LEON MORIN PRIEST

LÉON MORIN, PRÊTRE
Written by Béatrix Beck
1952
BÉATRIX BECK
2
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER ONE
It must have been getting on for eight in the evening. I was
coming back from a nearby village when, to my surprise,
while passing by the municipal park, which was of course
already closed at this hour, I saw a group of strange young
men clinging to the inside of the railings up which they
clambered to get a better view of the passers-by. They were
all wearing big, romantic capes and funny felt hats, each with
a feather. They looked for all the world as though they were
about to say:
Throw us some peanuts! Peanuts!
I wondered what the explanation of their strange clothes
could be. All of a sudden, I knew the answer: these weird
youths must be a troupe of travelling actors who had been
given permission to lodge in the public buildings inside the
park. I found it rather astonishing that anyone should think
of entertaining us at this time, circumstances being what
they were, but nevertheless I was pleased by the prospect of
seeing a few shows.
The next say I learned that these shadowy troubadours
were Italian soldiers who were here to occupy the town.
From then they were everywhere. They walked about in
pairs, their arms about each other’s waists, or in larger
groups, munching cherries and amusing themselves by
seeing how far they could spit the stones. They pushed
3
BÉATRIX BECK
barrows, carretta da battaglione leggera, laden with fruit and,
occasionally, with singing girls.
Henceforth, all letters received were stamped:
Verificato per censura,
a phrase which we took to chanting in ridiculously
funereal tones whenever we passed a member of the
occupying force. Our neighbours’ language seemed to us to
be a caricature of our own.
One morning at the office our work was interrupted by
the strains of operetta-like music. We ran to our windows,
which were at ground level and opened on to the street, and
saw a battalion advancing towards us. Behind their jolly
band the soldiers, who looked like figures in some rustic
carnival, came hurrying grotesquely along. We nearly split
our sides laughing. A young girl who worked with us
shouted:
‘The feathers! The feathers!’
and she help up a handful of her hair, to imitate a plume
waving above her head.
One of the soldiers turned his handsome face towards us.
He flushed with rage and reached for some grenades that
were stuck in his belt. The terrified girl slipped down from
her chair and crouched under the table until our querors had
passed.
Christine Sangredin, the messenger girl, came in, half
crying and half laughing, and told us what she had just seen
in the street: a child of five or six had mocked the soldiers,
4
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
like everybody else. An Italian had thrown a grenade at him.
The child, blinded and with half his face blown away, had
died within a few minutes, ‘in his mother’s arms,’ as
Christine put it with a certain heartbroken satisfaction. What
made the whole story comical was the fact that the child was
Italian.
We read in the newspapers that our town was also to be
occupied by Germans. We stopped laughing.
‘We’ll have to make eyes at them and then they won’t
shoot us,’ remarked a typist jokingly, and rolled her hips.
‘I’d rather be shot than make eyes at them,’ protested
another girl.
As dawn broke the hammer blows of a disciplined
savagery, the rhythm of deep singing, told us that our
masters had arrived.
To start with, they apparently wished to make us both
love and fear them: there were repeated displays of their
strength and unending parades accompanied with shattering
music.
Towards their allies they made a deliberate show of their
contempt, even going so far as to cross the road so that they
need not walk on the same pavement as the Italians. The
letter seemed highly amused at being insulted in this fashion.
One night I was awakened by the noise of nearby
shooting. Joyfully I flew to the window. But I could not
imagine how a battle might have broken out in the middle
5
BÉATRIX BECK
of an occupied town. Perhaps the Germans were shooting
the inhabitants?
The next day we learned that it was the two allied armies
which had been fighting each other, for the Italians had
refused to accept orders from the German command. They
had not surrendered until their ammunition was exhausted.
We saw the befeathered clowns no more. The Germans,
proceeded, with great ostentation, to disinfect the billets
which the ‘macaronis’ had occupied.
The Germans scattered imitation banknotes, inscribed:
Money don’t smell: Jews do.
Some people turned these pieces of paper over and over
in their hands, their expression one of the bewilderment or
amusement. Others crumpled them into little balls and
threw them away with disgust. The office boy, who was
deaf, laughed silently: snatching one of the banknotes, he
pretended to wipe his behind with it.
The tram terminus was plastered with hideous faces,
rapaciously hooked noses, and beneath was written:
‘Look about you and you’ll see for yourselves: the T tram,
at 12.15, is full of Jews.’
While studying these caricatures I saw, superimposed,
Vim’s face, and I said to myself:
‘You were right to die, after all, dear Ivanotchka
Duratchok.’
It amazed me that the mere act of travelling by tram could
create a grievance against the Jews. But this type of
6
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
propaganda was successful. There were people to whom the
word ‘Jew’ has hitherto conveyed only a vague meaning,
with smutty undertones involving circumcision: they now
began to distrust those persons who, they learned, were
foreigners. All the same, French antisemitism retained its
element of pity:
‘It’s all right to take their property and shut them up in
camps,’ said the people I worked with, ‘but they shouldn’t
be killed.’
We received an order from the Kommandantur: all
reference to Jewish authors was to be eliminated from our
coursed, and in particular there was to be no mention of
Bergson in the philosophy class. Malet’s and Isaac’s
histories had to be replaced with other books. Similarly one
of our anthologies was forbidden, since it contained a
passage from Heine.
The round-up began. The Germans would stand in front
of shop windows, which they used as mirrors: as soon as the
signal flare was fired they would turn about, surround the
passers-by, and load them into lorries. So people only risked
leaving their homes when this was unavoidable.
Danièle Holderbeng, an Alsatian by origin, was
summoned to the Kommandantur and asked whether she
was not Jewish. She replied that she was not, but when she
had come back to the office she asked us:
‘How can you tell whether you’re Jewish?’
‘It’s if you’ve been baptized.’
7
BÉATRIX BECK
‘But the Protestants, they don’t get baptized either.’
‘Being a Jew means having no nationality.’
‘They don’t belong to the French race.’
‘There’s no such thing as the French race.’
‘Oh, come off it, what’s the matter with you? Think of all
our inventors, our thinkers.’
‘When France has spoken the world has but to listen.’
Three people who worked with us, Jews, fled to the coast.
The evening that he left, the old professor of Greek,
Monsieur Edelman, came and told us that he was now
Georges Mauchamp. And he really did seem to be a
different man. Clean-shaven, with new clothes, he looked
ten years younger as he stood there with his tiny suitcase in
his hand. His grey eyes, formerly so sad glittered now with
the fever of adventure.
I loved Sabine Lévy, the administrative secretary. She
reminded me of those sexless beings in the Bible, their loins
girt, holding in their hands a crook or a flaming sword or a
wand, angels in fact. She also looked like an Amazon, like
Pallas Athene, like a samurai. When I saw her, I leaped
through time and space. ‘Yes, it is for the beautiful to
command,’ I would say to myself as I watched her. She was
tall: when she leaned over the desk at which I was working
I felt that I was seated beneath the shadow of a palm tree.
At the touch of her narrow hands, so quick and white with
their flashing nails, at the smell of her heady scent, I was
almost overcome. Her well-modulated and chilly voice, her
8
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
brilliant smile devoid of kindness, her penetrating glance,
her extreme sensibility of perception—which made it seem
as though she were the possessor of more senses than are
granted to ordinary beings—her variety of knowledge—she
had mastered engineering even as she had mastered
philosophy or music—everything about her enraptured me.
When my eyes crossed hers, as duellists cross swords, I
experienced a pang of pleasure which lasted until I could
bear its intensity no longer and was forced to lower my eyes,
relishing her victory.
Once she leaned with her hands against the edge of my
desk, imprisoning me between her two bare arms. I felt
myself attached to her by a link stronger than that of sexual
union.
At night I dreamed of Sabine: she was my mistress (my
schoolmistress), I had become a child once again, and she
was writing down verses which she dictated, verses which
seemed to me wonderful and which, when I awoke, I
attempted in vain to recall.
Or else I would be running after her, through gardens, up
and down flights of stairs built of pink or rose-red marble.
When Betty Sinant came to live down the town as my
lodger, I spent most of the evening talking about Sabine un
terms of such burning eulogy that at last Betty asked me:
‘In fact, you’d like to sleep with her?’
I protested, horrified. Lesbians seemed to me
physiologically incapable of really making love, of doing
9
BÉATRIX BECK
anything worth while, anything that was not fake. I loathed
pretence and make-believe. Besides, if I was fascinated by
Sabine, it was because she resembled a young man, but one
gifted with curious charms, with a virility that was delicately
tinged with the feminine. I dreamed of a golden age, when
there were neither men nor women but only complete
beings, such as I seemed to myself to be—a Platonic dream.
My love was like nightly dreams, the beginning of which
I never managed to discover. These dreams came to me fully
underway. Similarly, and despite all my intense probings of
the past, I could not fix the moment at which my impersonal
admiration of Sabine had been kindled into flame.
It was precisely these most vital instants of my life which
eluded my grasp; thus I did not know how, during my
childhood, I has learned about the relationship between
men and women. My life had happened to someone else, to
a cautious and conservative stranger who showed cause why
he need not be compelled to answer my questions.
Having been possessed by a man (what hypocrisy that the
verb ‘to possess’ should be used only in one direction! Thus,
too, the expression ‘to give oneself,’ by means of which
women transform the satisfaction of their own desires into
sacrifice and an oblation. In fact, it is the man who gives his
seed and therefore himself; the woman takes and receives),
I was amazed to find myself experiencing once again, and at
the age of twenty-five, a schoolgirl passion which was at the
same time both pagan and semi-mystical.
10
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
When, at a thankless age, I had burned with love for
Angéle Daréï, and later for Marie-Dominique, I had been
devoid of any desire to please them. I prostrated myself
before them and had no thought of embellishing my nullity.
Since then I had learned to see myself, to remember myself.
My widow’s weed hung heavy on me, for they must
displease Sadine who was always so gaily dressed, as elegant
as an emperor butterfly I felt I was committing a sacrilege
when I sewed a wide, white collar to my mourning dress.
The deportations became more frequent; Sabine hid in
the suburbs, but from time to time she would come back to
settle important matters. One afternoon when she was there
two German officers, passing by our windows, stopped and
glanced through. They exchanged a few words and seemed
about to come in, but they walked on.
Sabine’s face had turned green with terror and her
features seemed to fall apart. As soon as the Germans had
gone, she ran to the bathroom whence we heard the noise
of the lavatory being flushed. That marked the end of my
passion. In vain did I argue with myself that Sabine’s fear
was justified and even pathetic. I could not love her save
when she was braving death and anguish. The paroxysm
within my idol’s bowels was one of my worst
disillusionments.
Now there began for me a cycle of loathsome dreams:
Sabine’s arrogant face would be coming close to my own,
closer and closer like an aero plane about to land. Her lips
11
BÉATRIX BECK
were on the point of brushing my own perverted mouth
when suddenly her face fell apart in putrefaction all over
mine.
Or else she was defecating before us. Or her dress would
be stained with diarrhea without this apparently affecting
her. Someone would say: ‘It were better to kill her.’
One night I was alone in a world of darkness, and in the
sky a stentorian voice said over and over again:
‘Coward! Coward! Coward!’
I tried to run away knowing that this voice would fall on
me like a bomb.
I also dreamed that my daughter had vanished down a
trapdoor, that she and I were attempting to cling to a
slippery rock, battered by a raging sea.
For me sleep became penance.
One morning, while I was leaning out of my window,
everything was suddenly, violently shaken. A black cloud
enveloped me and my nose tingled with the smell of
gunpowder. From the stairs came shouts and the sound of
running feet. I hurried across to flee with the other people,
but my door was jammed. I hoisted myself up to the
fanlight, shouting: ‘Help me out of here. Break down the
door.’ None of the running people stopped to listen. Only
one woman looked at me, but her eyes were blank, and she
did not even slow down. They are going to leave here to
die,’ I said to myself, though I did not believe this. Because
12
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
from the moment it became impossible for me to run away
I saw no objection to remaining where I was.
That evening a locksmith, accompanied by the landlord,
came and let me out.
The bomb, of the sort we called bombinettes, had been
slipped under my neighbor’s doormat—he was a
collaborator— at the precise moment when he was saying
to his wife:
‘We ought to move. It’s getting too dangerous here.’
Now the front wall of his apartment was gone. It was
open to the landing and the stairs, and one could see all the
rooms at a glance, as with a doll’s house.
A member of the malice, kidnapped by the maquis, was
shot in the woods. His parents, who owned a café, lowered
their steel shutters on which they posted a notice:
Closed because of assassination.
That night the witty killers replaced the notice with
another:
Closed because of illegal swine-slaughter.
The priest of Saint Mesmin, who preached pro-German
sermons, received a little cardboard coffin though the post.
One afternoon a group of young men bust into our
office. Smiling, one of them covered us with a revolver and
told us not to be afraid.
‘Oh, but I know you!’ cried one of our girls, her eyes
shining with amusement. ‘You’re the son of …’
13
BÉATRIX BECK
‘Sh!’ interrupted the maquisard. ‘We’ve come to get your
machines. If you’d please go next door, we’ll lock you in,
but not for long.’
Shut up in the bathroom, we heard the men of the F.F.I.
calling each other by numbers instead of names. They
opened the door. The leader said he was sorry, but he must
take our names and addresses: if his men were arrested, it
would cost us our lives. He said ‘my men’ in a tone of
restrained pleasure that was almost voluptuous.
When it was Sabine’s turn to say who she was, she
answered firmly:
‘Villaret, Hélene,’ and gave a false address.
I thought she was afraid the list might fall into the hands
of the Germans, and I determined that I too would not
reveal my Jewish name. For a few seconds I became
Madeleine Anronin, living at No. 6, Impasse Saint-Sauveur.
The maquisards gave us all ration tickets and said a few
encouraging words about our speedy deliverance. The scene
resembled a stage play, elaborately produced, in which all
the actors knew their parts perfectly but failed to give a
convincing performance.
Having made us promise not to ring the police until
twenty minutes after they had gone and then to say that they
had worn masks, our visitors left us, taking in a truck our
two duplicating machines and both the typewriters.
14
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
Often the police car, which had a loudspeaker on the
roof, would drive about announcing a curfew:
‘We’ve got to go home so as the Krauts can bury their
dead,’ people would remark with relish.
The day after these discreet funerals, salvoes from the
Fair Ground would tell us that the Germans were shooting
hostages: fifteen for and officer, ten for a private.
Christine Sangredin announced that these executions
delighted her:
‘They’re all Communists and Jews,’ she said. ‘Good
riddance.’
With the approval of the boss, she hung a picture of
Pétain in our office. We used the marshal’s face as a penwiper.
15
BÉATRIX BECK
16
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER TWO
Anton Silmann, a former colleague of Chaim’s, and his wife
Minna arrived at my flat, together with their son, aged three,
and two suitcases; the Gestapo had been to their place to
arrest them. I had no choice but to shelter them. Anton
suggested I sleep with him and his wife, in my bed. I refused.
The idea of lying beside those two fat bodies disgusted me.
I made up a bed for myself on the tiled floor in the kitchen.
Dimitri was a pretty, pale boy, who looked like a lily of
the valley. Despite all our threats he was noisy. I was
terrified lest he be heard.
The Silmanns had brought food. With the agitation of a
voyeur I watched those mouths closing over meat, cakes,
chocolate. Minna explained to me:
‘We’ve got to eat well in order to keep our strength
against danger.’
There came the time for the renewal of rations cards. The
Silmanns had broken the law by not having their papers
stamped with the big J—for Jew—nor with the foreigners’
visa. Through their fear of being deported, they had lost the
right to get food-tickets, which were indispensable. We
discussed the problem until one in the morning. According
17
BÉATRIX BECK
to Anton’s instructions, it was up to me to get them their
ration books. It was as easy as cheating at cards. I agreed,
though I was frightened.
At the door of the distributing centre served for
foreigners, each applicant had to have his rations cards and
his identity papers checked by a policed man. I walked
towards this policeman, staring at him fixedly as though I
were an animal-trainer and he a wild beast. To my
stupefaction he left his post, running.
Electrified by this prodigy, I entered the semi-circular
lecture-hall. It was essential to get the business over quickly,
before the policeman came back. The risky conjuring trick
of going, as I was supposed to do, to await to my turn on
one of the upper benches, I headed, almost at double,
straight for the officials who were handing out the coupons.
I threw the three Silmann cards and my own on their table.
Of the several hundred persons seated on tiers of students’
benches, not one protested against my high-handed bypassing of the queue. An official hastened to look after me,
I thanked him carelessly and walked out as phlegmatically as
I could. When I had reached the end of the passage, I
glanced back, just in time to see the policeman taking up his
position by the lecture-hall door once again.
‘I don’t mind telling you, if this goes on, I’ll begin to
believe in God,’ I said to the Silmanns as I handed them
their ration books.
18
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘I have never ceased, for a single second, to believe,’
replied Minna in a voice choked with emotion. These words,
coming for a Communist sympathizer, astonished me. She
kissed me enthusiastically, and Anton gave me an egg and
five nuts.
When she heard footsteps upon the stairs Minna would
have an attack of nerves. Her mouth would twist sideways
and upwards until it was beneath one of her cheekbones,
her legs would twitch. Her eyes rolling, her arms flailing the
air, she would gasp:
‘No! No!’
