Sebastien Roch (Dedalus European Classics) Read online

  However, it was not as easy as he had at first supposed, and his self-respect was put to some harsh tests. The Reverend Fathers, at the height of their popularity and obliged to enlarge their premises every vacation, proved very severe in their choice of students and rather fussy. In theory, they only took as boarders the sons of the nobility and those whose social position might bestow honour on their roll. They asked for more time from everyone else – the small fry, the obscure, hard-up bourgeoisie – after which, more often than not, they would refuse a place, unless, of course, they were offered some little genius, and these boys they generously took on, with an eye to their future prospects. Monsieur Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch, though passing for rich in Pervenchères, was not at all in the same league as those favoured by fortune, as those whom an accident of birth placed beyond any competition; he may have been a churchwarden, but he was unquestionably amongst the second rank, and Sébastien showed absolutely no signs of genius. The first year, the Jesuits responded to Monsieur Roch’s repeated approaches with polite but specious objections: overcrowding, the pupil’s extreme youth and a whole series of questions beginning, ‘Has Monsieur considered….?’ It was a cruel disappointment for the vainglorious ironmonger. If the Jesuits refused to take his son, what would people in Pervenchères think of him? His position would surely be diminished. Already he thought he discerned a touch of irony in the eyes of his friends when they enquired: ‘So, you’re not sending Sébastien away after all?’ He put a brave face on it and replied: ‘It’s still just an idea. Nothing’s been settled yet. I’m pondering, weighing everything up, considering. As for the Jesuits, well, I haven’t made my mind up yet … I fear they may be overrated … what do you think?’ But his heart was heavy. Poor Sébastien would probably have been reduced to taking intellectual sustenance from the vulgar and leathery dugs of a parish school or a regional lycée, if his father, in a series of memorable letters, had not laid vigorous claim to a glorious family history at the time of the Revolution.

  He explained that in 1789, in a desire to please God and as attested by a black marble memorial plaque, the Count of Plessis-Boutoir – whose vast domain encompassed all of Per-venchères and its neighbouring counties – had paid for the restoration of the parish church, a Romanesque structure dating from the 12th century, renowned for the fine, sculpted tympanum above the main door and for the admirable design of its arcature. The Count brought some stonemasons from Paris, amongst whom was a young man, by the name of Jean Roch, originally from Montpellier, and, according to flattering, but sadly unconfirmed theories, a descendant of St Roch who lived and died in that town. This Jean Roch was undoubtedly an artisan of rare talent. He was responsible for the repair of two capitals depicting the Massacre of the Innocents, and of the symbolic beasts adorning the portal. He settled in the area and married, for he was a level-headed man, and founded the present Roch dynasty, creating several important works of art, including the choir of the Lady Chapel in the local convent of a teaching order of nuns, which connoisseurs consider to be an artistic marvel. In 1793, the revolutionaries, armed with pickaxes and burning torches, attempted to demolish the church, and Jean Roch and a handful of companions defended it. After a heroic struggle, he was captured by the ruffians, beaten till he bled, and then tied to a donkey so that he was facing its rump and holding its tail upright in his hand, like a candle. They then released him and the donkey into the streets, where both were bludgeoned to death with sticks. Monsieur Roch, recalling every detail of the tragic death of this martyred ancestor, whom he compared to Louis XVI, to the Princess of Lamballe and to Marie-Antoinette, begged the Jesuits to take into account ‘such forebears and credentials’ which for him constituted true nobility. He also explained how, if Jean Roch had not been sacrificed at the height of his talent – not that he would dream of complaining about this – Robert-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch, his son, founder of the hardware store, and Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch, the undersigned, his grandson, who carried on the business, would not have vegetated in obscure trades, where they had, however, worked hard, by their probity, love of God and fidelity to the old beliefs, to honour the traditions of their venerable father and grandfather. Then there was the story of his own life, recounted with grandiloquent bitterness and comic sadness: his youthful aspirations stifled by a father who, though very devout, it was true, was miserly and narrow-minded; his resignation to a kind of work unworthy of him; the brief joys of his marriage; the sorrows of widowerhood; the terror of his paternal responsibilities; finally the hope which a refusal would destroy – to revive through his son his own noble, defunct ambitions, his fine long-vanished dreams: for Monsieur Roch had always dreamed of being a civil servant. These tales, these supplications, bristling with parentheses and larded with the most extraordinary phraseology, overcame the Jesuits’ initial reluctance and, at last, the following year, they consented to take charge of young Sébastien’s education.

