Mirbeau denounces publicity as literature’s ruin—mocking its grotesque theatrics, cynical self-promotion, and cronyism—while celebrating silent artistic integrity, forgotten virtues, and the enduring honour of true creators.
As soon as the news of M. Jean Richepin’s madness spread along the boulevard, everyone exclaimed with a knowing smile: “That Richepin, what a sly one.” It didn’t occur to anyone—not even those unfamiliar with his calculating, cold nature—that M. Jean Richepin might actually be mad, and everyone thought instead that it was M. Richepin himself who, with an accomplice—the poet Ponchon, perhaps—was spreading this rumour of his sudden madness through the cafés. People especially admired the very ingenious, entirely novel staging of this gripping drama, as if directed by M. Duquesnel: the Trappists refusing to open their cloister doors to the author of Blasphèmes, the wretched wife setting off in pursuit of the desperate man, and he, filth on his body and revolt in his soul, plunging into the desert—that mysterious desert from which none return, where we were already picturing him beloved by panthers, taming lions, and rousing wandering tribes.
“What a superb spectacle!” cried a young playwright, downing his third absinthe. “I can see it. All that’s left is to write it… And what sets! The prologue takes place… at Le Havre, at Sainte-Adresse… Violent, breathless, passionate… Ah! The magnificent scenes, the terrible roars… and the knife thrusts, and blood… Then the sea, the furious sea, breaking and rumbling; at the stern of a boat fleeing under full sail, Richepin standing in the storm, fist raised against heaven, while on the jetty a woman in black faints into the arms of Mme Guérard, who pats her hands and says: ‘We’ll find him, madame.’ Now it’s the desert, all red… Tufts of alfa grass, a palm tree, a camel, an ostrich… The woman in black, accompanied by Mme Guérard and M. Fernand Xau, a reporter whom we’ll make very witty, as befits, enters exhausted. She sits on the burning sand and laments. M. Fernand Xau, while preparing the evening meal, complains bitterly that there are neither cafés nor telegraph offices in the desert and launches into merry jokes about the backwardness of these incompletely civilised countries. Suddenly we hear a roar; two eyes gleam in the shadows. It’s the prowling, hungry lion. He is about to pounce on the unfortunate women when an Arab horseman, splendidly dressed, arrives, dismounts, and with fierce gestures makes the king of the desert retreat, who lies down, crawls, and defeated, comes to lick the horseman’s feet. This horseman—you have recognised him—is Richepin. I’ll skip a thousand thrilling twists: the scene with the two women, or three, for the wife has also gone searching for her husband… You understand, I’m synthesising in these two roles the struggle between good and evil, and I have found admirable effects… Finally, in the third act, Richepin, having become something like the Mahdi, has raised all Muslims against his homeland. He dies killed in battle by Ponchon, now a captain of African chasseurs in whom patriotism triumphs over friendship. You can see the tableau: Richepin on a heap of corpses; at his feet, the woman in black, dagger in her heart… and near her, weeping, Mme Guérard and M. Fernand Xau; Ponchon in the background, waving the tricolour and crying: ‘Long live France!’ and finally, as apotheosis, the wife ascending to heaven, supported by Hope and Resignation with wings spread…”
No one was surprised or indignant. They summed up the adventure with the indulgent boulevard formula used for all the puffery and nonsense of our time: “That’s a good one.” Then they expressed the idea that M. Richepin had written a book or finished a play: “He’s making his comeback, that lad.” As one might say: “One must live.” It seemed perfectly natural that after a few days’ silence, a man of Richepin’s stature should return to us, not simply, but with a prodigious story that wrapped his name in something like scandal and circus glory, giving his publisher the chance to sell a few more editions. What surprises people today is that an author, to publicise his book and ensure its success, doesn’t go as far as theft and murder.