Dimitri began to imitate his mother, trembling and
sobbing convulsively. When I could no longer endure the
spectacle of the child’s terror I shook my fist in Minna’s face
and said, between clenched teeth:
‘I forbid you to be frightened. Or else I’ll throw you out.’
These amiable words calmed her immediately and never
again did I see her lose her equanimity.
In the evenings Anton made me draft and redraft and fill
up and sign and paraphrase a whole set of false papers. He
had decided to be born at Saint Quentin, to be baptized, to
be a bachelor. I was a witch who, with strokes of my pen,
bestowed a whole new past upon him. As a child it has been
my ambition to make counterfeit money for my mother.
Now, for the sake of this Jew, I was able to satisfy my
19
BÉATRIX BECK
forger’s ambitions. To please him I wrote the most flattering
references. But he sighed:
‘You haven’t got a director’s handwriting. You write like
a convert girl. Make it a bit less legible.’
Vim had said to me:
‘I can’t speak Yiddish: at home we always talked Russian.’
I has occasion to mention this to Anton, who was both
astonished and indignant.
‘Vim knew Yiddish perfectly! I often talked to him in
Yiddish. It was his language.’
I could only explain this lie of Chaim’s to myself as a
resulting from his horror of particularism and from his
desire thar there should no longer be a Jewish language, or
Jews.
When Minna had found herself pregnant both she and
her husband, being very poor, had thought of abortion as
the only way out.
‘I’d drink disinfectant rather than have a baby,’ said
Minna.
Each day, at the Electrotechnical Institute, Anton talked
to Chaim about abortion. This solution, commonplace
though it was, seemed to me inacceptable. It is possible, in
all serenity, to envisage the assassination of a mediocrity.
But hem it is a question of an unknown, unborn person, a
monarch of all that is possible, the risk becomes frightening.
20
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
I recounted to Chaim a whole catalogue of accidental deaths
and prison sentences, so that he in his turn might influence
his friend.
Dimitri was not destroyed. I flattered myself that I was
partially to thank for this and I loved him. I became more
and more worried as the number of persons arrested in their
homes increased. I persuaded the Silmanns to part with their
son until the danger should have become less acute. The
peasants who were looking after my daughter agreed to take
Dimitri as well.
Minna, speaking of Betty Sinant, said to me:
'She's a Christian, we should make use of that.’
And we made her swear on the Bible that if we were
arrested she would look after the two children, while the
maquis would pay for their board. If she should find any
means of communicating with us, she would give us news
of the dog (Dimitri) and of the cat (France, my daughter).
One Sunday I rode out, with Dimitri seated astride the
carrier of my bicycle. 'If only they don't baptize him!' said
Minna, her expression one of torment. She seemed to dread
this sacrament even more than death itself.
As I pedaled along I told the little boy stories, and I was
just telling him about humming birds when I saw ahead of
us a line of German soldiers blocking the road. A youth on
a bicycle called out as he passed us:
"They're checking papers.'
Dimitri was circumcised: my name was Aronovitch.
21
BÉATRIX BECK
These two thoughts made my eyes go dim with fear. I fell,
rather than jumped, off my bicycle, put Dimitri on his feet
and began to push the machine into the meadow that
flanked the road.
'What are you doing?' the child asked anxiously.
'We'll go across the fields to find France. It'll be more
fun,' I replied, trying to make my voice as reassuring as I
could. 'We'll go through that pretty little wood down there.'
The Germans, seeing me set off across the fields with my
bicycle, which was so awkward to push over rough ground,
must surely realize that I did not wish to show my papers.
'We'll pick some grass for the rabbits,' I told Dimitri. And
as we moved further and further away from the Germans I
kept leaning down and plucking haphazard handfuls of
greenery, which I stuffed into my bicycle's saddlebags. The
circumcised child helped me collect this meal for the
imaginary rabbits.
We arrived that evening, after a détour that had taken us
several hours. France scarcely bothered to say hullo to
Dimitri and from then on behaved as though he did not
exist. I took her aside and asked her why she was being so
unfriendly towards her new playmate.
'But you know my boy friend is Titi Serpolet,' she replied
in a tone of offended dignity. 'He looks after five cows,' she
added proudly.
Next Sunday, speaking of Dimitri with disgust, the
peasant woman said to me:
22
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'He won't live, that wretched thing: he has all the parts’'
After a month Madame Lathuile refused to have anything
more to do with Dimitri: she said he'd die on her hands. I
wondered where I could hide the child. His mother, a meanminded and stupid housewife, now had a bold stroke of
genius. In the suburbs there was a boarding school, of which
Philippe Henriot was the governor. Minna sent her son
there, fully equipped with a baptismal certificate and all the
other papers required, each one perfect and each one a
forgery.
‘They won't go looking for him there!' she said, with a
broken laugh.
'You're very clever,' I said.
'I'm a Jewess!' she announced triumphantly. Her mean
and puffy features seemed to fall apart, to reveal the flaming
visage of a prophetess.
'Kingdoms pass, the Jews remain,' she said. 'No one can
do anything to us.'
Pierre Bernhardt, who came from the same town as
Chaim but was naturalized French, joined the maquis. His
wife, Lucienne, hid another Jew, Simon Weiss. For reasons
of respectability she asked me to come and spend the nights
with her.
Simon seemed atrocious, to me, with his protruding ears
and his ratty face. But his gaiety, his vitality and his love for
his two brothers soon changed him in my eyes. He became
23
BÉATRIX BECK
as beautiful as a polished leather thong. Lucienne, too,
found her lodger very attractive. In her marital bed, which I
shared with her, the clung to me like a little snake and said:
'Wouldn't it be delicious to make love with Simon?’
'Oh, yes,' I cried.
Lucienne also said:
'I love having you here, Barny. I feel as though a soldier
of the liberating army were beside me.'
When she heard a noise she used to get up, in her pink
lawn nightdress, take her husband's shotgun from the wall
and leaning out of the window above the moonlit garden,
she would call out:
'If anyone is stealing my plums, I'll shoot.'
Lucienne told me about her clothes and her former
lovers. A dentist had given her a bracelet made of gold teeth.
An ironmonger had wished to marry her, but he had had
hairs growing on his fingers.
At night, in bed, the Bernhardts enjoyed working out the
value of their furniture.
When Pierre, after studying the calendar, exercised his
conjugal rights, Lucienne was so bored that she counted the
flowers on the wallpaper.
The Germans put a price on a number of heads: two
hundred thousand francs each.
'Would you turn them in? Would you?' Lucienne asked.
I was taken aback. I looked at her and said:
24
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'You ask me that question because you would?' 'No, I
don't think so. Oh, no. Not for two hundred thousand
francs anyhow. It wouldn't bring you happiness. Or else I'd
have to be really broke first.'
One evening I found Lucienne sobbing over an open
book. I looked to see what novel could have upset her so.
It was a cookery book.
In the office they said to me:
'It seems you're hiding Jews?'
I burst out laughing: I wasn't all that stupid, at least not
yet! As if life wasn't difficult enough already.
I hardly had to force myself to laugh, so ludicrous was it
to think that the Silmanns were reduced to hiding with a
woman named Aronovitch. The farce was even more
laughable than my comrades guessed: while the Silmann's
were hiding with me, I was sleeping with Lucienne
Bernhardt, who was concealing Simon Weiss while her
husband hid in the woods.
It was my concierge. She had heard voices in my flat, and
had mentioned this to her sister-in-law who did the laundry
for one of the girls. I'd have to get rid of my guests. Betty
Sinant had a friend, Mireille. Mireille was the mistress of a
black market operator named Hector. Hector owned a flat
in town. At the moment he was in Normandy. Whenever he
went away he left the key to his flat in a café (which one?)
25
BÉATRIX BECK
for Mireille. As soon as I left work I hurried to the post
office to telephone Betty:
'I need Hector's key. Mireille knows where it is. Run and
ask her. She can't refuse it me. If Hector were here he'd let
me have it right away, I promise you. I can't explain over the
phone. For God's sake, the key. You're not heartless after
all. You'll regret it, you'll never go to Heaven. There's no
risk. If you refuse I'm lost, and so are you. You know me
well enough. You'd like to be deported? You, a member of
the Salvation Army! You know, I've got a revolver here, in
my handbag. If you don't tell me where the key is, I'll blow
my brains out, right here in this phone booth, I swear it on
my word of honour. You'll hear the shot. Wait? It'll be too
late. Thank you, Betty. Good-bye.'
When I left the booth I was in a muck sweat and jubilant,
though my honour was sullied, for I did not possess a
revolver.
One hour later the Silmanns were installed in Hector's
elegant bachelor flat. They passed a few pleasant and
tranquil days there until, in the middle of the night, Hector
returned and kicked them out. They came straight back to
me. I found their surprise visit only moderately entertaining.
Simon Weiss had crossed the border into Switzerland.
Thus Lucienne had a spare room again. I decided to pass
my Jews on to her. The next day I went to see her and made
my request. She replied:
26
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'I don't give a damn for the Silmanns, you can tell them
that from me. I'm not going to get myself picked up for their
sake. It's always them, them, them. It's bad enough for me
having Pierre with the maquis. I had Simon here and I think
I've done my bit. I've lost twelve pounds in the last month.
And if ever anything should happen to Pierre, I'll be
absolutely on my own, me with a child and her keep to pay
too.’
'I can't keep the Silmanns, since they've been
noticed. There's nowhere they can go except here. You're
absolutely safe, out in the country.'
‘That may be, but they give me the creeps. Why don't
back to wherever they came from?'
‘They'd be picked up at once.'
'And why do you think I should worry if they are? It'd
serve them right. They should have stayed in Poland.'
'Lucienne, I swear, by the memory of my husband and by
the head of my daughter, that if you don't take in the
Silmanns I'll report you to my tribunal and have you shot.'
'Where did you get that stuff from, Barny? The movies?'
Lucienne laughed. But I noted with joy that she had turned
a little pale.
‘The movies, and real life too,' I replied.
‘There's no point in going on, chum, I'm not having them
here.'
'Requiescat in pace,' I intoned, making the sign of the
cross over the young woman.
27
BÉATRIX BECK
'Damn you, Barny, cut it out,' she cried with a false laugh.
'All right, I'll take in these ostrogoths of yours. I was only
having you on.'
'Good, I'll send them to you right away.'
And I hurried off, lest Lucienne change her mind. Before
I had reached her garden gate she had run after me and
slipped a small, white paper parcel into my hand. Her
expression was mysterious. It was a wonderful piece of fatty
bacon. While I pedaled along I raised it greedily to my lips.
With delight I dug my teeth into it, all the way to the gums,
and I wondered if I had to thank my childish invention of a
tribunal for this windfall.
The bacon was an inspiration, it flooded me with poetry.
Nothing now held me to the earth, I was without limits.
Death was a fiction. With a laugh I ran up the three flights
of stairs to where the Silmanns were waiting and cried:
'Lucienne is expecting you with open arms. Go there as
quick as ever you can.’
When Anton and Minna were just about to leave I
announced, pompously:
'I find you people horrible. All the same, I'd give my life
for you.’
They gazed at one another.
Pierre, who from time to time risked a visit home,
suggested that I give him Chaim's camera in exchange for
28
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
twelve pounds of vetch. During the next few days I stuffed
myself with vetch, morning, noon and night.
When the sack was empty I considered what heirloom I
could next swop for food. Betty had given herself to an
Italian officer and had been paid in rice. I envied her; but
me, I was unsellable, inalienable.
One evening I thought I saw a bit of bread at the back of
my cupboard. I reached out for it. But it was a piece of
wood.
Seed peas appeared in the shops. They were described as
'denaturalized' and as 'unfit for human consumption.' At last
I gave in; I bought some. Far from poisoning me, as I had
feared, they saved my life.
It was difficult to obtain the daily ration of bread. The
bakers opened late in the morning and closed in the early
afternoon. We had to queue up at lunchtime, and often got
nothing, as the day's stock would be exhausted before all the
customers were served. We ran from baker to baker. As
soon as I held the five-ounce slice of sticky, brownish stuff
in my hand, I would eat it. I could not wait.
Once, while leaning against the wall of the baker's shop
with my feet in melting snow, I fell asleep standing up. Only
when I awoke did I realize I had been asleep. I blessed this
vertical nap which, for a moment, had banished cold and
hunger.
I knew all the bakers in the neighbourhood, having
queued in front of each one. We discussed their respective
29
BÉATRIX BECK
advantages: this one gave better weight. That one sold purer
bread.
One day I was waited on by a very old woman who,
having no doubt relapsed into her second childhood, gave
me a whole loaf. With an effort to conceal my joy I hastened
from the shop, clutching the hot bread to me as though it
were a baby. I ran all the way home; I was afraid that the
mistake would be noticed and I would be chased and the
marvel taken away from me.
I locked the door and ate the whole loaf then and there.
I could not stop, nor could I keep any for the evening or the
next day. After this feast of bread I felt much happier.
I went back to the same baker's, in the hope that the
mistake might be repeated. But I was never so lucky again,
nor did I ever see the old fairy with the whole loaf.
In order to have my identity card renewed I had to queue
from eight in the morning until three in the after- noon. I
arrived at my office without having eaten. The boss said:
'Go home and get yourself something to eat, you can
come back afterwards.'
'No, thank you, sir, it's not worth it.'
'Of course it is. You can't stay here, with an empty
stomach. Go and eat something.'
'There isn't anything at home,' I said with a laugh.
'Go on, go on, have your lunch,' insisted the boss, who
apparently had not understood.
30
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
I did not dare refuse any more and I went home. I sat
down at the table, with Amiel's Journal in front of me, and
read for a quarter of an hour, the time it would have taken
me to eat a meal.
The boss asked heartily:
'Well, had something now?'
'Yes, I read,' was my reply.
'Quite right,' he said.
I met my former landlady. She greeted me with the words:
'Have you heard? It seems the Bernhardts are Jews.
Who'd have guessed it, to look at them, eh? They were
always so decent and everything. To think I had them as
tenants for three whole years. It just goes to show what
these people can get away with, doesn't it, eh? You'd think
they'd have a bit more shame, these days, the Jews I mean,
after having started the war and everything, well it's their
turn to pay now.'
‘The Bernhardts aren't Jews. Who ever told you such
nonsense? They're a hundred per cent Aryans,' I announced
indignantly.
The Bernhardts gave the Silmanns a succulent dinner,
during the course of which they asked them to get out.
Anton's director found him a hiding place: a hovel, in his
backyard, in which a man could neither stand nor sit. Anton
lay on a stretcher and read technical books.
31
BÉATRIX BECK
Minna crowned her triumph by getting a job in the
Vichyist school to which she had sent her son.
'When I hear them praying against us in their chapel —
they call us "the treacherous Jews"—I sometimes think I'll
faint for sadness,' she said. 'But nobody could guess it.'
In the office one of the girls told me, with an expression
of anticipatory pity, about a woman in my position (the
Aryan widow of a Jew). The Gestapo, she said, had taken
her two children away from her.
I regretted my visit to the registry office, but was glad that,
in the country phrase, we had 'celebrated Easter before
Palm Sunday.' I would maintain that France was not her
father's daughter. I invented an Aryan paternity for her. This
was the former student, Marcel Hervet, whom she
resembled slightly, who had occasionally walked home with
me from the faculty, and who would not have the heart to
contradict my story.
I heard shots from a crossroads a little way ahead of me.
The area seemed to have become perfectly deserted and
silent save for this crackling rifle fire. For a moment I
flattened myself against a wall, but the idea of being late for
work frightened me and I hurried across the road. A bullet
grazed my cheek, an emotion hitherto inexperienced which
yet did not seem new. I leaped on to the pavement. A
shoemaker flung open the shutter in front of his booth,
shouting: 'Look out! This isn't in fun. Don't be a fool.
Quick! You want to get yourself rubbed out?'
32
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
My heart swelled with gratitude for this stranger who
wished me to remain alive.
A few days later I saw a small crowd standing around a
workman who lay in the road. He was a big man, powerfully built and with a very ruddy complexion. His blue
overalls looked as new as if he had just worn them out of
the shop. He did not move and his green eyes were fixed on
me, unruffled as the water in a swimming pool. Wounded
or sick, no doubt, and unable to move.
His eyes did not leave mine, he stared without
embarrassment. Obviously I pleased him. I returned his
look, enjoying the calm freshness of his glance. Until this
moment the expression 'to make eyes' had always seemed to
me a vile one: now I saw a wonderful meaning to it. I was
astonished that nobody did anything for the wounded man,
and I asked loudly:
'Why doesn't someone fetch a doctor?'
'Don't see?' answered a man standing next to me, you and
he pointed at the workman's shoulder.
Only then did I realize that the reason the man's eyes
stared so insistently into mine was that he was dead.
Policemen arrived and everybody moved away.
That night I dreamed I was leaning over a corpse laid out
on the asphalt. I realized that it was the body of Sabine.
I was about to walk over a level-crossing when a German
soldier, whom I had not noticed, stopped me with a guttural
33
BÉATRIX BECK
cry, ran towards me, seized me by the wrist and dragged me
away after him.
‘The maquis will look after France,' I told myself, by way
of consolation.
The soldier looked hardly more than seventeen years old.
His pink face had the severe intensity of a child's. His vicelike grip hurt. We followed a path that ran between the
railway line and a hawthorn hedge. With my free hand I
broke off a sprig of blossom, a cheeky gesture, but it made
me feel less lonely.