  The morning that Monsieur Roch received the news was one of the most joyful moments of his life. But for him joy was an austere business. In this serious man, so serious that no one could boast of ever having seen him laugh or smile, joy manifested itself only by a redoubling of his seriousness and a twitching of the mouth which made him look as if he were crying. He went out into the street, his head held high, ands stopped at every door, dazzling his neighbours with his sententious accounts and knowledgeable exegeses of the Society of Jesus. Mouths gaped in respectful astonishment. People surrounded him, proud to hear him discourse on St Ignatius of Loyola, of whom he spoke as if he had known him personally. And escorted by numerous friends, he went first to the presbytery, where interminable congratulations were exchanged, then to his sister, Mademoiselle Rosalie Roch. She was a shrewish, spiteful old maid, paralysed in both legs, with whom he argued even more than usual over the happy event he had come to announce to her.

  ‘That’s just like you,’ she cried, ‘you always were too big for your boots. Well, I’ll tell you, you’ll make your son unhappy with your stupid ideas.’

  ‘Be quiet, you silly old fool! You don’t know what you’re talking about. First of all, the way you talk, anyone would think you actually knew something about the Jesuits. And where might someone like you have learned that? Ask the priest if you like, he may just know a bit more than you. The priest will tell you that the Jesuits are a great power, he’ll tell you that they even tell the Pope what to do …’

  ‘But don’t you see, poor imbecile, that people put such stupid ideas in your head just to make fun of you? I’d like to know how come you’re so rich though? Where did all that money come from?’

  ‘What money?’

  And Monsieur Roch drew himself up to his full height and put on his most serious voice.

  ‘I earned that money,’ he said very slowly, ‘by hard work and in-tel-li-gence, in-tel-li-gence, do you understand?’

  When he was back in his shop and had taken off his suit and slipped on his grey cotton overall, he called Sébastien, to whom, while he was sorting out some brass hooks, he addressed a pompous speech. Monsieur Roch, naturally eloquent and scornful of casual conversation, never expressed himself other than in the form of solemn harangues.

  ‘Listen,’ he commanded, ‘and remember what I am about to say to you, for we are entering upon a very serious stage in your life, a decisive moment, if you like … Listen carefully …’

  He was even more majestic than usual, against the sombre background of the shop, full of ironware, where the pots stuck out their fat, black bellies and the brass saucepans gleamed, their round, homely brightness creating a transient halo around him. The largeness of his gestures, when not sorting the hooks, made his shirt puff out in the gap between waist-coat and trousers.

  ‘I did not keep you informed of the negotiations undertaken between the Reverend Jesuit Fathers in Vannes and myself,’ he began. ‘There are some things a lad your age doesn’t need to know. These negotiations …’

  He emphasized this word which, i
n his eyes, ennobled the whole process and conferred on himself the importance of a diplomat dealing with matters of peace or war, and his voice gurgled slightly as he enunciated the word, savouring every syllable.

  ‘These negotiations, difficult and sometimes painful as they were, have now, happily, reached a satisfactory conclusion. Henceforth, you may consider yourself an alumnus of the college of St Francis Xavier. This school, which I have chosen above all others, is situated in the county town of Morbihan. Do you know where Morbihan is? It is in Brittany, that most excellent of regions! Thanks to me, you are going to be educated alongside the flower of French youth. It may even be, if my information is correct, that you will have the sons of princes as your schoolmates. You will be surrounded only by fine examples of the wealthy and the illustrious of the land, if I dare express myself thus. That, my dear child, is not given to everyone. And that places on you important responsibilities … Besides, did you know that a Jesuit, even the least amongst the Jesuits, is almost a bishop? He does not have the title, I admit, but he does have the power, and, I permit myself to add, the distinction. As for the Jesuits considered as a whole, a brief word will suffice. They even tell the Pope what to do. I am not sure whether I am making myself clear, whether you realise what the Jesuits actually are. You do, don’t you? Well, try by your dedication to work, your piety, your behaviour in general, try to deserve the great honour to which you have been called. Above all, do not forget the enormous sacrifices which I am making for your education, and thank the Lord for having such a father such as I, because I’m being bled dry, you know …’

  And, leaving aside the hooks for a moment, he indicated with four rapid clicks of the fingers imaginary stigmata on his two hands and feet.

  ‘Bled dry, I say.’

  After a brief pause during which he savoured the look of horror on his son’s face, he continued slowly, in a slightly different tone of voice.