M. Richepin’s case—though the most sensational—isn’t isolated, unfortunately. It’s the case of almost all writers of the moment. Each has his publicity method, his little personal agency, his tricks for which he doubtless takes out patents; formidable competition for the known agencies that pay their licences. One—as if he needed these little periodic advertisements—writes every week in the papers that vile brigands are usurping his name to dupe people in provincial hotels, spa casinos, even shady establishments. There are precise details all to his advantage, anecdotes that make one dream, threats that give a bold and terrible idea of the writer. Appeals go out to the Public Prosecutor, to police commissioners; examining magistrates are set on edge, and in the end nothing is found. All eighty-six departments will thus be called upon. Naturally, local papers seize on the question, discuss it, throw “remarkable, illustrious, genius” at the author’s head. The result is increased sales of his books, which was the point. Another makes all hearts pity his marital misfortunes. Stories rain down, heartbreaking and risqué, exciting unhealthy curiosities and pity to the highest degree, bringing desire and tears. Others recall their duels, their bankruptcies, their lumps; they go rummaging through their lives to find something ridiculous, or shameful, or filthy, or brilliant, and deliver it all as fodder to the public’s voracity. Lie or truth, little they care, as long as people talk, as long as they write, as long as the morning paper carries to more than a hundred thousand readers their heroism or infamy, dancing atop their name publicity’s rabid cancan.
So here we are in this century of Advertising. Talent is nothing now, art doesn’t count, genius remains earthbound, powerless, crawling sadly on the stumps of its clipped wings, unless it’s paraded through the streets by clowns, dressed up in grotesque costumes like a redcoat. This is where journalism has led us, with its cronyism and its counters open to all, counters and cronyism that make wretched hawkers of men of letters and artists and transform literature into a fairground booth, in front of which Bobèches grimace with slaps and kicks in the arse to better attract the crowd.
But everything down here serves some consoling purpose; everything marches pitilessly toward a moral and definite goal. Men may be cowardly and things ugly: beyond the cries, the blasphemies, above the twisted mouths, through the convulsed fists, rises radiantly this triumph of eternal Beauty. The shameless publicity of bad books makes the beauty of good books even more precious to us. Doubtless it violently unveils the sordidness of a factitious world created by petty contemporary journalism that runs from editorial offices to gambling-den green baize and often manages to impose itself thanks to some people’s corruption, others’ paid complicity, everyone’s immoral and cowardly cronyism. But is it an evil that people who have stolen the public’s respect and consideration, who often have no talent and never any conscience, receive from time-to-time splashes of this mud they have kneaded with their own hands? And then, beside the underground lives that Parisian events suddenly throw into their brutal spotlight; beside the little statuettes of false great men modelled on café tables between two absinthes and two short stories, how they also make us better see and cherish those silent, dignified existences entirely devoted to work and entirely dedicated to letters, far from noise, far from publicity, in a resigned and sublime obscurity, in an ardent dream of ideal pursued and attained.
Two men, two writers, two admirable artists, M. Barbey d’Aurevilly and M. Leconte de Lisle, have given us a great example and a good lesson in these times of shopkeeper compromises when everyone—the strong and the weak, the illustrious and the obscure—is afflicted with this incurable and terrible leprosy: publicity. We have never seen them running about town begging for praise, flattering this one, caressing that one, descending to those permitted little cowardices that are nevertheless so well protected by the world’s indulgence. Always amid the hatred of imbeciles and the mockery of the impotent, they have kept intact the honour of the book, which is the finest and rarest virtue of the man of letters. They have thrown their works into battle armed only with their genius and their pride. And if sometimes they have received wounds, they are glorious wounds that cover them with immortality. They are great through their works because they are strong and superb; they will be greater still because they have respected them and made others respect them.
Don’t you think that if they had, like the others, compromised their dignity, made ingenious bows to merchants of ephemeral fame, addressed lying smiles to traffickers in human brains, don’t you think they would be famous instead of remaining almost obscure, rich instead of remaining almost poor? But publicity passes as quickly as the reputations it raises, and soon grass and moss invade the monuments it’s built—abandoned tombs. Who will speak of the Dumases and Daudets? Who will even know their names? While Leconte de Lisle and Barbey d’Aurevilly will find, as the centuries age and disappear, more glory, more youth, and more life.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Gaulois, 8 December 1884
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Léon Hennique Novel 