We reached a grass-grown, open place. In the middle
there stood a post. ‘The execution stake,' I said to myself.
My heart contracted and at the same time I felt faintly
amused by the stereotyped idea of a military firing-squad
that the scene conjured up.
We went straight towards the post. It bore a sign:
Verboten! The German text was followed by a French
translation: it was forbidden to cross the railway line during
certain hours. The child-soldier let go of my wrist and
pointed solemnly at the notice. I began to laugh, which
made him scowl. Our little walk seemed to be at an end. I
walked away at a normal pace, until I was out of sight, and
then began to run, so great was my delight. At last,
breathless, I threw myself down in the grass and kissed my
wrist which was now ceasing to be numb.
One night I was thrown from my bed by a violent jolt. A
bright pink light filled the room. ‘This is it,' I thought,
34
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
without knowing what I meant. From the street there came
the babble of voices. I ran out on to the balcony. It was
brighter than midday. People, in their nightclothes like
myself, were calling happily to one another from window to
window: the Arsenal was going up. In front of the chain of
mountains, which were extraordinarily white, an enormous
firework display was taking place. From earth to sky were
hurled comets, bloody bouquets, fiery roses, whips, snakes
of lightning, flaming horns of plenty, paroxysms of light, all
tossed upwards in a lavish apotheosis.
The two men who had blown up the Arsenal had crept in
through a sewer. No trace of their bodies was ever found.
A German soldier was running towards a little group of
his fellows. Some distance behind him ran a young civilian,
going even faster. He caught up with the soldier and the two
ran on, side by side, in a sort of frenzy, until they had
reached the others. Immediately, and with the speed and the
precision of robots, the soldier who had been running and
another soldier began to rain down blows with their fists the
head and face of the civilian. He collapsed. Still with a speed
and coordination that seemed a delusion, two other soldiers
picked him up. Each gesture was that of experts. Holding
the adolescent by his armpits, they carried him in a vertical
position without his feet touching the ground. His head
hung down on his chest. I wondered if he was dead. The
group of soldiers marched off, in step.
35
BÉATRIX BECK
This scene remained, for me, unforgettable and
incomprehensible.
Sabine arrived at the office. No one would have
recognized her. Her face was stained with crying, her hair
tied in a knot, her dress buttoned up all crooked. Her
brother had been arrested by the Gestapo, in a house of illfame, it was said. Her mother and she received a letter, from
Drancy, in which he wrote that he was being taken to
Germany; it ended with the words: 'Vive la France.' Nothing
more was ever heard of him.
Sabine ran the offices as usual, but from time to time her
voice would break and great tears would fill her eyes. The
flesh fell away from the bones of her face, which lost almost
all its former beauty, and within a few weeks she appeared
years older. She talked to us about her brother as a child,
about his way of mispronouncing certain words.
Sometimes, when she was telling us of Michel's naughtiness,
a smile would play about her lips. I felt such pity for Sabine
that I would have forgiven her, had I only been capable of
forgiveness.
36
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER THREE
One Sunday France dirtied her white shoes and burst into
tears:
'I'll be beaten.'
She wanted to clean her shoes with her handkerchief and
she asked:
'Will you tell them not to beat me?'
The next Sunday her shoes were dyed black.
'It's because Daddy's dead,' she explained to me. Speaking
of Gilberte Lathuile, a full-blown beauty in her twentieth
year, France confided in me, with a mixture of amusement
and fear:
'She sticks her tongue in my mouth.'
Madame Lathuile agreed to nurse a butcher's new-born
baby. Raising her handkerchief to her eyes, she explained to
me that she now had too much work to do: she could no
longer look after France.
I took the little girl home with me. Her ears began to
suppurate and her hearing became worse and worse.
One fine Sunday afternoon the barracks were blown up.
At the sound of the explosions the people in the streets,
37
BÉATRIX BECK
terrified, ran away in all directions. France, trotting along at
my side, was astonished:
'Why are all the people running?'
I pushed her in front of me so that she might not see the
flood of tears which I could no longer hold back. 'Please let
us both be killed,' I prayed silently. Which did not stop me
dragging my child to shelter as quickly as I could. France
had to stay in bed and was all alone while I was at the office.
'Some ladies came to see me,' she told me in the evening.
'Mrs. Robinson Crusoe and other ladies who hadn't got any
names.'
'Perhaps they were fairies.'
'Yes they were, they said they were my fairies and your
fairies. They're going to bring me some cheese.'
The doctor gave me a card admitting France to hospital
for a trepanning operation. While the operation was taking
place, several miles away, I was scribbling away as usual. The
sound of the stamps being banged down on to the papers
re echoed like the blows of the woodman's axe in the forest
of my childhood. Within me, and despite myself, a halfmuffled prayer was being constantly repeated: 'I beg you, I
beg you.'
'I beg who? I beg what?' I asked myself angrily. But the
prayer went on, all the stronger, and my questions remained
unanswered. 'Stop, you fool,' I said to myself. 'I beg you, I
beg you, I beg you,' the stubborn prayer within me repeated.
38
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
France was half-asleep. She was pale as a pearl and the
crown of cottonwool about her head gave her an Arabian
look.
'I'm not going to die, am I?' she murmured with mixed
anxiety and optimism.
In the beds beside hers there lay a woman and her sevenyear-old daughter. A little boy of ten, seated proudly on top
of a wheeled table, was pushed in to visit them. His face was
radiant with joy and he gazed about him, at the sick people,
as though he were in a theatre. While still far down the ward
he began to wave his arms, exuberant gestures intended for
his mother and his sister.
When the trolley was parked beside the woman's bed she
carefully drew back the blanket spread over her son's legs:
the right one finished at the ankle in a bandaged stump.
He had found a parcel in the street and had carried it
home. When he was cutting the string his treasure trove
blew up. 'So now we're all three here together,' the woman
concluded, in a tone that combined resignation with
apology and that contained a hint of amusement.
'I won't have to be a soldier!' gloated the boy, showing off
his mutilated leg which he treated like a doll. 'I'll be a
cobbler!'
This glorious future was greeted with smiles.
After half an hour a male nurse came to wheel away the
happy boy who had lost a foot.
39
BÉATRIX BECK
France learned a song. The hero was a soldier condemned
to death before a firing-squad because he had killed his
captain who had seduced his girl:
As soon as I fired
My captain fell dead.
Good-bye, dear comrades, good-bye.
When you shoot me
Don't lose your respect
For your unhappy victim
Who must pay with his life
For a moment of folly.
'Daddy?' she asked, when she had sung her song.
Pierre and Lucienne Bernhardt, Jenny, Lucienne's sister,
her husband Emile Déshairs and I planned to have our
children belatedly baptized. It would have to be done very
much on the quiet, in a district where we were not known,
and without being mentioned in any sort of parish bulletin.
When we had secured the baptismal certificates, all that
need be done would be to alter the dates. The problem of
godfathers and godmothers proved a complex one. Finally
it was decided that Lucienne would be godmother to my
daughter; I would be godmother to Lucienne's daughter; I
would be godmother to the youngest boy. The Déshairs
father would stand god- father to Lucienne's daughter and
40
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
to mine. The Déshairs girl and the Déshairs boy would have
to do without a godfather. We worked out the details. (The
elder Déshairs boy was fourteen. His mother was almost
certain that he had been baptized years ago. We would solve
his problem at some later day. Enough was enough.)
Pleading 'family reasons' I procured permission for
France to be baptized outside the parish in which we lived.
I trembled with impatience while waiting for her to be
discharged from hospital. As soon as she had been baptized
I would take her away to a safe village.
On the afternoon that I came to fetch my daughter the
nurse noticed, with evident surprise, my white gloves and
my hat. Her astonishment increased when she saw me
dressing France in an embroidered frock.
'Where on earth are you going in that get-up?' she asked.
"To a party,' I replied, with an attempt at a laugh.
With France on my carrier I bicycled to Lucienne's. Her
daughter had only just arrived, from the village in the
mountains, and she was giving her a bath in a tub of water
so hot that Jacqueline cried with pain:
'Shut up, or I'll send for the rabbit-skinner. Barny, help
me, polish her shoes.'
'Where's the shoebrush? Haven't you got a cloth?'
'It doesn't matter. Rub them with the curtain, quick, we
can't keep the priest waiting, can we? Pierre is already there
with the others. Where's the eau-de-Cologne?'
41
BÉATRIX BECK
Their hair brilliantined, after having been slapped,
scented, threatened and gloved, the two girls were hoisted
on to their mothers' bicycles. We set off at a great rate.
'All the same we don't want to kill ourselves,' said
Lucienne. 'If we must have a crash it'd be better afterwards
than before.'
The old priest put a candle in Bernhardt's hand. He did
not know what he was supposed to do with it and tried to
slip away. The creed was haltingly intoned. Our children
kneeled down and salt was placed upon their tongues.
'Taste nasty,' whispered the smallest boy as soon as the
priest had moved away.
'There's a war on,' explained his sister.
'You're sure he won't start ringing any bells?' murmured
Bernhardt anxiously.
From the darkness of the church there emerged four
children newly baptized by the grace of God and of the
Germans. The maquisard kissed his wife and daughter
before returning to the woods.
France stayed with me until such time as I could find a
family with which to board her. She went to school, but on
Thursdays I had to leave her alone at home. I did not lock
her in; thus she could get out if there were to be an air raid
or a fire. She took advantage of this to go down into the
street, despite all my scoldings. One day I found her radiant
with joy. She threw her arms about me, crying:
42
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Now I know everything. I was told it all and I
understand.'
'All what?'
'Everything. Now I know who made me.'
'Who?'
'God!' she cried with triumph.
'Who told you that?'
‘The gentleman.' 'What gentleman?'
‘The priest.' 'Where?'
'At catechism.'
'Where was the catechism?'
'In the church.'
'You went to church?'
'I didn't go on my own. Lucida Trivoli took me.' She
waved an illustrated catechism:
‘They gave me a book.'
'After they've taken communion they get little rolls
without having to give up any ration tickets,' she said
enviously.
She seemed ecstatic.
'Now I know all about God,' she said.
'You didn't see him.'
'No one can see him, he's got no body, but it doesn't
matter.
Lucienne Bernhardt introduced me to the Misses Reine
and Aimée Plantain, two spinsters living in the country and
anxious to board a child.
43
BÉATRIX BECK
Reine told me that when she was young someone had
said, referring to the beauty of her hair:
'It's too bad, hair like that wasted on a working-man's
daughter.'
Her lover's mother had forbidden their marriage in view
of the difference of social status.
'He was carried off by the Spanish 'flu: so she didn't have
him either.'
Reine and Aimée came of a family of ten. Their mother,
whose name was Gracieuse, had abandoned the Catholic
faith in order to marry their father, a Protestant. On their
wedding day Gracieuse's old mother had been taken to
chapel under the impression that she was going to church.
When she realized the trick that had been played on her she
fainted clear away.
The Plantain ladies taught the little Aronovitch girl that
Our Lord, crucified by the Jews, had cursed them, and that
those wicked people were now suffering as a result of this
curse.
'I hate them, the Jews,' said France, passionately. "They
put little Jesus to death. They ought to be killed.'
She was keenly interested in the crucifixion.
'Didn't they drive a nail through his belly-button?' she
asked with regret.
I was terrified when German soldiers carried out
manoeuvres in the meadows which lay behind the
Plaintains' house. France was enraptured:
44
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘They give me chocolate, they sit me on their knees. I sing
them a song: "I've loved you for long and I'll never forget
you." And then they sing their Boche songs to
me.'
The Germans went away. My daughter showed me a little
silver plated chain which she wore around her wrist and
which one of them had put there. I'd have liked them to stay
for ever,' she said.
Christine Sangredin threatened that she would be
unfaithful to her husband if he did not manage to escape.
'Oh, my mid-summer lover!' she sang.
She lived with her mother, who was a concierge, and
whenever she had the chance would say, with an emphasis
that was joyously aggressive:
'My mother, who is a concierge…
And:
'In the porter's lodge where my mother lives…’'
Christine owned a missal which was stamped with her
initials. Her daughter, Chantal, said to her:
'I'm glad your name starts with the same letter as mine.'
Christine was touched, and asked:
'Why?'
'Because you see when you're dead I'll be able to use your
prayer-book.'
A few days before this France had said to me:
45
BÉATRIX BECK
'When you're dead what do you want me to plant on your
grave? I won't be able to afford expensive flowers because
I'll need the money to bring up my children.'
And:
'Our teacher's dead, but it doesn't matter, we've got a new
one.'
I wondered at the wisdom of these children who reduced
death to its true proportions.
Christine ordered one of her assistants to take some
documents to a certain professor, but refused to say where
he lived. The girl burst into tears. Christine smiled.
Christine told us how she had punished her daughter.
'I sat down in a good, solid armchair, I lifted up her skirts,
I pulled down her panties, and spank, spank, spank. Every
time I slap her she screams as though her throat were being
cut, worth listening to, I can tell you.'
This zealous mother was as energetic in defence of her
offspring as she was in chastising her: she would go for the
old grandfather, a spoilt bulimic, with her two fists when he
tried to eat his granddaughter's soup.
When I asked Christine a question requiring an answer,
her eyes, which alternated between the colour of chestnuts
and that of champagne, would light up with satisfaction and
she would not reply.
When I brought her parcels to be posted she would not
let me put them down, and if I succeeded despite her in
46
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
placing them on a table she would throw them on the floor
and hurry to the boss to complain about me.
My arrival and departure were greeted with expressions
such as:
'Stupid cow! Idiot! Swine!'
If I should say:
‘These letters must be sent off to-night,' she would reply:
'When did your last servant die?'
'She must suffer from a concierge complex,' I said to
myself, 'aggravated by the loss of marital satisfaction.'
My reaction to her bullying was to keep my face as
wooden as possible and to say nothing.
There were periods of calm: Christine was going to
confession and made up to me. I understood, then, why
Chantal sometimes called her formidable mother 'my sweet.'
Christine and her daughter had exactly the same smile,
deliberate, intelligent and eminently social. This smile,
whether on the lips or of the crude mother of the six- yearold child, was an action of the spirit, a deliberate sign, the
affirmation of an identity between others and themselves.
I said to Christine:
'I can understand it when you lose your temper. But this
spitefulness of yours, without purpose and without any
reason, that I cannot understand.'
'What makes you think it's easier not to be spiteful than
to keep your temper?' she replied. 'Anyhow, I'm not spiteful,
I just like to tease.'
47
BÉATRIX BECK
She confided to us:
'When I was a kid, my mother always said: teasing is just
a babyish sort of spitefulness.'
One evening when I took her the pile of letters to be sent
off, Christine greeted me with a kick in the stomach. A
violent blow landed on her face and her spectacles were
knocked off her nose. I realized, with stupefaction, that it
was I who had struck this blow.
'You've broken my spectacles,' said Christine in a quiet
and threatening voice.
'I'll pay for them,' I answered arrogantly, wondering
where I could find the money to do so.
Christine had leaned down to pick up the glasses. When
she had done so, she said:
'No, they're not broken.'
"That's all right, then,' I said, staring at the pale mark that
my hand had left on her cheek. I walked out of the
room.
Far from keeping quiet about this incident, Christine told
the story to everyone in the building, with an almost sensual
pride:
'She really gave me a slap, I can tell you. Saw stars, I did.
Oh, that Aro woman, when she lets herself go…’
And Christine, laughing kissed the top of my head. The
next day, with a rough, quick gesture, she pushed a parcel
wrapped in newspaper into my hands. It contained
mushrooms. I ate them, convinced that my last hour had
48
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
come. But they were not poisonous. They were delicious
and did me a lot of good
Christine devoted her leisure to finding homes for the
babies of women whose husbands were prisoners-of-war.
'One of them,' she told me, 'it's the second baby she's given
away. Last year she brought us a girl and this year it's a boy
and each time she's managed to faint. Last year I felt kind
of sorry for her. The other day it just made me laugh.'
According to Christine, the ladies who ran the association
thoroughly enjoyed their tremendous moral superiority in
their charitable dealings with the guilty mothers.
'I wish they'd go wrong too, those women,' our comrade
said. 'It'd do them good.'
For some party or other we employees clubbed together
to buy a few bottles of fizzy wine. Everybody drank
everybody else's health. I was squashed up against Madame
Michet, a little greyhaired woman who habitually grubbed
about in wastepaper baskets in order to find any secret
instructions that the boss might have given the deaf officeboy. My glass clinked against those of the others. This ritual
gesture filled me with disgust and anguish: if I were to join
in these toasts of inferiors, if I were to commune through
the wine of mediocrity, then I must belong in reality, and no
longer only in appearance, to the dregs. I pretended to drink
49
BÉATRIX BECK
and hastily emptied my glass over my shoulder. It had been
a narrow squeak.
While walking with the other boys, Dimitri was
recognized by former neighbours who called him over and
expressed their astonishment at finding him a pupil at that
particular school.
Minna hurriedly left the place, taking her son with her.
She hid the child, but would not tell me where. I begged her:
I might need to know of this hiding-place for France. It was
only after considerable effort that I managed to drag it from
her: Dimitri had found shelter in the convent of Notre
Dame-de-Sion.