  ‘This very day, I’m going to sort out your clothes with old Madame Cébron. You will need suitable clothing for I do not want to expose you to shame in front of your new friends and I do realise that, bearing my name, the name of the Roch family, and living amongst the élite, in a world which is essentially aristocratic, you need to cut a respectable figure … anyway Madame Cébron and I will sort through my old things and see which of them, once altered to fit you, would prove most suitable and stand up best to wear and tear. Concentrate on being relaxed in manner and well-groomed. Elegance accords well with tidiness. In fact, I still have my wedding suit. Ah, your poor mother!’

  Overcome by tenderness just long enough to allow this emotional note momentarily to interrupt the unusual length of his speech, he immediately went back to sorting the hooks, trotting out advice and insisting, above all, on his own lofty qualities and paternal virtues. Sébastien was no longer listening. He was not sure what he was experiencing: it felt like grief, a terrible tearing sensation, the pain of which left him gasping, his hands gripping the edge of the counter. Of course, he was perfectly used to his father’s eloquence. It had always seemed to him just another sound of nature, and he had never paid it any more attention than the humming of the wind in the trees or the gurgle of water flowing ceaselessly from the spout in the municipal fountain. Today, it fell upon his body with the crackling roar of an avalanche, the thud of rolling boulders, the violence of a torrent, the boom of thunder, that blinded and deafened him, leaving him with an unbearable feeling that he was slipping into a ravine, tumbling down an endless flight of stairs.

  Dizzy with panic, he gazed at Monsieur Roch’s stomach, vast and threatening beneath the cotton overall, then at the smaller paunches of the cast iron pots which, ranged along the top shelf near the ceiling, seemed to be turning on their trivets and giving vent to furious rumblings. The red glow of the copper saucepans, where reflections cavorted and danced, took on the unlikely appearance of angry stars. When he had exhausted his supply of both words and hooks, Monsieur Roch concluded thus:

  ‘That is why, my child, right up until the day of your departure, it will be necessary to break off all relations with your friends here. I am not claiming that one should be proud with small children, but there are limits to everything. And society imposes on its members certain hierarchies which it is dangerous to transgress. Those mischievous lads, for the most part sons of poor and simple workers – I am not blaming them, note, merely observing – are no longer on the same level as you. Between them and you from now on there is an abyss. Do you understand the significance of what I am saying? An abyss, I tell you.’

  In order to illustrate that abyss, he measured out the width of the counter separating him from Sébastien and said again, raising his voice:

  ‘An abyss, do you understand me, Sébastien, an unbridge-able abyss! And damn it, where would a country be without the aristocracy?’

  Monsieur Roch climbed up on a stool, pulled out, one after the other, several numbered boxes filled with padlocks, and whilst he compared them with each other and tested their rusty locks, he gave a melancholy sigh:

  ‘Ah, I envy you! You’re still very young and you know nothing. But I envy you all the same. Where might I have got to if I had had a father like yours? Now you’re part of that aristocracy, you can do anything, anything! And look at me! A future ruined! Ruined …’

  At that point, the door of the shop opened and a customer came in.

  ‘I’ll be with you this instant!’ cried Monsieur Roch, immediately climbing down both from his stool and from the idealistic heights where his imagination trailed vague, boundless dreams of glory for ever lost.

  Despite these lofty sermons and brilliant promises, Sébastien felt neither proud nor happy. He was stunned. From his father’s words, from the morass of incoherent, discordant phrases, he retained only one definite fact, that he would have to leave his home town and set out for an unknown destination which neither the Jesuits nor the ancient frock coats in which old Madame Cébron was going to rig him out could succeed in making attractive or even comprehensible. On the contrary, his natural suspicion, proper to a small wild animal, peopled this place with a thousand dangers, a thousand confusing duties too onerous for him. Up until now, he had grown freely in the sunshine, the rain, the wind and the snow, fully and physically active, without thinking about anything, without imagining anywhere other than his home town, any house other than his own, any air other than the air he breathed. He had never got used to the idea of boarding school, or, rather, he had never seriously thought about it. The only relationship he had established between primary school and boarding school was this: that primary school was for small children and boarding school for big children, much bigger children than himself, and he had not considered that one day he might grow up. When his father had spoken of it, it had seemed so distant to him, so vague, that his mind, responsive only to what was immediate and present, did not dwell upon it; now, however, faced with the imminent threat, the implacable date, he trembled. He looked with dread upon this separation from himself and from everything he was used to as if it were a catastrophe. Neither could he understand why he was being asked to sacrifice the friendships he had had since his earliest childhood in favour of some sudden, mysterious necessity, and why he should do so at that precise moment, already painful enough, when he felt an even greater need of protection and of closer contact with those things that were most familiar and most dear. All this made him very sad and very vulnerable. With a heavy heart, he retreated into the room at the back of the shop, which served as their dining room, and at which, when not at school, he would sit to learn his lessons and prepare his homework.

