paris, simply stopped her work and refused to cross this dreary expanse, for Life is far too Parisian for that. Above, the sky hangs heavy, the air oppressive and unwholesome; miasmas exhale from everywhere. Scarcely has he taken a few steps on this accursed soil, in this pestilent atmosphere, than the wittiest, gayest Parisian feels himself growing stupid and morose. The stupid Parisian… Yes, the provinces have achieved this seemingly impossible result. They have produced others still more frightening. I know one writer, quite illustrious, who came to the provinces to write a virtuous novel that would sell over a hundred thousand copies; the writer had to abandon this chimera. Provincialism—that venomous substance—immediately invades the Parisian, atrophies him, lays him low. His brilliant faculties become paralysed, his brain empties of all the delicate things that adorned it. And there he is, reduced to some unconscious larva. In vain he tries to recall who originally played Menelaus in La Belle Hélène—he cannot. Only through the most painful efforts does he glimpse, like a flickering light, Christian in La Grande-Duchesse, and the great figure of Paulus returns to him, still apotheotic but uncertain and blurred. Yet he advances through this desolation. Nowhere any trace of life, not the slightest gas-lamp cord announcing the five-hundredth performance of some fashionable operetta. He can no longer breathe, he is suffocating; he realises that no poet could, in this uninhabitable milieu, rhyme even the smallest music-hall ditty. And melancholically, he begins to dream of Paris. Alas! It’s the delicious hour when one sees M. Édouard Philippe passing on the boulevards. Ah! What nostalgia… Enthusiastic crowds rush towards chasms of light, eager to fortify themselves with M. Albin Valabrègue’s generous marrow. And he hears musical murmurs sweeter to the ear than celestial harmonies; these are the critics and ministers, deputies and dandies, bankers and scholars, poets and great ladies, and schoolboys too, and beggars, and maîtres d’hôtel, and concierges, two million souls in all, debating whether Audran is worth Varney and whether Varney is worth Lacôme.
He continues advancing, and finally perceives, stretched upon the ground, motionless, bizarre and glutinous forms that vaguely recall the human shape. He examines them with disgust, lifts them with his fingertips, grimacing. What is this?… Some unknown beast? An aborted human germ, or the triumph of the mollusc before the definitive reign of the Parisian? Does it speak? Does it eat?… He sees, at the edge of a hole that probably serves as this repulsive thing’s mouth, greenish drool, like that which hangs from ruminants’ muzzles.
“Who are you?” asks the Parisian.
“Alas! As you see,” replies the thing… “I am the provincial.”
“But why are you lying there like that?”
“What would you have me do?… I have no theatre to attend… Never has the divine light that radiates from Burani’s brow penetrated my poor brain… So I sleep and I graze…”
“Why don’t you work?”
“At what?… We have nothing here to work with… Ah! If only Brasseur would come to us, if we could just have Lassouche or Grassot…”
“Grassot?… But he’s dead.”
“You see?… We know nothing, we provincials… We’re doomed to eternal ignorance… Here lies the kingdom of darkness.”
“But surely there are factories in the provinces, earth to till, commerce to attempt?… Can’t you be a doctor, a notary, a landowner, a judge, a poet, a magistrate?…”
“In the provinces, there’s nothing… And we can be nothing… Let me sleep.”
“But you could at least look at what’s around you…”
“Look at what? Are there trees, flowers, horizons?… There’s nothing, I tell you… Let me graze the earth… And go away… For the air is poisonous to those who venture here… In a day, you’d be like me… Return to Paris… The theatres have reopened…”
“And if you had theatres, like back there, you’d be regenerated; life would bloom in you again.”
“Well, I suppose so, since that’s what Parisians say.”
“Well then, wait, poor devil… Be patient a few days more… I’ll send you Coquelin.”
Octave Mirbeau, Le Gaulois, 20 October 1887
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
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