Anton's boss allowed him and Minna to sleep in his
drawing-room. They went there after dark and had to leave
before dawn, so that they would not be seen. They came to
my flat to cook. Their fat sizzled in my frying-pan.
A crash like thunder, and the air turned black. Dust
everywhere. Everyone was running, shouting, calling,
laughing. Pieces of broken glass and smashed bricks grazed
my face.
My arrival at the office caused much hilarity. I was urged
to look in the mirror: my face was sooty as that of a sweep,
while two thin trickles of blood looked like a clown's tears.
The whites of my eyes and my white teeth were startling in
this negroid face. I liked myself this way: it was a true picture
of me as I really was.
50
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
51
BÉATRIX BECK
52
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER FOUR
When I could not sleep I recited, in alphabetical order, the
names of the children I had not had: Anne-André, BlaiseBénédicte, Claire-Calixte, Désirée-Damien. . . They obeyed
my incantation and came to the sound of my voice. They
were neither boys nor girls, but marvellous androgynes.
My spirit was as tormented as was my body. Though I
told myself over and over again that they were senseless and
fruitless, the metaphysical problems of my adolescence
returned to torment me more acutely than ever before. For
the space of a few years my joys and sufferings had lulled
these obsessions into slumber, but now they awoke.
The faithful and their priests seemed to defy me. They
lived on paper currency. Me, I had to have gold. I should
have liked to tell them what I thought. I realized with a
flicker of amusement that nothing would be easier. I would
go into the confessional, as though to confess my sins, and
then would pour my elixir into the priestly ear. I'd have to
choose a church at some distance from my own district, so
that there would be no danger of being recognized later on
by the priest on whom I planned to play my trick. I chose
the church of Saint Bernard. When I entered it, it was quite
empty. I went stealthily from one confessional to another
53
BÉATRIX BECK
and then to the third. I decided against the parish priest,
who would doubtless be the oldest and therefore the least
sensitive to my salubrious witticisms. That left the two
vicars: Philippe Demanoir and Léon Morin. I had only their
names to go by in my guesses as to which of the two would
prove the more receptive. Philippe sounded the more
middle-class. Léon's parents were probably peasants to have
given their son that Christian name. So Léon it was to be!
Up and at you, Morin! I was frightened, but there could now
be no question of turning back. I kneeled down. The pews
were embellished with lice-like penitents. I would have liked
to go back out into the fresh air, to give up the silly farce
which was a waste of my time. A notice said that Morin
would be in the church at five-thirty. Exactly as the clock
struck the half-hour he glided over the tiled floor, a small,
dull-looking man who kept his eyes on the ground. I entered
the confessional almost at the same moment as he.
After a few seconds, which seemed to me to last a very
long time while my nervousness increased, the little window
slid open. Pressing my hands tightly together I said, in a sort
of gasp:
'Religion is the opium of the people.'
'Not exactly,' replied Morin. His tone was quite natural,
as though we were going on with a conversation already
begun. ‘The bourgeoisie turned religion into the people's
opium. They perverted it in their own interests.'
I thought I must be dreaming and I had to force myself
54
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
to answer.
'You let them do so. Now you and they are one and the
same.'
‘The Church lost the working-class through its own
mistakes, I agree, but we are reacting now. A member of the
Young Catholic Workers who goes on strike, and who has
taken communion, will be all the more resolute in his strike
action. Injustice fills the Christian heart with horror.'
‘There's more to it than that. Even if religion had
remained pure, that wouldn't prove it was true.'
From the other side of the grill I could feel Morin giving
me his entire attention. I was impressed.
'Oh, quite,' he said, 'even if religion had remained pure,
that wouldn't prove it was true.'
I was ashamed at having propounded so obvious a
truism. My ideas fled from me in panic. I no longer knew
what I was looking for in this mouse-trap of a box. I began
to get up; I wanted to get out of here.
'It is good that you came,' said the priest.
'What do you mean, good? I… I came here as an enemy.'
'You think so? I don't believe that, myself. It's a long time
since last you confessed, isn't it?'
'Not since my first communion. But I'm not confessing
now.'
'I realize that. It's not easy to admit one's errors to one's
neighbour.'
55
BÉATRIX BECK
'Easy or not, that's nothing to do with it since I don't
believe in God.'
'You're quite certain? You don't ever pray?'
'Only when I can't stop myself. It's a relic of my
childhood, a weakness.'
'You are proud, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
'Do you sometimes tell lies?'
'Yes.' (I felt, despite myself, as though I were playing a
game of questions and answers, in a somewhat acute form.)
'You have never stolen?'
'Yes I have.'
'What have you stolen?'
'Food.'
'You lose your temper occasionally?'
'Yes.'
'You do not commit sins against chastity?' 'I don't know.'
'Are you able to control yourself, to do without for the
sake of others?'
'Only for my daughter.'
'You perform your duties as an individual properly?'
'More or less.'
you
'Do you think that have made the most of your
capabilities?'
'No.'
56
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘You do not know that Saint Paul said: “The world would
be better if you were?” ’
I was struck dumb, and suffered this whiplash without
flinching.
‘You have made a good confession,' went on the priest
without any evident irony. 'Now you must ask to be
forgiven.’
'Ask who?'
'X,' he answered, gaily.
I remained dumb. The priest, so close and so cut off from
me, preserved an absolute silence, an absolute immobility.
'We will stay here, like this, till the end of the world,' I
thought, with distress.
'You've no guts,' said Morin at last.
'I'm sorry.'
'Ah, well,' he said in a neutral tone. 'You would like me to
impose a penance on you?'
'No.'
The tornado was whirling me away.
'I'd better. A penance will do you good. When you leave
this confessional you will go and kneel down.' 'On one of
those velvet chairs?' I tittered.
'No, not on a prie-dieu. On the flagstones. It will hurt
your knees a little. There you will pray. Whatever prayer
you wish.'
'Since I'm not a believer that phoney prayer would only
be a mockery.'
57
BÉATRIX BECK
'Our prayers are always a mockery. The disproportion is
so great between them and Him to whom they are
addressed.'
'But if the person praying takes it seriously, if he really
believes…'
'Who told you that effort is less valuable than faith?'
'I have no remorse.'
'I should hope not. Judas had remorse; that's why he
hanged himself. We are asked to repent, which is the exact
opposite of remorse.'
'I could only repent if I had chosen Christian morality to
guide my conduct.'
'Even without choosing Christian morality to guide your
conduct, you are living in a Christian world. You know
when you have committed an offence against the
conscience of your society. Are you always entirely satisfied
with yourself?'
'No. But my behaviour is determined by my heredity, my
body and my environment.'
'So you're a robot, are you? Bow your head, and I shall
give you absolution.'
I did so, saying:
'I'm easily ordered about, aren't I?'
'Moderately so,' replied Morin imperturbably. He raised
his right hand, speaking slowly:
'Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et
Spiritus Sancti. Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi, merita
58
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
beatae Mariae Virginis, et omnium Sanctorum, quidquid
boni feceris et mali sustinueris, sint tibi in remissionem
peccatorum, augmendum gratiae, et praemium vitae
aeternae. Amen.'
He translated, emphasizing his words:
'I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. May the passion of Jesus
Christ our Lord, the merit of the Blessed Virgin Mary and
of all saints, all the good that you have done and the
suffering that you have borne, help you in the remission of
your sins, the increase of grace and the conquest of eternal
life. So be it.'
After a short silence:
'You would like me to lend you some books?'
'Oh, yes,' I cried, and immediately regretted my
enthusiasm.
‘The curacy is right opposite the cinema, Le Moderne,' he
said briskly. ‘When can you come?'
'Only in the evening,' I replied, regaining a measure of
confidence from the thought that a cleric could not possibly
receive women visitors after dark.
'Wednesday, at half-past eight, that suit you? Third floor.
Father Morin—' (He spoke these last two words ironically.)
'You won't forget?'
I muttered indistinctly.
'Go along now,' he said, rather roughly.
59
BÉATRIX BECK
With a shock I remembered the bewildering penance that
this violet-clad judge had imposed upon me. 'If only I could
drop dead!' I thought. I stumbled from the confessional. 'If
only I were somebody else,' I said to myself, enviously, 'I
could go out into the fresh air, right away, without having
to play a part in this mediaval farce.' I knocked into a chair.
I seemed to see people moving; the faithful, sardonic or
scandalized, turning to stare at me. I was in no state to
distinguish them from one another; they were a single,
hostile, hurtful presence. Bending my knees as one might
throw oneself from a high window, I took up the attitude of
a washerwoman at the water's edge. The grey flagstones
were like a huge game of hopscotch as I knelt there, leaning
against a pillar. I closed my eyes; the pillar became a treetrunk in a forest and my fear subsided. The prayer which I
must address to the hypothetical recipient took on, willynilly, the sharp features and brassy voice of Christine
Sangredin. Hands on hips, she shouted: "That Barny, it's all
make- believe with her. Useless. She can't do anything for
herself. And you should see how she laughs when someone else gets in a jam. She's always scared of being broke,
the fuss she makes about a bit of cash. She's no joke, a tart
like that. She remembers stuff she's read and then she
forgets she's remembered it and thinks she thought it all up
for herself. Not to mention the way she did in her ma and
her chap. When she's had her chips, there's not many will
be sorry, I can tell you.'
60
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Shut up, you slut,' I said to this muse of the people, and
I got to my feet. I left the cavernous church as quickly as my
somewhat unsteady legs would carry me, and my joy was
enormous to find myself once again in the daylight and the
fresh air which I had thought lost for ever. The wild beast
had escaped, wounded but more alive than ever, from the
trap in which a whim had ensnared it. Nothing that had
happened counted. Nothing obliged me to keep my
appointment with Morin. That priest was consummately
artful. What powers of attentive concentration! What
strength in his silences! What skill in ringing the changes! I
had only escaped him by a hair's breadth.
To my relief at emerging from the church which I would
never re-enter, there was added another strand, apparently
incompatible with the first: that of absolution. I hurried
along, buoyant, precious, fragile in my new skin, in my
renewed virginity. I was apprehensive and careful lest at any
moment I crack the invisible crystal.
That night I had a nightmare: Léon Morin had set a trap
for me. He threw himself upon me like a vampire. His room
was hung with bloody cloths. 'Why didn't I see it at once,' I
thought as I awoke. 'He's a sex maniac who uses his ministry
to lure women into his bed. But I'll know how to look after
myself.' In a confused way I was sure that I would keep the
appointment, despite myself.
On Wednesday evening I walked across town, now
hurrying, now dawdling, taking short cuts and then
61
BÉATRIX BECK
deliberately going out of my way, stopping in front of shop
windows, until at last, at the exact time, I entered the
alleyway which ran between a side-wall of the church and
the curacy. At the cinema Le Moderne they were showing
Grain in the Wind. I stared at the night bell by means of which
a priest could be summoned to administer the sacraments,
and I felt an itch to pull it. Slowly I pushed open the door
and walked up the old stairway that was polished by age and
that did not lack a certain squalid grandeur. I clutched the
iron banister.
Screwed to the third floor door was a piece of wood to
which was tied, by a bit of string, a wooden peg. In the wood
were a number of holes, each followed by an address, in
pencil, save the last beside which was written: 'Back in
fifteen minutes.' In the same fine hand was a notice, in ink
on white cardboard, above the bell: 'Léon Morin, priest.’
I only just touched the bell, and at once the door was
opened. I found myself confronted by an intimidating
figure, on the tall side, young, and in no way resembling the
ageless shadow that I had seen glide into the confessional
box. However, it must be the same man, since he was clearly
waiting for me and recognized me.
'Hullo,' he said cheerfully and showed me into a barelyfurnished room.
Morin was wearing a patched soutane, and he wore it
without awkwardness. Some of the patches themselves
showed careful darning. His frayed collar, which was very
62
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
white, reminded me of something, of someone: I could not
remember who or what. Pinned to the whitewashed walls
were a number of multi-colored posters and there were also
a severe-looking Madonna and a big crucifix. The general
atmosphere was that of a railway station or a travel agency
or a Communist party office. In one corner stood an upright
piano on which there was a tumbler containing snowdrops.
Part of one wall was hidden by shelves of books. Morin
gestured me towards a chair and sat down at his desk.
'How have you been getting on, since the other day?' he
asked, fiddling with a steel ruler.
I did not know what answer to give. Quickly he raised his
brown eyes to mine and asked in a mocking tone: 'Well, they
were soft, the flagstones of Saint Bernard?' 'Yes. No. In any
case I'll never enter a church again, except as a tourist.'
'We're all tourists in a way.'
'Not all in the same way. There are some people who
aren't shocked by tinsel and gilt.'
'I find it as shocking as you do. It's high time all that
rubbish was burned.'
'You say that, you, a priest?'
'Certainly. Did you imagine that priests like all the
trappings and elaborations?'
"They let them go on existing, anyhow.'
'Not altogether. One does what one can. It's a struggle,
but there is already some progress being made. For example,
we've done away with different classes of funeral. In the old
63
BÉATRIX BECK
days there were sometimes as many as three priests just to
plant one fellow in his hole in the ground. Quite useless.
Burial is not a sacrament, it's nothing. We're there for the
living, we're not hired mutes.'
'If the only result of your struggle has only been to reduce
the number of priests at a funeral from three to one…'
'Also we've done away with the collection. In church
there's always the money thing. Which means that people
who haven't any money I can't come to church.'
'Yes, but that, that's only abolishing abuses against
Christ's teaching. The real question is this: is Christ's
teaching valid?'
'What idea have you got of Christ?'
'I've read the Gospels, naturally, and Renan.' 'Is that all?'
'And then Giovanni Papini's Life of Christ.'
'Papini isn't worth much,' said Morin, getting to his feet.
He took a book from one of the shelves and handed it to
me: Jesus the Christ by Karl Adam, professor at Tubingen
University.
'Take this book with you. Can you come back on Friday
evening?'
'Day after to-morrow? I'll never be able to read it by then.'
'That doesn't matter. We'll have to meet in any case.' 'You
want to convert me,' I teased him.
'Only you and the Lord are capable of such an
achievement.'
'Then why are you lending me books?'
64
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Wouldn't you lend me books if you had some I wanted
to read?'
'I don't know. But why do you want me to come back?'
'Do you never feel the need to exchange ideas with your
equals? What a savage!'
'It was last Saturday that I was a real savage. I can't think
what can have come over me. Please forget the whole thing,
I beg you.'
'I certainly shan't, it was far too amusing,' said Morin with
a glance towards the crucifix, as though he were calling it as
a witness. And he laughed heartily.
I walked towards the door with the book that he had lent
me. Morin came too.
'Good-bye, then. Until Friday,' he said, on the landing. I
agreed, hesitantly, and set off down the stairs which were
now in total darkness. 'He has the style and the manner of a
militant Communist,' I thought. 'You'd say he was a
revolutionary leader. A citizen priest, a father comrade! He
must put on that act to make me feel at home.' But I now
feared neither rape nor conversion. Morin gave me
confidence, or almost so. Nothing hence- forth would make
me deviate from my healthy laicality. My forming a personal
relationship with a priest was, after all, as normal, as
acceptable, as the comradeship which had existed between
Chaim and his military chaplain.
I took Karl Adam to bed with me. The book seemed
specially written for me, referring to miracles as 'matters of
65
BÉATRIX BECK
dismay to modern man.' The Boche kept coming back to,
and approaching from all angles, the essential problem: in
no way did he postulate a creator, but he extracted the divine
features in the personality of Jesus and hence concluded that
God exists. In particular, Karl Adam analyzed the prayers
of the Nazarean and showed by means of com- parisons
that hitherto no one had prayed in this manner, from within.
I yielded to this book, which was the Columbus. When I
finished it, it was six in the morning, almost time for me to
get up and go to work.
I was no longer surprised by the priest's contempt for
Giovanni Papini's book, Catholic though it was: in spite of
its beauty it was only a series of magic lantern slides, whereas
the Tubingen professor had produced a real achievement of
concentrated induction. And by so doing he was incidentally
following the spirit of the Gospel, since Christ had said, 'No
man cometh unto the Father but by me.'
There is no compelling reason for starting with the God
of the philosophers, Voltaire's debatable watchmaker, and
working down to Jesus. On the contrary, the path that starts
with the inspired carpenter leads upwards to the source of
his inspiration. The enunciation of the beatitudes implies
God.
The question, if it is not to be fatuous, must deal not with
the existence but with the nature of God. He who animated
the Messiah, did he possess an individuality? When I handed
Jesus the Christ back to Morin, he asked
66
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
me:
'You've finished it already?'
'Yes.'
'You read it too quickly.'
'Once I had begun I couldn't stop.'
He replaced the book on the shelf and looked for others.
'From your Catholic point of view,' I said to him, 'if I go on
living as an atheist, I've had it.'
He denied this:
'No, no, my dear, you won't have had it, even if you go
on living as an atheist.'
This spiritual detachment confounded me. The normal
thing would surely have been for Morin to take advantage
of this opportunity in order to say: 'Yes, unless you change,
you are lost.' I was moved, too, and also slightly shocked
that this young priest should address me as 'my dear.'
'Outside the Church, no salvation,' I insisted with a note
of mockery.
'It is the invisible Church that matters. It far surpasses the
visible Church.'
'What is the invisible church?’
'It is all human beings of goodwill.'
And Morin went back to searching his shelves, remarking:
"They're in no sort of order. I never have the time to
arrange them, and people don't bring the books back either.'