  It was a dark room where the sun never entered. It froze before his eyes as if he were entering it for the first time. He paused on the threshold, startled by the objects in the room and the furniture, amongst which he had lived all his life, but which, disconcertingly, he no longer recognised, for they had grown suddenly ugly, sullen and hostile. In the centre of the room was a table covered with an oilcloth, u
pon which were printed, in a circle and in chronological order, the ‘likenesses’ of all the kings of France, with their family trees, the dates of their accession to the throne and of their death. ‘One can learn even whilst eating,’ Monsieur Roch was wont to say, and, with his mouth full, in the cold silence of mealtimes, he would often recite the resounding names of Clotaire, Clovis and Pharamond, immediately followed by a gesture punctuating them with exclamation marks. There were a few straw-seated chairs and a walnut dresser, piled with chipped crockery, which stood facing an old wardrobe. Now everything reflected back at him the debased, ridiculous image of his father; now everything was reduced to grotesque, demeaning little scenes. Hanging on the green-papered walls mottled with damp was an arrangement of daguerrotype photographs of Monsieur Joseph-Hippolyte-Elphège Roch in various poses, each more oratorical and august than the last. In his mind’s eye, Sébastien could see his father pausing complacently in front of each one, comparing them, striking up the same poses and sighing with a shrug of the shoulders: ‘They say I look like Louis Philippe. Of course, he had rather more luck than I did.’ He could see his father lighting – as he did every evening with the same methodical, obsessive care – the tarnished zinc lamp that a customer had returned as faulty, an episode about which Monsieur Roch still felt an unforgiving bitterness and which, ten years on, he would still recount, in the same indignant tone, insisting: ‘Fancy daring to call it trash, as if a Roch could possibly sell trash! Trash! Me!’ And he cited in support of his argument the solid mechanism of the lamp, the pretty metal chains, the efficacy of the smoke extractor and the opinions of his friends. On the mantelpiece, between two blue vases won at the fair, there stood a photograph of the mother whom Sébastien had never known. She was a frail young woman, posing somewhat stiffly, her face almost faded away, her temples adorned with long, looped tresses of hair, and, in her hand, a lace handkerchief held affectedly in the tips of her fingers. He could hear his father saying as he did every day: ‘I really ought to put your poor mother back up in my room and put a clock in her place.’ All this he relived in a single moment, his heart dull with sorrow, disillusion and disgust, and all overlaid by the gloomy clarity of day coming in from outside, tinged by the grubby light shining through the glass bricks that chequered this dark cubbyhole. Sébastien looked out of the window, as if to catch a glimpse of sky. The sole, curtainless window looked out onto a narrow courtyard, and his gaze collided with the walls of the neighbouring houses, filthy, festering, covered in greenish mould, crazed with oozing fissures, pierced by the occasional squalid window offering a view of neighbouring yards piled high with rubbish and seething refuse. Pipes continuously disgorged stinking water; black mouths spewed forth a viscous sludge, flowing towards a common gutter, between piles of old metal and debris of all kinds. This repellent spectacle lit by the dingy, wretched light, this intimate view of familiar things, stripped of the veil of habit and revealed in their depressing, naked state, quickly changed his mood. Without his being aware of it, his father’s incoherent speech about the Jesuits and the princes’ sons had awakened in him a dream of something beyond, stirred something latent in his imagination which crept to the fore now when he was faced with the horror of reality revealed. At the very thought that he might have stayed here all his life, amid these glutinous shadows, staring at these hideous walls which hid the glory of the sky from him, a feeling of retrospective melancholy overtook him. Forgetting his previous tranquil insouciance, he convinced himself that he had been miserably unhappy and that what he was feeling at that moment he had always felt. Whilst he stagnated in that wretched life, others had been allotted joy, beauty and magnificence. He now knew – his father had told him so with such certainty and wonder – that he had only to stretch out his hand to grasp such marvels for himself. The idea of boarding school no longer frightened him. He was surprised to discover in himself an actual desire for that unknown world which, though still troubling, also drew him on, like the shadowy approach of some unspecified liberation.