Mirbeau celebrates Élémir Bourges’s fierce originality and literary courage—defying theatrical cronyism, wielding stylistic brilliance, and pursuing the ideal in an age of vanity and conformity.
Monsieur Élémir Bourges has just published a new novel with the Librairie Parisienne. Under the Axe is a terrible episode from the Vendean chouannerie. It’s not lacking in interest, and the style has a learned colour to it—sometimes the colour of blood, like the era it chronicles. There is a savage power in these pages that makes one shiver, admirable landscapes painted with the knife—one might say with the cleaver. I was particularly struck by a battle between chouans and blues fought in a village church, which recalls, in its fever and movement, the famous battle of the millers from The Chevalier Des Touches by our illustrious master Barbey d’Aurevilly.
Monsieur Bourges won’t take it amiss if I say that despite all the qualities of style and invention in his latest work, I prefer the magnificent novel he published last year, The Twilight of the Gods, which, like all beautiful books and all works of pure art, has blossomed quietly in the night. This sombre and vengeful study of the end of a royal race, crumbling in blood, in mud, in pus, was Monsieur Bourges’s literary debut, and one does not forgive the isolated beginner, carried by no boulevard camaraderie, for rising up with a masterpiece—and The Twilight of the Gods was almost that.
Monsieur Alphonse Daudet had treated the same subject in his Kings in Exile, with his affectations of a jew’s-harp player and his poor little vision of a troubadour turned bohemian, where what was needed was the great soaring of the poet and the stern justice of the historian. He must have pulled quite an ugly face reading Monsieur Bourges’s book, which showed him how much talent could expand even the largest subjects. For it is Monsieur Bourges who truly wrote the real Kings in Exile, and showed them to us not through newspaper gossip and the petty café anecdotes of Parisian life, but through the appalling collapses of overworked races rotting away, of stolen fortunes disintegrating, of vices and crimes long unpunished that finally receive their punishment—all the more terrible for having been so long awaited. And see the justice of things: Kings in Exile achieved great success, and The Twilight of the Gods was scarcely read.
Monsieur Élémir Bourges, who is one of the best chroniclers at Le Gaulois, wrote the dramatic column for two years at Le Parlement, which, having more dignity than circulation, disappeared one fine morning. It was the only newspaper sufficiently independent of the theatre world, and sufficiently ungreedy for free tickets, to ensure its critic complete freedom in his assessments. It’s unlikely that any paper, Parisian or otherwise, political or literary, would have the courage to attract Monsieur Bourges and thereby attract the hatred of directors and the ill-will of general secretaries. For Monsieur Bourges is not the ignorant and submissive critic that the perversion of modern theatre has created; he is the indignant and learned critic, such as solid literary education and self-respect produce. I would swear that Monsieur Bourges has never set foot in the wings of a theatre, that he knows neither an actor, nor a secretary, nor a director, nor a librettist, that he has never courted any star of operetta, drama or comedy, and that he disdains to appear at critics’ banquets—those banquets presided over by Monsieur Auguste Vitu, at which the late Scribe must smile down from the heavens, his final dwelling place. I imagine he pushes his professional ignorance to the point of remaining unknown to ushers and ticket collectors, and that one never sees him mingled with the right-thinking groups where Monsieur Sarcey holds court and above which float like a banner the hair of Monsieur Lapommeraye. And then, I’m told he had, at opening nights, a way of being and listening, tranquil and solitary, that lacked the most elementary Parisian taste and could not, consequently, place him among the ranks of Tout-Paris.
Finally, he has the rare and curious merit of thinking for himself, of thinking correctly, of knowing a great deal and of writing what he thinks and knows in a brilliant, witty and elevated style.
I will therefore surprise no one by saying that Monsieur Bourges professes the most sovereign contempt for today’s theatre. He is without pity for the alienist imaginings of the fashionable dramatist, and commercial successes mean nothing to him. No one shows better than he the frightening emptiness of these applauded works and their incurable imbecility. He knows how to dismantle, with the art of a skilled craftsman, all these paltry plays whose childish and rusty mechanism grinds horribly under his pitiless fingers. From fetishes adored by the crowd, he makes a little heap of dust, and he tears from their pedestals the glorious statues erected by the omnipotence of publicity to the omnipotence of stupidity.
Since he used only good and solid arguments for his work of healthy demolition; since mysterious letters, discreet warnings, visits and recommendations produced no effect on him, people had taken to saying, to console themselves a little: “He doesn’t count.” And they didn’t invite him to hundredth-performance suppers. It’s only fair—from the moment Sarcey counts, Monsieur Bourges cannot count. He doesn’t count because he has never wanted to prostitute his talent in complaisances and camaraderies, because he works hard and ignores intrigue, because he knows how to forget Augier with Shakespeare, Monsieur About with Voltaire, Monsieur Dumas with Beaumarchais, because, in this age when one loves nothing but money and the vanities it procures for its courtiers, Monsieur Bourges loves literature, the delicate and intimate pleasures it gives to its chosen ones. Stendhal, showing Julien Sorel among the seminarists, his study companions, says: “He could not please, he was too different.” Then, later: “I have lived enough to know that difference engenders hatred.”
Monsieur Élémir Bourges, with his solid knowledge, his robust and subtle judgment, with his passion for the ideal and his pride, among his colleagues, is too different. I don’t know if, from the heights of their ignorance and bad faith, his colleagues hate him, but they certainly disdain him. And it is this disdain above all that makes us love him. Monsieur Bourges will console himself by giving, each week, to Le Gaulois, his brilliant chronicle, and by publishing, next year, a new novel which he is completing at this moment, and which all those who know him affirm to be a book of the strangest and most beautiful talent.
Octave Mirbeau, La France, 7 March 1885
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Léon Hennique Novel 