67
BÉATRIX BECK
While Morin leaned down, got up, touched the floor for
a moment with one knee while he looked for nourishment
that would suit me, I admired the careful patching that was
his soutane. I could not stop myself from expressing my
astonishment aloud:
'It's funny, isn't it, that I should have happened upon you
of all people?'
Scarcely had I let these words pass my lips than I regretted
them: were they not too deep a compliment
to Morin? No doubt he would protest modestly: 'All
priests are alike,' or 'I am not one of the best, far from it.'
Instead of these standard answers, he replied:
'It's Providence.'
He ran his eye critically along the shelves. Suddenly he
said:
'I don't know why I'm trying to choose your books for
you. Come here. Just take anything that appeals to you.'
I walked timidly across the room. In my relationship with
the new director of my reading I was in a perpetual state of
oscillation between respect and mockery, pugnacity and
submission.
Now I was faced with a new trap, that strange thing: the
library of a man in Black. The mind of Buddha, the true face
of Catholicism, the irrational in the concept the divine and
its relationship to the rational, she and you, young man, the
duty of improvidence, the key to the eucharistic doctrine,
conversations in Loir-et-Cher, French, the liturgical
68
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
language, he and you, young woman, Oriental mysticism
and Occidental mysticism, Lord, teach us to pray, how to
recognize edible fungi, from instinct to spirit, the adventures
of Sophie, on sincerity towards oneself, the sword and the
mirror, the sexual education of our children, religious
creation and contemplative thought, essays on the
christology of Saint John, the unbeliever's catechism: that
was the one for me!
Morin had sat down at his desk and was writing with
apparent absorption. I did not dare interrupt him, nor had I
the courage to help myself. He felt my eyes on his back and
said:
‘Take it.'
I obeyed.
'Let me see.'
I held the book out to him at arm's length in order to keep
as far away from him as possible. He read the title and burst
out laughing:
'Obviously!' and:
'I don't know if I'd be doing you a good turn or not in
lending you that sort of stuff; you're argumentative enough
as it is. Still, if it'll amuse you. Is that the only one you're
taking?'
'I have so very little time.'
'You haven't told me what you thought of Karl Adam.'
'It's strong stuff. It's original. While I was reading it, I
believed in God, or so I thought.'
69
BÉATRIX BECK
'Luckily you got over it, eh?' he said with a smile. 'How
do you expect me to believe without any proofs?'
‘There's no need for proofs. Belief in God is not a
scientific, cerebral certainty, as you seem to imagine. Belief
in God is a harmony of our entire being. If you love
someone, you love without proofs. It is the same with faith.'
'But… to begin with there are so many religious books
that list the so-called "proofs of God's existence."’
‘They're wrong. It's badly put. Those are presumptions
and not proofs. They are guides that help us along a
stretch of the road. But there is always the precipice that
each man must climb on his own. If proofs existed,
everyone would believe. There wouldn't even be any need
of belief: we'd know, we'd understand. In that case this
would no longer be the world below, but already heaven
above.'
Morin pulled a block of paper towards him, picked up a
pencil, looked at me, and announced:
'I'm going to draw your picture.'
With mocking concentration he made a single, tiny mark
in a corner of the white sheet, which he showed to me,
explaining:
‘That's you.’
'Ah!'
'Yes. Now I'll draw God,' and Morin traced a circle which
filled the rest of the paper.
70
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'The point wants to swallow the circle; but that's
impossible, as you can see. The point must be contained
within the circle, the parts cannot be reversed.'
'What is the circle waiting for?'
'It's up to you to move. If God compelled us to cleave to
him we wouldn't be free any longer.'
Just now you compared belief in God to love. Your
comparison won't do at all. I grant you, you love a person
without needing proofs, but you do have proof that that
person exists.'
'In fact what you keep asking yourself, over and over
again, is whether God has an existence or not. God has no
existence. God is existence. As you know, Jehovah said: "I
am that I am."
'It's rather like saying: x = x. What I wondered, after
finishing Jesus the Christ, was whether the existence of God
is a personal existence.'
'Human beings seem to you to be endowed with a
personality?'
'Yes.'
'And whence do they derive this personality if not from a
superior personality?'
‘That doesn't follow. We could be a progression from
previous non-differentiated states.'
'Where does this progressive energy come from? Can the
lesser, on its own, produce the greater?'
71
BÉATRIX BECK
"That's all just scholasticism. Maybe the lesser can
produce the greater after all.'
'You sound as though you believe in spontaneous
creation.'
'Of course, Father Morin, you are producing all the
proper arguments to make me believe in God. But an atheist
could find equally good arguments for the other side.'
'Naturally. We're wrong to go on chattering in this way;
words are useless. God is an individual, experimental reality,
different for each of us and incommunicable to others.'
'Incommunicable, that is appalling.'
'Why? What difference can it make to you in the long run
whether there is a God or whether there is not?'
'What do you mean, what difference can it make to me?
It's the only thing that matters. When I was studying
philosophy I thought of killing myself because of him.'
'Remarkable idea.'
My talks with Morin, which took place once or twice a
week, became now as much a part of my life as the Sunday
afternoons I spent walking with my daughter in the country.
I had thumbed through the priest's books so often that I
could have picked out any one in the dark. It happened that
he would have looked for various books to lend people and
have been unable to find them. When next I came to see
him he would ask me:
'Where are they?'
I could show him at once.
72
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
I felt more at home here than I had ever done anywhere
else before, in this sort of parlour which looked like the
office of a broken down laundry. Sometimes the floor was
polished and shone; at others it was stained with patches of
damp. Morin apologized for this:
'It's the snow from people's boots. I'm going to mop it
up, but I haven't had time yet. Then I'll sweep the floor and
give it a proper polishing.'
My well-being was troubled: I was stealing his time from
others who were entitled to it, whereas I was not, since I
would never be converted. I told Morin of my worries.
'Don't fuss yourself,' he replied. 'It's a relaxation for me
to talk to you; it does us both good. If you find our
conversations boring, you mustn't come to see me. But so
far as I'm concerned, you don't waste my time at all,' he
added without excessive cordiality.
I had been careful not to tell Morin my name and I
wondered how he referred to me when he noted the time
of our next meeting in his much-used engagement book. He
never questioned me concerning my private life. Without
being asked I had told him that my husband had died in the
war, probably through suicide. I anticipated that the priest
would show shocked horror or would express pity. He did
neither, simply saying:
'Yes, there have been many marriages broken.'
Morin never spoke of himself. Once, however, when we
were talking about the relative condition of only children
73
BÉATRIX BECK
and of those with a family, he said—and his face, shiny as a
pebble, lit up:
'I've two sisters at home. Now, with you, I've got three.'
These words, spoken with utter spontaneity and a
seraphic smile, moved me. But I mastered my emotions and
asked:
'Do you tell all the women who come here that they're
your sisters?'
'It is mostly young boys that I see,' he answered soberly.
'How can you include me, spiritually, among your sisters
since they're presumably Christians and I'm not?'
'What's that got to do with it? Nothing, nothing at all.'
This reply was so unexpected that I did not believe my
ears, and I asked:
'What did you say, Father Morin?'
He refused to repeat his last remark:
'You heard perfectly well.'
'Oh, I see what your scheme is,' I said to him, 'you're
relying on my contrariness to convert me. But it won't work.
Nor will anything else either.'
'All right, crayfish,' he replied amiably.
I laughed aloud at being called a crayfish, but it showed
me that this fisher of men had not given up the idea of
catching me in his net.
74
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER FIVE
One evening when I was going up the stairs of the rectory I
was surprised to see Christine Sangredin in front of me, also
walking upstairs. There could be no doubt about it: her hair,
dyed the colour of mahogany and drawn back sharply from
the nape of her neck, her black and threadbare jacket, her
banana-coloured skirt with the worm-like design in brown,
her strong, bare calves, the white straps of her sandals
encasing her yellowish-pinkish heels that were like two little
apples, the cheerful clatter of her wooden soles. I caught up
with her and touched her shoulder. She turned around,
stared at me, and asked:
'What are you up to here?'
There was no trace of make-up on her face. The swallowshaped ear-rings had flown away from her small, delicately
curved ears. Her lips without lipstick called kissing to mind.
The moonlight, striking down through the small window
above the stairs, gave her skin a pearly softness. I could not
resist the impulse; raising my hand, I stroked her cheek. She
started and seemed angrier than the day that I had struck
her.
75
BÉATRIX BECK
'You… you're out of make-up?' I stammered. I did not
know what else to say to justify my impulsive gesture. 'No,
I've taken it off.'
'Why?'
'I'm on my way to visit my spiritual director,' she said, as
though stating the obvious, and with the same note of
aggressive self-defence that she used when she told us she
was 'proud of her concierge mother.'
I tried to calm myself: several priests and many other
people lived in this house.
'Who is he?' I asked, leaning against the banister.
'Father Morin,' she replied, her tone one of profound
respect. 'And you, what are you doing here?'
'I was on my way to see him. But you go. Good-bye.' And
I ran down the stairs, regardless of Christine's cries:
'Stop! Wait a minute, come back, Aro, Aro!'
She would have all the priests out of their holes! I hurried
across town.
'If only I could throw myself in,' I thought as I crossed
the turbid river. A few days before I had been
enthusiastically reciting to my comrades The Death of the Wolf:
To groan, to weep, to pray, all are cowardice.
'Cowardly to pray!' Danièle Holdenberg had exclaimed
indignantly. When my periodic enemy had told the story of
my visits to the priest, I would be thought, not with- out
reason, to be either an arrant hypocrite or a lunatic.
76
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
My distress gave way to a sort of joyfulness. I now knew
that it was Morin's influence which made Christine act
kindly on occasion, despite the nastiness of her nature. 'At
last, at last, the catastrophe is beginning,' I thought, and felt
strangely relieved. The next day, without any preamble, I
began to tell the others about Karl Adam's Jesus, praising it
wildly. I had been afraid that my words would evoke
surprise or mockery: nothing of the sort happened, the girls
remaining entirely uninterested. I still had to explain what
had happened to Christine, which I decided to do when I
took her the mail. It was she who came to find me,
surreptitiously slipping a little folded note into my hand. I
put it in my pocket, remembering as I did so the violent
messages I used to receive in class from Marie-Dominique
and the note that a red-headed boy at school had once
passed me:
I love you. Don't tell anyone.
Christine Sangredin's message was on similar lines:
It was me who should have left, not you. I'm sorry. Father Morin
is expecting you at nine, day after to-morrow, can you go then?
You're not like other people. What I want to say will annoy you
maybe: I'd really like to be your friend. How about you?
The Father would be sure to say I'd be better helping my ma with
her washing instead of chattering away like this.
77
BÉATRIX BECK
Please answer.
This childish proposal of friendship, perhaps
unconsciously perverse, filled me with joy. At the same time
I was sure that the inspiration had originated with Morin,
who no doubt was pleased to see in her a potential assistant
in his scheme for me.
I found Christine outside the gate. She was seated on her
chromium bicycle, with one foot on the curb, and she kept
ringing its bell, automatically. She said to me:
'It's funny we should have met there. Me, when I went to
see him the first time, I said to myself: "At last you've found
what you've been looking for."'
'It's not in your part of town.'
'Danièle took me there first of all.'
Only then did I remember Danièle Holdenberg saying, a
long time ago, that she went to see a priest occasionally:
'What's happening to me!' she had cried with rapturous
rancour. 'Sometimes I'd like to beat him.'
'You and Danièle, you're devout Catholics?' I asked
Madame Sangredin.
'Not in the same way. For her religion is like her history
of France.'
'And you?'
'Me, I'm different. We've got it in our blood, our lot have.'
'Did Father Morin say anything about me?'
'He said you were a funny girl.'
78
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Is that all?'
'I shouldn't tell you. But he said: "She's nearer to God
than the people who come to my church."’
When next I saw Morin he made no allusion to Christine.
'Madame Sangredin told you…' I ventured. 'Yes, she told
me. What a way to behave.'
I was not sure whether the priest was scolding me for
having struck her in the office or for having stroked her
cheek on the stairs. And not knowing I felt the need to pour
out my heart:
'I, I'm in love with a girl!'
No sooner were the words uttered than this truth,
previously dead, came alive again: at the thought of Sabine
my heart contracted.
Morin sat in silence. At last and pensively he said: 'Quite.
All the men of your own age are far away.' 'But you, you're
a man of my age,' I replied with false ingenuousness.
'I don't count. I'm not the same,' he said patiently, as
though teaching a backward child its alphabet. Then, after
another silence:
'A girl where you work?'
'Yes. She's beautiful and clever. She runs the whole place.
She's a ray of black sunlight. She's called Sabine.' 'Why do
you not bring her to see me?'
'She'd never come; I'm her subordinate. Anyhow, I don't
love her the way I used to.'
79
BÉATRIX BECK
'You've never loved, you don't even know what love is.
You just vegetate introspectively like a shrivelled-up plant.'
There was the sound of a distant explosion. We fell silent,
listening. I thought to see on Morin's face an expression
similar to my own. This gave me the courage to confess:
'I can't help it, whenever I hear that noise it makes me
wild with joy. Even if I don't know what's happening, even
if I can't hope it's the resistance. I try to tell myself that
people are dying tragically, but it makes no difference, the
more I tell myself that, the happier I feel. As soon as the
bangs start I want to be there, not for any reason, just for
fun.'
'I am exactly the same,' said Morin. 'We must realize we
are poor creatures. We like smashing things, we enjoy
violence. Human nature is corrupt, we must resign ourselves to that.'
"There are people in my room all the time, they sleep in
my bed,' remarked the priest with some astonishment, as
though stating a curious fact over which he had no control.
'What people?'
'Jews, by heaven. You take in one and before you know it
you've got the whole tribe, and their friends. They're after
us all the time for baptismal certificates. I have to go to the
bishop's nowadays for a wash.'
80
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'What does Father Morin say about your being proVichy?' I asked Christine.
'He says he looks forward to helping me on the day of
liberation, when I'm tied to a stake.'
The colour of Christine's hair underwent strange
permutations.
'What on earth have you done to it?' I asked.
'It's him. He threatened he'd stop giving me absolution if
I went on dyeing my hair. He knows exactly how much it
costs; he must have a barber he confesses. He told me I
ought to imitate "the simple style of the Communist
women." I saw what he was getting at right away: the
Communist women, that's you. You've bolshevized him
good and proper. I said to him: "If I agree to do social work
in my spare time, I'll be too busy." He said: "Nobody is ever
too busy." "You can talk, Father, but how about my little
girl?" "Put her in a boarding school, she'll be far better off."
What he'd really like would be the Russian system: the kids
all brought up in barracks so as the parents can spend their
time looking after Tom, Dick and Harry. You've really done
a job on him.'
'It's the other way around, it's he who is turning me into
a Communist. I told him my mother disapproved of the
Young Communists, because they give themselves before
they've made anything of themselves. He said: "They're
right. It's by giving oneself that one makes something of
oneself." ’
81
BÉATRIX BECK
'If it had been me I wouldn't have thought twice about
answering him the way he often answers me: "That's just a
lot of blather." ’
The Germans had ordered a curfew from eight o'clock
on, for an indefinite period. I could no longer go to see
Morin and I had books of his to return. I took a chance and
went to call on him one Saturday, early in the after- noon.
The wooden peg was in the hole marked: Saint Bernard. I
went downstairs again, wondering if I wanted, if I dared, to
enter the church.
Gently I pushed open the door. Morin was alone,
kneeling in the choir-stalls. He saw me but went on praying
for a long time. I waited, standing behind a pillar. There was
no question of my praying, but Morin's serene gravity, his
absolute silence and stillness, took possession of me. I was
lifted up, borne away by another's prayer. My mother once
told me that when she was a girl she had gone far out into
the Mediterranean, without swimming, one of her hands on
her father's shoulder, the other on that of her brother. Now
I too found myself far away, remote from any shore and all
anxiety, though I had not even moved.
Morin got to his feet, walked across to me, and gestured
me to follow him outside. In the porch an aged lady stopped
him:
'Father, will there be an Elevation of the Host at
Benediction to-night?'
82
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
Before answering, Morin took hold of the lapels of my
coat and pushed me to one side. Then, changing his mind,
he produced a key from his pocket and gave it to me, saying,
in a most friendly tone:
'Please be so good as to wait for me up there, I'll be with
you right away.'
Holding the key in my hand I climbed the stairs once
again and was filled with astonishment at the priest's
eccentric manner which he apparently did not even modify
in front of respectable strangers. I had never met anyone so
deliberately contemptuous of what 'they' might say.
The door opened very easily, since it was not locked but
had simply been pulled shut. Although I was alone, I took
care to make no sound and stepped lightly. I even held my
breath. The silence was calm. The nakedness of the big
room was such that one felt all the furniture had been
removed in order to make room for a party.
Morin arrived out of breath.
He took an apple from a drawer, and handed it to me,
saying:
'Here, I kept this for you.'
My eyes misted over. I shook my head.
'Do you refuse to accept presents from people?' 'You
know I don't. I accept your charity, when you give me your
time.'
'Charity!' protested Morin. He pulled himself together
at once:
83
BÉATRIX BECK
'Yes, it's true, I do give you my time as an act of charity.
Now bite into that apple.'
'No, thank you, Father Morin.'
‘That's pride, that's what that is. You don't like the
bourgeoisie and you're more bourgeois than they are.
Doesn't it smell good?' he asked, holding it in front of my
nose.
'Yes.'
He enjoyed himself, polishing it against the sleeve of his
soutane, throwing it up in the air and catching it again.
"Take it.'
'No, thank you, Father Morin.'
'All right, I'll give it to someone less stupid than you. In
life simplicity is essential. Are you simple?'
'I don't know. Do I seem simple to you?'
'You don't seem anything to me.'
'How about you, Father Morin, are you simple?' 'Yes.' He
thought for a moment. 'Yes. I think so.' 'What do you think
of me?'
'Nothing.'
'How can you say that? It's not possible.'
'It is. I have formed no judgment on you. Nobody will
ever ask me what you are worth.'
'But after all, when I'm here, face to face, what sort of
impression do I make on you?'
He studied me, his eyes half-closed, his expression that of
a horse-coper examining a foal, and he said slowly:
84
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘The impression of an embryo. That's the impression you
make on me.'
'Just now you accused me of pride. But why should pride
be a bad thing?'
'Because it is a lack of self-respect.'
'On the contrary! It shows great self-respect.'
'It's lying to oneself.'
Lying, what do you mean?'
'Lying by pretending to be more important than you really
are.'
The angelus was ringing. I stared at Morin with an avid
curiosity that was not without malevolence: either he would
behave like the Millet picture or else he would ignore the
call of the Church-he would be ridiculous or inadequate.
'Six brones and fifteen carberries for the lockaday lady of
ling,' he remarked in his most serious manner. Then without
any transition he went from double talk to the language of
the Church and declaimed joyously:
'Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae et concepit de Spiritu
Sancti et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.
'Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genitrix.
'And then you, if you weren't such a very clever young
woman, would reply:
'Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.'
Morin stared critically at my bare feet in my sandals, and
said:
85
BÉATRIX BECK
'You should paint your toenails.'
I choked and did not answer.
'You need a husband,' he went on.
'Too bad!' I answered. 'I make love to myself with a stick.'
It seemed to me that Father Morin's features changed. I
had never before noticed how emaciated his face was, tired
and too young; the face of a slum child. He bowed his
tonsured head, looked up again and said flatly:
'You could hurt yourself.'
'I'm not that tender.'
He said nothing.
'When there are gaps in our talks, Father Morin, is it
because you're waiting for the Holy Ghost to pop the words
into your mouth?'
'My poor pigeon, you really do love to chatter, don't you?'
he said with a sad smile.
'Father Morin, you haven't answered my question: are
your silences private asides with the Holy Ghost?'
'You should not even dare to speak that name.' I opened
my lips to utter some other indecency. He stopped me,
saying:
'When I was a little boy and talked rubbish, they used to
say to me: "Go up to the attic and talk to the walls."’
' I accepted this reproach and tried to remain silent, but
after a few moments I asked bitterly:
'Why am I so horrid to you?’
'It's the way you are,' replied Morin.
86
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
And he added:
'It'll pass.'
From the depths of his brown eyes there welled waves of
joy.
Neither when I arrived nor when I left did Morin ever
shake my hand. If absentmindedly I even held mine out he
would simply graze it with the palm of his own, as flat and
hard as a board. On this occasion, after I had mocked his
religion in so gross a fashion, he took my hand as I was
leaving and shook it more firmly, more warmly than I ever
remembered it to have been shaken before.
If I were to commit a crime, I thought, he would kiss me.
The aged vicar was leaving Morin's room. With unusual
politeness the latter said to me, stepping aside: 'If madame
would be so good as to come in.’
Scarcely had the door closed behind when Morin,
guffawing like a schoolboy who has just played a joke on his
teacher, asked me:
'Well, where had we got to, tree-toad?'
'What disgusts me about Christianity is the self-interest of
it all: you force yourselves to do this, you stop your- selves
from doing that, in order to get to heaven.'
‘And you, when you plant a seed don't you want it to
grow? That is what heaven is, the sprouting of the grain. Do
you remember the mustard seed that Our Lord talked
about?' Morin asked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though this
87
BÉATRIX BECK
were a metaphor that we had heard a friend of ours expound
a day or two before.
'Your Lord,' I corrected him.
'Yours as much as mine,' he said with a winning smile.
'No, not if I refuse.'
'You can refuse to let the earth turn on its axis, but I
don't think it'd make much difference.'
'The Mass…. Why did the Church invent such a
harlequinade?’
'When I was at the seminary I felt the same way about it
as you do. It's only since leaving school that I've come to
understand it. It's a drama in four acts, the Mass. The actors
are the whole world, you (even if you aren't there), us, in the
same way that we are all actors in our own lives, with Christ
playing opposite us. Mass is a living drama.' 'Maybe the Mass
has hidden beauties. But you've got to be initiated before
you can see them.'
'Mass is said in Latin, so nobody catches any part of it.
There's no book, there's no use looking in the book, you
won't find it. You can be sure that a few years hence Mass
will be said in the national languages of every country. Rome
is very slow in such matters.'
'No, it's not the Latin, it's not that… At least it's
international. Besides, if I were talking to God in an official
capacity I think I'd rather use a special language. What repels
me is something far worse.’
‘The people who come to Mass?’
88
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘That must be part of it. As a group they're far more
horrible than the crowds in the streets or the people you see
in trams.'
'Yes, they stop other people coming. They go to Mass
because it's nice, a spot of mass between sleeping and
having their Sunday morning drink. Those are the eleveno'clock-Mass Christians, the Sunday Christians. The Church
has no worse enemies.'
'If I understand you properly, practising Catholics are the
worst enemies of the Church. Are its real friends atheists
like me?'
'If you came to spoken Mass, every morning at six
o'clock, here at Saint Bernard's, you'd see! It was difficult,
but it's been arranged at last. And on Sunday at ten, sung
Mass. Everyone sings, it's the expression of everyone's
feelings, the feast of all the world.’
When you talk to me like that, it's as though you were
calling to me from another planet.’
'It's not easy to fit oneself into an unbeliever's skin if one
has been nourished by the faith since one's mother's milk. I
must be patient.'
At night I dreamed. It was certain that faith in God made
the world into a ladder of fulfilment. From the amoeba to
God, through me, the progression seemed inescapable.
God, the supreme me. God was within me. God, contained
within me as one of my vital organs, like the essential
89
BÉATRIX BECK
viscera, confounded with my own life, yet dominating my
being, incomprehensible to myself, as is the hypnotist to his
subject.
From: 'I think, therefore I am,' to 'I think God, therefore
God is,' the step is an easy one. Is it not with God as it is
with a mathematical formula? To conceive it is to create it.
But that act of creation, is it not simply the discovery that
the formula already existed? In the realms of speculation
there is no difference between virtual existence and
existence. To be able to exist, for a disembodied being, is to
exist. If God is, alleluia! If he is not, let us create him.
God was becoming a question of personal preference.
In the problem of life the unknown could take on several
values, one of which was God. Empirical reasons should
determine which value to accept: was God the most fruitful
hypothesis? For me, perhaps. But he should be so for my
whole species.
My arguments with Morin were disturbing: I charged like
a bull, head down. The obstacle would fade away into
nothing just as I was about to crash it. Carried onwards by
my own impetus, I would fall, would not know where I was.
For lack of an adversary I lost my way.
Christ said: 'By their fruits shall ye know them.’ Morin
seemed to me a fruit without a flaw. But how are we to
know, Jesus, if the same tree bears fruit that nourishes and
fruit that poisons?
'I am more unhappy than ever, since I've been talking
90
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
to you about the things that interest me,' I said to Morin.
'I can't stop myself reading the books you lend me, and
yet I know perfectly well that they're bad for me, killing me.
I'm tortured, I'm hunted, I'm persecuted. I feel I should
never come to see you, ever again, but I can't help coming,
I can't do without it.
‘'We have a phrase for that. We call it: the working of
grace,' Morin informed me flatly.
91
BÉATRIX BECK
92
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER
SIX
Part of my attic was cluttered up with rubbish. I decided to
spend Whit-Monday clearing it out. I loaded the loose
plaster and broken bricks into a wooden box which I then
carried down to the courtyard. After having lugged the box
up and down six flights of stairs several times, I had to rest.
I sat down on a trunk, in the attic. It was at this moment
that disaster struck. 'I shall be converted to-morrow'
announced a voice within me, an inflexible, desperate voice,
inaccessible to reason. It was as though a strangler, suddenly
appearing from nowhere, had seized me by the throat. I was
overwhelmed and felt that it was more than my life that I
was losing: I was ceasing to be myself. I was losing, for ever
and ever, my personality, my freedom, my peace of mind.
Every- thing was being blotted out. Henceforth I would
have to walk, alone, across a limitless desert. To-morrow I
must undergo this punishment: I must tell the other girls
about my conversion. My ruin would lead to that of my
child, too. From now on we would both be compelled to
take the same path, without caution, without care. Why
follow Christ, since I doubted him? Why sacrifice
everything for nothing? There's no way out of it,' was my
only reply.
93
BÉATRIX BECK
As a child I used to smother a desire to cough, which yet
would end by bursting forth horribly in front of my mother;
even so, now, my conversion broke through its long
repression, broke down the dykes. Barny was having a fit. I
was the victim of a malady as severe as sudden insanity. Yet
my senses continued to function as they always had. I
watched, I took part in my own burial. I tried to find support
in the words of Claudel: 'The business of a stomach is not
to understand food but to digest it.' There are happy
Christians who live a normal life, I told myself up. But all
attempts to console myself were unavailing: to enter the
Church was to wall myself alive. Overcome with shame, I
remembered a phrase I had once heard. 'Nowadays there
are only perverts or converts.'
Whatever inner satisfaction Morin might derive from my
return to religion, I was sure that his words would be solely
sarcastic. In a sort of agony I finished cleaning out the attic.
'Father Morin, there's something I'd like to tell you,' I
said, speaking with difficulty.
He raised his eyes to mine. His expression was attentive.
Just this. I'm cornered.' 'Cornered?'
'Yes, I'm going to be a convert. Just tell me what to do.'
Morin showed signs of consternation. He asked
anxiously:
‘What's happened to you?’
94
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Nothing. I'm going to join, or rejoin, the Catholic
Church'
‘Why?
I've got my back to the wall, I surrender.’
'Perhaps you're a little overtired, or maybe you haven't
been eating enough lately.’
'No, I'm not tired, and we've got hold of some potatoes.’
'Why do you want to be converted?’
'I don't want to, I have to.’
‘What does it mean to you conversion?’
'It means setting out to follow the teachings of Christ.'
‘Which teachings?
'Being poor all the time. Loving people, doing everything you can for them, sacrificing yourself and your own
interests, praying to God, taking the sacraments, joining the
Church in fact.'
'You'd do better to think carefully before making a
decision which will involve your entire life.'
'It's not a decision. I have no choice,’
'You imagine you have no choice because you're
somewhat nervous and overexcited.’
'Oh no, I was absolutely calm, all alone up there in the
attic.
‘What happened in the attic?’
'Nothing happened. Just the opposite: everything
finished.'
'How do you mean?'
95
BÉATRIX BECK
'I mean, like when the Arsenal blew up.'
‘This girl is off her nut,' murmured Morin.
'Believe me, if I'm converted it'll be despite myself.’
'A clear case of possession,' said the priest, and added
with enthusiasm: 'I'll have to exorcize you.'
'Father Morin, naturally enough you did everything you
could to make me a Christian. But now, to hear you talk,
anyone would think that you really want to stop me from
following your Lord.'
'Why should you follow him?'
'Because I am not certain that what he said was wrong.’
'You're going to poison your existence, you're going to
wreck your life.'
'Yes, it's true. And you, you're saying that to test me,
obviously. But me, I know quite well that nothing worse
ever has happened to me or ever could happen to me.'
'You've never thought of becoming a Protestant? They're
often wonderful, those people.'
'Why are you laughing at me, Father Morin?'
'I'm not laughing at you, I'm telling you the truth.'
'I could not possibly become a Protestant, because Christ
founded one Church, with Peter as its head. Loyalty to
Christ implies remaining within that Church even if it's gone
rotten. He said that the powers of hell would not prevail
against it. For myself, I think they have prevailed, only
perhaps not definitely, not completely. And then there's
96
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
another reason, a more serious one, why the Protestants can
never be Christians even though they may be saints.'
'And what is that? You seem to me to be talking rather
wildly.'
‘The reason is that Christ said: "My flesh is meat indeed,
my blood is drink indeed." And the Protestants don't believe
this statement of Christ's, they deny the real presence.
They're like those disciples who said: "This is an hard saying;
who can hear it?" And then Jesus said to them: "Does this
offend you?" The Protestants followed in the footsteps of
those disciples, the ones who turned back and stopped
walking with Christ, which was obviously much the wisest
course to take. The Protestants are far too reasonable to be
Christians. It's not honest to have turned Holy Communion
into a simple service of commemoration. As though Christ
cared about souvenirs!'
My personal taste inclined me strongly towards
Protestantism: it is both less shocking and less cumbersome.
Protestantism is very nearly a lay creed.
'All right. Now then, let's be practical. Well?'
'I must go to confession, so that I can take communion.
Am I compelled to go to my own parish church?'
'No, you can come to Saint Bernard's.'
'Would it be you…’
'Yes, that would be better, since we know each other. I
hear confessions on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and
97
BÉATRIX BECK
Saturdays, from half-past five until about half-past seven or
eight. And in the mornings, before mass.’
Disgust closed over me.
'I'll be there to-morrow evening,' I announced as I got to
my feet.
'If you still want to,' answered Morin. 'If you don't come,
it won't make any difference.'
On the landing, instead of good-bye, he said:
‘Then I'll have seen everything.’
In his patched and dingy black robe he looked like a
sardonic blackbird.
I could not trumpet out my conversion to the girls I
worked with, on the other hand I had no right to leave them
in ignorance of it. The only solution was to hang a cross
about my neck. The girls would be astonished, they would
laugh: then I would tell them about my change of heart.
I looked at all the crosses in all the jewellers' shops, every
one was too expensive. The Prisoners' Work Bazaar sold
crosses made of paste; they were of a vulgarity which could
do no honour to Him who had been crucified. In the
cheaper department stores there were crystal crosses, but
these were too discreet for my purpose. I combed the town.
The antique dealers had many crosses in their windows;
however these were too much like ordinary jewels. Flustered
and exhausted, I visited the flea market and there, among a
pile of seashells and pieces of crockery that did not match
98
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
and old shoes, all laid out on a length of cheap, faded and
wrinkled red cotton, there I found my beloved awaiting me:
it was large, of beaten metal and the colour of lead. It cost
one hundred and forty francs.
As soon as it was mine, I held it tightly in my hands and
made this promise:
'I shall keep you for ever. I shall be buried with you.' I
bought a chain from an ironmonger and as soon as I was
out in the street once again, I hung it around my neck and
outside my blouse where it was visible to all.
'What a lovely cross! But it's a monk's cross, Madame
Aronovitch. Where on earth did you find such a
monstrosity?'
'It dates from the Crusades, at least. Let's have a look at
it.'
'Is it an heirloom?'
'I didn't know you were such a snappy dresser. You're a
sly one!'
'It must have cost you a small fortune. Where did you get
it from? A dustbin?'
'No, not a dustbin. The flea market.’
'It really suits you. You look just like a Boche with your
swastika.'
‘This isn't a swastika.'
99
BÉATRIX BECK
I felt as though I had been transported back to the
schoolyard of my childhood, during the break, surrounded
by cruel children.
I had every reason to be pleased: my cross was certainly
doing its job as a bait. But I felt more like the worm than
the fisherman.
'Why've you dolled yourself up with that thing? Have you
taken a vow?'
‘Yes, more or less.’
'A vow of chastity?'
'I'm wearing this cross as a sign of my religion.'
'No!'
'You've changed sides?’
'Yes.'
'I'm disgusted with you.'
'You're mad.'
'And after all those fine speeches you made us.'
'I'll never shake hands with you again.’
'Next thing she'll sprout a halo and a little pair of wings.’
'I see, it was Whitsun and the Holy Ghost paid you a
visit.'
'Yes,' I answered, 'that must be it. You're quite right.'
'Mind out the Holy Ghost doesn't put you in the family
way.'
Fortunately neither Christine Sangredin nor Danièle was
present. They would have had to take my side, and their
100
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
support would have hurt me even more than the gibes of
the others.
Walking jerkily, I went straight from the office to Saint
Bernard's. There's no sense, I thought, in persecuting
oneself like this. Oh, God!
The atmosphere of the church seemed no longer the
same as it had been on the occasion of my first visit: this
evening it was one of expectancy, a hint from archway to
choir-stalls, from stained-glass windows to baptistery, a
dispensation of cheer and promise from which I alone was
excluded. In front of Morin's confessional there waited a
long line of people, as though food were being issued. I
joined them, and was next to a boy scout whose face was
buried in his hands. Two young girls, one wearing about her
head a white and orange scarf, the other a scarf of identical
pattern coloured green and black, were bending over a
single missal. An Indo-Chinese student no doubt, his fingers
hieratically together, appeared to be in a state of meditation
which I envied. A woman was attempting to keep a boy of
three or four quiet by pointing at a statue of Jeanne d'Arc.
The longer I had to wait the greater grew my agony. I
could not prepare myself. The little boy was blowing kisses
with both hands towards Jeanne d'Arc. Comrade Saint Joan,
help me. Morin kept each penitent for a grotesquely long
time. I tried counting slowly and regularly: this might restore
my calm of mind.
101
BÉATRIX BECK
Each time a person emerged from the confessional we
would all move up one place. There were only three people
ahead of me, only two, only a girl of ten or so, now in the
confessional. She scraped her feet together. I heard Morin
say to her:
'Yes, ducky.'
She was only in there a few minutes.
'Hello, Barny,' said the priest, sliding back the panel.
'Oh, no!' I protested.
'What are you so worked up about?'
I tried to discover. Whenever I was spontaneous I was
hypocritical. My immediate reaction was not usually my own
but that of an unauthorized advocate. In order to achieve
sincerity I had to creep up on it carefully, like a cat stalking
a bird.
'It's pride,' I answered.
'You'll get over it. There's nothing to it, as you'll see.
Repeat after me: Lord, illumine my conscience in order that
I may know in what I have offended thee and may expiate
my sins by a humble confession, a true contrition and a
sincere penitence.'
'Lord, illumine my conscience in order that I may know
in what I have offended thee…’
'And may expiate my sins by a humble confession,'
repeated Morin.
'Do I absolutely have to say that?'
'Yes, but take your time. There's no hurry.'
102
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'And may expiate my sins. ...'
'By a humble confession,' repeated Morin for the third
time.
'By a humble confession, a true contrition, and a sincere
penitence,' I said quickly, the words tumbling over
themselves in my haste.
'Thy kindly spirit will lead me back into the path of
truth.’
‘Thy kindly spirit will lead me back into the path of truth.'
'Lord, Thou shalt restore me in Thy justice.’
‘'Lord, Thou shalt restore me in Thy justice.'
'Your hands are pure, are they not?'
'No. No, father.'
'Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. You must
treat it with the greatest respect. Do you not find your
human organism a wonderful thing?'
'Yes.'
"Therefore you must not dishonour it. You will cease
being vicious?'
'I shall.'
'Are you pleasant to the others, in your office?'
"The others hate me for being converted.'
'And you, do you love them?'
'I can't. I adore God, if he exists, because he is perfect
and all-powerful. But those women…'
'You know what Saint John said to people such as you?'
'No.'
103
BÉATRIX BECK
'He said: "He who says 'I love God' and does not love his
brothers is a liar."’
There was silence, a shattering, lasting silence: Morin
broke it at last, asking:
'Is there anything else wrong?’
'Yes.'
'What is it?’
‘The first time I came here I lied to myself, pretending
that I was doing what I did from mockery. I think I've acting
a part for months, hiding from myself and running away.'
‘That is known as resisting grace. Is that all?'
'Yes.'
'As penance for your sins you will simply say, once: My
God, make me love my neighbour as myself, for love of
You.'
The lightness of this penance overwhelmed me.
On the following Sunday I went to the spoken Mass at
six o'clock in Saint Mesmin's, the church nearest to my
home. I followed the service in the clumsy, dog-eared
missal-and-vesperal that Morin had insisted on giving me.
With the others I came up to the communion rail. Miseratur
tui omnipotens Deus, et, dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam
aeternam. Hail, oh my last morning! Indulgentiam, absolutionem et
remissionem peccatorum nostrorum tribuat nobis omnipotens et
misericors Dominus. Serenade the executiones Ecce Agnus Dei, the
terrible Lamb. I returned to my place, devoid of all feeling
104
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
of grace, my soul a desert, yet sealed, once and for all as well
I knew, by the little white wafer
‘'It's time you began to go to catechism,' I said to France,
attempting to keep my tone of voice natural. She laughed in
my face.
I've been going for a long time already.'
'What? Why didn't you tell me?'
'You'd have been cross.’
'Why didn't the Misses Plantain tell me?’
‘They don't know.'
'When do you go?’
'After school.'
'Don't they worry about your being late back?’
‘They think I've been kept in.’
Her mother and daughter had gone away for their holiday
and Christine Sangredin and I ate together at the canteen.
After we had swallowed the grey gruel and had our fill of
turnip pie or beetroot stew, we would sit on a bench in the
Place Saint Mesmin, opposite the church, and there we
would eat our dessert.
'It's fine you've returned,' said Christine.
'It makes me suffer horribly.'
'Really, why?'
'Imagine a snail, torn out of his shell, still alive and
covered with sores, dragging itself along through the dirt
and stones.'
105
BÉATRIX BECK
‘The sunshine will heal its sores,' said Christine with a
radiant smile.
'You,' I said, 'who can really manage brotherly love, how
can you be a collaborator?'
'There's no other way out for France.'
'Even if that were true, even if the Resistance were certain
to fail, even if collaboration were the only way France could
go on living, you still wouldn't have the right, as a Christian,
to accept that solution.'
'Why on earth not?'
'Because it would be better for France to die than to live
in a state of mortal sin.'
'Look here, it's not because France has accepted
collaboration as the lesser of two evils that the country is in
a state of mortal sin.'
'Yes it is, since it involves accepting the deportation and
the killing of people who have done nothing. +Of Sabine's
brother, for example, among thousands of others.'
'Resistance just produces reprisals, and that's all it does
produce.'
To put it another way: you, as a Catholic, agree that my
daughter be sent to the gas-chamber so that your daughter
can go on getting her quart of milk a day.' Christine seemed
shaken. She asked:
'You think you should sacrifice your own people's lives
even if it does no good?'
106
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'The people who are shipped off to Germany are as much
your own people as anyone else.'
‘They're almost all yids.'
'Quite. Our Lord is a yid.'
'At home we are all' sure the maquisards would do better
to keep quiet, but that doesn't stop us being Christians: the
other day Mum looked after one who'd been wounded in
the arm and she even mended his coat for him.'
'I don't understand,' said Christine, 'why you get no joy
out of the practice of religion.’
'Just the opposite, it destroys all joy for me: it tires me
out, it congeals me, I hardly know how to put it: it wastes
my time, it means I have to make all sorts of effort:
attention, meditation, acquiesence, renunciation, struggles
against human respect, disgust and so on and so forth…'
'You have faith, all the same, since you were converted.'
'It was a compulsion-almost physical. I think that my faith
is really the creation of contradictory doubts that cancel one
another out. It's a very low-class sort of faith.'
'You mean, when you go to church it's something like
working overtime?'
'No. It's funny… even though so far as I can see I get
nothing out of taking communion except distress, still... it's
foolish… but whenever it's over I am always upset to think:
"Now I've got to wait a whole week before I can take it
again."’
107
BÉATRIX BECK
'Why wait a week? Why don't you go to mass on
weekdays?'
‘That's all I need.’
'Me, I go two or three times a week. Why shouldn't you?'
'You think so?' I asked, hesitantly.
At home I was seized with a desire to follow and even
to exceed Christine's advice. The nullity of my Sunday
communion inspired me to take it every day. I resolved on
the spot to attend mass and to receive the eucharist every
morning of my life unless prevented by forces beyond my
control.
'It was worth coming,' I thought next morning at Saint
Mesmin's, and I thought the same thing during hundreds of
mornings that followed. It would have been hard for me to
define the benefit that I derived from the host. Everything,
both within and outside myself, remained unchanged, there
was no improvement, no progress. But this imperfect whole
enjoyed a beneficial transposition. Just as a squalid
landscape and vulgar figures when faithfully reproduced in
all their meanness by a painter of genius become a
masterpiece, even so all of us, on the divine canvas, are
beautiful. It was there, the life of eternity, beginning at this
moment. Just as within myself, at last…
My joy grew like a growing child. Introïbo ad Deum qui
laetificat juventutem meam, I cried in exultation. I was the drop
of water that had become wine.
108
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
When Morin learned that I went to mass every morning
he threw back his head and said:
'What a saintly girl! Up to her eyebrows in devotion these
days. And how about the practical side?'
Once a week I went to Lucienne Bernhardt's and fetched
a secretly published, roneotyped newspaper. I passed it
around the office, and when it had been read I took it back
to Lucienne. But even before my conversion I would have
done this job. What is more, I saw all around me unbelievers
taking far greater risks. At dusk Lucienne went and covered
a pylon near her home with Lorraine crosses and slogans in
black paint: '1918 To-morrow,' 'Liberation,' and 'Death to
the Nazis.’
One of her neighbours, a boy aged fourteen, distributed
ammunition, which he carried in his bicycle basket. From
time to time I would give a part of my rations to the girls I
worked with. But I had to tell lies in order to make them
accept.
'I never could stand dried eggs.' Or:
'I promise I don't need my oil ration. Some friends of
mine have given me a quart of nut oil.'
These sacrifices, embellished with untruths, can scarcely
have pleased Christ. At night I would pour cold, chaste
water over myself. Vibrant with hosannas I would go to bed,
my arms folded on the top of the sheet as on a communion
cloth. Some- times I succeeded in going on praying while I
slept. These dream prayers were even more fervent than
109
BÉATRIX BECK
those of the daytime, as the flowers of the mountains are
more brilliant than their fellows of the same species in the
lowlands down below.
After mass I did half an hour's physical training, so as to
keep in trim the tool which God had given me.
I forced myself never to get off my bicycle when going
up a hill, no matter how steep this might be.
The ridiculous, ludicrous quality of the sacrifices I made
vexed me. Had I killed the old Adam if I were now living
the life of a mystic and a racing bicyclist rolled into one?
Not only had my conversion failed to rouse me to any
worthy actions, but in some ways it had made me worse
than I was before. Thus in my atheist days if someone.
insulted me I would lose my temper, unless restrained by
fear. Now my reply was a smile that was intended to be
sweet, but which made one of my colleagues remark:
'Whenever I see you smile that way I damn near have a
fit.'
And she twisted her face into a sour grimace which, she
assured me, was the exact copy of my smile. I told Morin of
this incident. He was amused.
'When we first start,' he said, 'our attempts tend to be a
little wry. It gets easier bit by bit.'
'Anyhow, for the moment I feel like the boy Byron when
he became a lord: he was astonished to find he was just as
he had been before.'
110
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'You haven't become a lord, you've become an
apprentice.'
'I daresay. But the apprentice I am is not good enough at
his job ever to become a qualified workman.'
'A true Christian does not worry all that much about his
salvation or his holiness. That is God's business.’
'What does your true Christian worry about then?'
'Other people.'
'Exactly, I read it in Saint Paul: nothing I do, or that I
could do, would be acceptable to God, since there's not
an atom of charity in me.'
'It'll come,' answered Morin.
111
BÉATRIX BECK
112
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER SEVEN
In my clerical work at the office I had an assistant, an
eighteen-year-old girl named Arlette, a failed beauty. Her
teeth were splendidly white, but shockingly large. Her lips,
which needed no paint, were ill defined. Her snub, turnedup nose was 'aimed at the moon' as she herself said. Her
glittering black eyes went down at the corners. Her skin was
very white, save for her cheeks which were red. Beneath her
thick, dark hair she hid a pair of large, protruding ears which
seemed tacked on to her head.
Arlette was fond of showing a slight scar on each of her
stubby-fingered hands. These were the relics of an extra
finger which had been cut off a few days after she was born.
'Professor Gros keeps them in a jar of alcohol,' she would
say, not without pride.
I wondered if there was any connection between this
manual deformity and Arlette's extremely low level of
intelligence. Although she gloried in being a practising
Catholic, she joined the others in a chorus of sarcasm
directed at my return to the Church and at the Church itself.
One afternoon I took the bull by the horns and asked her
how she reconciled her faith with her irreligious attitude.
113
BÉATRIX BECK
'Oh me, you know, you shouldn't try and understand me,'
she answered.
One day after returning from the funeral of one of our
colleagues' father, Arlette cried out with real enthusiasm:
'Wasn't Madame Aronovitch tremendous in church? You
looked so pious and all, a proper picture. It's funny, you
didn't seem like the same person as here. I couldn't stop
looking at you all the time.'
A moment later Arlette hurled herself at me and snatched
my fountain pen, shouting:
'You thief! It's mine, I lost it at the post office, I know it's
mine.'
Again a moment later she was making me promise to go
shopping with her on Saturday. She wanted me to help her
pick out a dress.
Arlette was gifted with an amazing memory. I read
Péguy's poem: Les deux saintes de la patrie, aloud to the girls.
They said:
'It's all right. It's a bit of all right, that.'
Then Arlette repeated word for word, and without a
single mistake, the entire poem, even reproducing my
intonations. She had never read it before, and after she had
finished she said:
'I don't understand a word of it.'
Arlette was obsessed with the idea of marriage and had
prepared herself a trousseau of underclothes that buttoned
up the front, thus facilitating the nursing of children. She
114
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
always imagined she was being followed in the street and
thought young men, who did not even know of her
existence, were in love with her.
On one occasion she went scarlet for joy at the sight of a
coal-heaver walking past our office windows. She pointed
her finger at him, saying loudly:
'What beautiful teeth he's got!'
'She's on fire in a certain place,' was the comment of the
other girls.
'If she doesn't get married soon, it'll be a tragedy.'
'She might even go out of her mind.'
A number of young men were attracted by Arlette's
blooming, startling freshness, but they quickly dropped her,
finding her stupid beyond reason, and she spent her
Sundays in tears. It seemed to me that Morin might be able
to help her. I suggested that she go with me to visit a priest
who was particularly interested in young people.
She turned crimson and asked:
'Is he young, the priest?'
'Yes.'
'How old is he?'
'My age.'
Arlette went redder than ever, declared that she was
frightened, and then that it would be bad luck, and that her
father would spank her bottom if he heard she'd been to
visit a jerk like that. She did not, however, even let me get
in a few words of reassurance before she asked:
115
BÉATRIX BECK
'Well, when do we go?’
Before starting up the stairs in the curacy Arlette took
from her handbag a small mirror on the back of which was
the portrait of a fashionable singer. She bit her lips to make
them redder, licked her forefinger and pushed up her
eyelashes, straightened her hair that was like bunches of
black grapes, and loosened the front of her blouse.
Morin was looking serious as he let us in, saying simply:
'Come in.'
As we crossed the hall behind him, Arlette whispered in
my car:
'He's handsome.'
This immodest remark was a revelation to me. I looked
at Morin while we were sitting down, Arlette opposite him
in front of his desk and myself a little to one side. Was it
respect which had hitherto blinded me to the young man's
beauty? His charm seemed to derive not from any particular
feature but to lie in the general paradoxicality of his looks,
the princely vagabond, the laughing ascetic, the iron fist in
the velvet glove, the youthful sage.
Morin lowered his heavy eyelids, which made me think of
seashells on a distant shore, and became an austere statue.
I wondered, with a twinge of anxiety, whether I had not
perhaps sinned in thus relishing the physique of my father
confessor. But surely not, I said to myself, surely there could
be no harm in it? We are led to believe, in the Gospels, that
116
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
Jesus was beautiful. Beauty is a gift of God. Thank you,
Lord, for having made your servant, Morin, a finished work
of art.
The babyish female whom I had brought here had
undergone a startling change: all her foolishness had left her
and she was explaining to Morin that whereas she had
hitherto practised Catholicism primarily as a matter of
routine, she was now beginning to feel the need for
something deeper; her eldest brother, she said, was passing
through a religious crisis, and she would like to be able to
help him; she felt herself to be made for marriage and for
the bearing of numerous children; she would wish her
children to be properly brought up and not just left to grow
haphazardly as had been the case with herself and her
brothers.
It is a transference of thought that makes Arlette appear
so sensible, I said to myself. The power of Morin's
personality is such that anyone he talks with comes in some
ways to resemble him.
Morin seemed extraordinarily interested in her sensible, if
somewhat banal, remarks and he encouraged Arlette to run
on while he himself only answered.
'I do not go to communion very often,' she said. 'It
doesn't bring me any happiness.'
'Do you imagine it brings me any either?' replied Morin
with a laugh. 'You must not expect more from communion
than what it is supposed to give you.'
117
BÉATRIX BECK
Pretending that I had some shopping to do, I left the girl
and the priest alone together.
When next I saw her, on the following day, she informed
me joyfully that she was to call on Morin again next
Saturday. He had lent her a book which struck me as
extremely heavy going for her: The Glorious Dangers of the
Faith. She was to write an essay about it for him. As she was
leaving he had said to her:
'Good-bye for now, little butterfly.'
A little later I overheard a remark of Sabine's: 'Arlette is
coming out of her chrysalis.'
Another girl in our office told us, laughingly, a story about
a friend of hers. This latter girl, it seems, had been deserted
by her young man and had later found, outside her door, a
spray of branches from a weeping willow, left there by the
young people of the village.
'It's the custom, in our part of the world, when a romance
is broken off,' she explained.
Christine Sangredin, too, had that sort of cruelty; she was
of rough, mountain stock and would easily have handed out
willow branches. Even on Morin the country had left its
mark: his mountaineer's charity was as harsh as a blizzard,
while his austerity and his lively gaiety recalled a climate of
alternating sun and snow.
'You wouldn't like to pretend to be a priest?' Morin asked
Christine.
118
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'If I could be of any use to you.'
'You could. A girl of the Vichy milice has got herself shot
and now she's dead set on being buried in Saint Bernard's.
That's all we need.’
Christine, carrying some heavy parcels on her head,
announced in a tone of deliberate good humour which was
perhaps born of bitterness:
'I work with my head, real intellectual work.'
She knew how much I loathed my job, which could in
actual fact have been done by a machine. She said to me:
'You poor, proud creature, what earthly difference can it
make if you do that or something else?'
'Didn't you ever read somewhere about how lights
shouldn't be hidden beneath bushels?' I asked.
Christine burst out laughing:
'You think you're a light?'
'Yes. And you can be quite sure that one day the bushel
will be taken away. It's been promised me: "There is nothing
secret that will not be known and revealed at last."’
These words awakened no echo in Christine. She
pretended to be worried about me, laying her hand on my
forehead.
Christine had a friend, Marion Lamiral, a saucy brunette
who was in the middle of getting a divorce and who came
to the office occasionally to fetch Christine. Marion kept up
119
BÉATRIX BECK
five lovers' morale: two were in the Resistance, one in the
milice, one in the black market; and one, the most recent
addition, was a German. She worked in a bank and thus had
only a limited amount of time in which to serve Fighting
France, Vichy France and the Reich; her schedule was a tight
one. This eclectic young woman was also engaged in black
market currency deals.
'I'd like to meet her,' said Morin.
Christine took her to call on the priest.
'You've lost one of your car-rings,' said Morin as soon
as she had arrived.
'Oh, yes,' answered Marion. 'I forgot to put it back after
telephoning.’
He asked her how old she was.
'I'll be twenty-six when the cherries are ripe,' said she.
'I thought as much, he replied gaily. 'You and me
both,’
'You couldn't imagine anything less religious than their
conversations,' Christine said to me. And non-stop, too.'
'What do they talk about?'
'About the weather and that sort of thing. The other day
they were discussing Caesarean operations. The priest knew
more about it than Marion. She didn't know you couldn't be
cut open more than three times.’
'He's been to see Marion's husband,' said Christine.
'Why?'
120
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'He asked him to take her back.’
'Did the husband agree?’
'Not likely. It's astonishing he was as nice to him as he
was. He has a holy horror of the priesthood.'
Marion's got a thing about Father Morin,' Christine
informed me, smiling strangely.
This monstrous remark left me speechless. 'She says she's
going to make him,' Christine went on. 'Can you understand
that sort of thing yourself?’
'No, me I can't. I couldn't ever feel that way. I could never
forget that a priest is a consecrated man. But that doesn't
make any difference to Marion, she doesn't see the sacrilege.
For her he's just another chap. She wants him.'
'Does she really think she could ever make him?'
'She's quite sure she can. She's never had any trouble
in that line.'
'You should get a parish in the country,' Marion said to
the priest. I'd come too and be your housekeeper.
'Not a bad idea, except that priests' housekeepers have
to be old and ugly. Still, maybe in a few years' time.'
'I'd like to make eyes at you.'
'Your eyes would never be very enticing to me.'
'Because you're not allowed to?'
'No. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but the expression
in your eyes is not very beautiful.'
121
BÉATRIX BECK
‘That's because I haven't got any mascara or eye-shadow
on to-day. I'll have some next time.'
'Oh, you silly goose,' said Morin. 'By the next time your
hash may have been settled once and for all.'
'Marion's been sent a love-letter,' Christine informed
me.
'A sixth man?'
‘The priest. He calls her "my dearest girl" and says: "It's
crazy the love Christ has for you. You're one of his
favourites." He talks about the heaven specially prepared for
her. It's knocked her all of a loop, she wasn't expecting that.'
I went to Saint Bernard's, to confess, and saw, on her
knees a few rows ahead of me, Marion Lamiral in a darkred dress. She looked like the figure of a saint that had
stepped down from out of its stained-glass window, so
intense was her peaceful contemplation. Her red gloves,
which lay on the rail before her next to her folded hands,
resembled a skin that a snake has sloughed off. Her little
face, concentrated and pale beneath the bloody halo of her
hat, recalled to my mind the heads that decapitated martyrs
hold in their hands.
Marion of the currency rackets, Marion of the five lovers,
was entering the confessional. Her bag, which she had
forgotten on the prie-dieu, looked like a piece of meat.
Marion reappeared, delicate as a fairy, and knelt down to
pray.
122
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Dear God,' I begged, 'grant that I may pray like Marion.
And with Marion.’
'Yesterday I saw Marion at Saint Bernard's. She went to
confession,' I told Christine.
'I daresay. But nothing will come of it. Don't fool
yourself.'
And indeed a little later Marion left our town, with a new
protector.
As I was climbing the stairs Morin appeared above me on
the landing, and gazed down at me fixedly, as it seemed to
me, from behind his eyes. This look-which was more than a
look-impressed me as though I were being watched by a
helmet's narrow visor. Morin's was so withdrawn and so
deep that it seemed not to belong to him. I was being looked
at through his eyes.
He is going out, I thought, and I had best leave. But I
could not turn around without saying something, and I
glance did not wish to talk, there on the stairs. I went on
upwards, but so slowly that I was scarcely moving.
'Would you mind hurrying a little?' asked Morin, and in
his face was reflected a gaiety from afar.
I leaped up, stumbled, and he caught me. He shook me,
saying:
'Have you forgotten how to walk now?'
123
BÉATRIX BECK
He pushed me into his office, played a chord on the piano
as he passed by it, and told me:
'Last night they shot at the Beauregard from the belfry.'
The Beauregard was an hotel close to the church. It had
been requisitioned by men of the milice who lived there with
their families, on a war footing.
'About one o'clock,' Morin related, 'there was shouting in
the street: "Curé, heigh, for Christ's sake, curé, come on
down." I went down, taking my time over it. The belfry was
all lit up. The church had to be unlocked and then they
climbed up into the belfry.'
'How about the men who'd been shooting?’
‘Vanished.'
The major part of my grievances against Catholicism
continued, despite my conversion.
'You won't allow the faithful to read the Bible,' I said to
Morin reproachfully.
'Oh, naturally it's not allowed,' he said. 'As a matter of fact
everything is done to make it as widely read as possible.'
He walked quickly into his bedroom and came back
carrying a large, bound, Bible. He pointed out the
imprimatur to me. He opened it, apparently haphazard, and
read:
Judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard.
124
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
What could I have done more to my vineyard,
That I have not done to it?
Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
Brought it forth wild grapes?
Morin turned over the pages and went on:
In the day thou wast born, thy navel was not cut, neither wast
thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor
swaddled at all. None eye pitied thee, to do any of these things unto
thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open
field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.
I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood. Then I
washed thee with water: yea, I thoroughly washed away thy blood from
thee, and I anointed thee with oil. I clothed thee also with broidered
work, and shod thee with badger's skin.
On another occasion, it was in the evening, I was
expostulating to Morin about the terrifying remark of
Christ's:
'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?'
'It's the beginning of a psalm,' replied the priest. He went
to fetch his Bible.
'Look, the twenty-second Psalm:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so
far from helping me and from the words of my roaring?
'It goes on:
125
BÉATRIX BECK
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
'And later:
Thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me
hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.
'And it ends with a homage to God:
For the kingdom is the Lord's; and he is the governor among the
nations.
'Our Lord, when he was dying, began to repeat one of the
prayers of the Jews of his time, one that applied specially to
him, since it also says:
They pierced my hands and my feet.
They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.'
I found it wonderful to hear the Old Testament, to know
the very book from which the Messiah had been taught, to
share my reading with the Son of God. I felt that I was with
him personally, that I actually knew the Christ of flesh and
blood as he had been at the time of his life on earth.
Through him the Eternal had been given youth. He had
chosen to die in his prime. By the juvenescence of that
blood, God would never age.
The dislike with which Morin spoke of 'little old women
mumbling their prayers' and of 'old fools who hold up the
Church's progress' was, in fact, specifically Christian.
'He adores everyone, until they reach middle age,' said
Christine.
'And how about when he reaches it himself?' I asked.
126
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Oh, no,' said my friend with a note of optimism. 'He
won't make old bones, anybody can see that.'
Insensibly my entire life, even in its most trivial aspects,
was becoming divine. The ink pad, the date stamp, the
buttonhook, the broom, the iron, the kitchen knife-all
became saintly objects, the companions and allies of my
redemption. The tearing of a page from the calendar was an
act of homage to my Creator: I offered him both yesterday
and to-day, I invoked him, I thanked him that we had
advanced one step closer to himself.
The houses snapped their cables and sailed out on to the
high seas. Sorrow and joy sang, in duet, the same psalm.
Everything assumed a meaning.
'I've something fine to show you,' said Morin, taking from
his breviary a small sheet of paper which he handed to me.
It bore the following words, typed:
The Golden Calf is well, thanks to your labours, and the
money-changers driven from the temple are back again.
Merchants of dreams, confidence tricksters, swindlers,
exploiters of the people's credulity, watch-dogs of capitalism,
lackeys of the bourgeoisie, your turn is coming soon.
The communication was signed with a hammer and
sickle, drawn in red.
'Where did it come from?' I asked, somewhat stunned.
'From a poor-box.'
127
BÉATRIX BECK
'A poor-box?'
'Yes, in the church, from Saint Anthony's poor-box. It's
terrific. I'm going to show it to our parish priest, it's good
for everyone to have a bit of a jolt from time to time. Pity
there's no way of meeting the chap who wrote it, he must
be quite a remarkable fellow.'
'Did you see the Clarmont's been blown up?' Morin asked
me gaily.
'Really?'
The Clarmont was an hotel de luxe taken over by the
Kommandantur.
'You didn't notice, on your way here?' Morin was
astonished. 'I thought you went right past it."
'Yes, I do.'
'And you passed by all those ruins without even noticing
that the Clarmont had gone?'
'No, I didn't notice.'
Morin looked at me attentively and said:
‘That most certainly won't do. It won't do at all.'
'I've always been very absentminded.'
'I daresay. But this is going too far, altogether too far.'
'What does it matter? Why should you worry about it,
Father Morin? It's no sin not to have noticed that the
Clarmont had been blown up.'
'Sin or not, when somebody starts wandering about in a
trance like that, it just won't do.'
128
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
On my way home I passed by the square, one side of
which had been the Clarmont. The hotel was now nothing
but a black, chaotic mound crisscrossed by twisted lengths
of metal. My recent blindness worried me. Since I had been
visiting Morin external events had assumed, for me, a
negligible quality, factitious as the back-ground in a
photograph. The priest had perhaps realized that our
sessions together served to increase my lack of interest in
practical matters, for he had told me he had no free evening
during the next six weeks.
The headline was: a wand… but not a magician's.
The story I read in the paper said that the parish priest of
Saint Bernard had caught a woman, of decent appearance,
in the act of fishing banknotes from the parochial poor-box
with a wand dipped in bird-lime. The parish priest had
attempted to stop her, but she had managed to escape.
On the occasion of my next meeting with Morin I told
him how utterly delighted I had been at reading of this
incident.
'Our parish priest can't run,' he said with audible regret.
'If I'd been there I'd have caught her right enough, I'd have
collared her.'
'And if you had, what would you have done with the lady
then?'
'I'd have brought her back here and given her a nice drink
and had a bit of a chat with her.'
129
BÉATRIX BECK
'Maybe you'd have lent her Karl Adam?' I suggested.
Morin appeared not to have heard this. With an
expression of regret he murmured:
'Strange type she must have been. I really would have
enjoyed meeting her.'
Christine wore dark glasses.
‘Take those things off,' ordered Morin.
'Why should I?' protested Christine.
'I must be able to see a person's eyes. Otherwise it's no
good.' He abominated screens of all sorts. "Take pillars,
what poisonous things,' he said, 'they stop the faithful from
seeing the altar. And the darkness in churches, it's very bad.
What we need are enormous, ultra-modern churchés, filled
with sunshine.'
'Religious skyscrapers?' I teased him.
'No,' he said. 'But a cathedral made entirely of glass,
wouldn't that be something, eh?'
The clock at Saint Bernard had just struck eleven when
there was a ring on the front door bell. Morin laughed:
'Another fellow who thinks the curacy is a doss-house,' he
said as he hurried to open the door.
A moment later he was back, hastened through his front
room, reappeared carrying a mattress, went out, came
through again, once again emerged from his bed- room, this
130
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
time with a pillow, a khaki blanket and two snow-white
sheets.
I heard him talking for a moment and then he re-entered
the room, saying:
'He'll be all right on the billiard table.’
‘Who?'
'I don't know his name,' he answered in a matter-of- fact
tone.
During that night I dreamed of Julienne Daréï. In my
half-sleep I was struck by a similarity for which, it seemed
to me, I had long been searching: the smock which my
former professor used to wear in the labs, Morin's worn
collar, and his sheets, all were of the same utter whiteness.
131
BÉATRIX BECK
132
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER EIGHT
On Sunday, when I went to see France, I often met Gilberte
Lathuile on her way down to the village; we would exchange
a few words.
'She's thrown in her lot with the Germans,' Lucienne
Bernhardt confided to me. 'It's been proved that she gives
them information. The next time there's a raid she's going
to be taken away and shot.’
'Is that definite?'
'Absolutely dead certain,' said Lucienne, her small, hard
eyes glittering with satisfaction. 'Pierre told me so himself.'
Meeting Gilberte became an ordeal for me. I was afraid
the girl would read her death sentence in my eyes. It seemed
to me that my 'good day' would end in a scream.
'Yes, it really is a beautiful day,' I answered, thinking: 'You
haven't much longer to live, you poor little goose.'
The agony never left me now. One word of mine would
suffice to save this creature from a sinister death. A threat
would certainly be enough to make her stop all association
with the Germans. 'I go to communion every morning,' I
said to myself, 'and I am the accomplice in a crime, in the
murder of a girl in her 'teens.' I heard France repeating in
133
BÉATRIX BECK
her thin little voice that was both fearful and ecstatic: 'She
sticks her tongue in my mouth,' and I was pierced with joy
at the thought of the price Gilberte must pay. Lord, do not
abandon me.
In the confessional I told Morin all about it.
'What was your friend's reason for telling you the decision
that had been made about this girl?'
'I think it was simply that she can't keep her mouth shut.'
'Was there any reason why her husband should have told
her in the first place?'
‘This business is no concern of yours.'
'No.'
'I know, but I could save a life.'
'You'd like to save a life in order to increase your own
self-importance.'
'Oh, no, it's not that. At least, maybe that does enter into
it a little. But it's above all the idea of committing murder by
omission.’
'Even if you were to warn her, it would probably not be
possible for her to get away.'
'She could leave the village.’
‘That might have results which you cannot foresee.'
‘Then I must go on play-acting with her?’
'Keeping a secret is not play-acting.'
'So I must say nothing, do nothing?'
134
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'It's hard, I know, but I believe that that is the part you
must play in this story. Unfortunately there many stories of
the sort taking place at this particular are a great time.'
The following Sunday, as I passed by the Lathuile house,
I saw that the shutters were closed and that on them, in
letters of red, was written:
'A traitress who sold herself to the Boche has been
executed here.'
Everybody pretended to know nothing about the
circumstances in which she had been shot. All I learned was
that Gilberte's parents had moved away to another part of
the country.
Though each day of Morin's life was consecrated to the
service of God, he certainly did not allow the
commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill,' to stand in his way.
Danièle Holdenberg's young man, Jean Louis, who was a
member of a Resistance tribunal, went to see the priest in
order to unburden his conscience: he was eighteen years old
but had already condemned several collaborators to death.
He was afraid he had become a murderer, he had had
enough, he did not wish to go on.
'If you quit,' Morin told him, 'there's the danger of
someone less conscientious than you taking on the job. Be
as careful as you can, make sure of the facts, do what
you should. There can be no duty that takes precedence
over a man's duties as an individual.
135
BÉATRIX BECK
‘The common weal must come before your petty scruples
and before your moral daintiness. There are people for
whom the most charitable thing that one can do is to blow
out their brains.'
Jean-Louis said to Danièle:
'I see you as the future mother of my children.'
The girl felt entirely indifferent towards him, but she did
not discourage him. At the same time she was carrying on
various other flirtations.
'It's a filthy way to behave,' Morin said to her. Jean- Louis
should be told.'
'Oh no, Father Morin, it's not worth it. I've got a feeling,
in fact I'm certain, that something will happen soon which
will settle everything.’
Danièle dreamed that she was in a field of rosebuds,
saying to her mother:
'Do you think they'll open?'
She lost her appetite. 'You're lucky,' the other girls said to
her.
She caught cold, went to bed, weeks passed. At last the
doctor was sent for; he said she must be X-rayed.
'So she should,' Christine informed us. 'She's T.B.'
Danièle's mother underwent this trial with remarkable
fortitude, but when her son coughed once she wept all
night.
136
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
Danièle got extra food tickets. They brought her platefuls
of noodles, but she sent them back half-eaten. Her family
gobbled up what she left.
Christine brought Danièle a tin crucifix, made by a
prisoner from tin-cans, and hung it up at the head of her
bed. She begged her friend to confess to a priest and to take
communion.
'I won't,' said Danièle. 'I couldn't ever confess, in broad
daylight, face to face like that. I couldn't, I mustn't, it'd make
me iller than I am already. The Good Lord understands.'
"Think of all the grace you are losing,' said Christine
regretfully. Christine had the instincts of a careful housewife. 'You're all right, stuck here where you can hardly
commit any new sins. You should make the most of it.’
‘I'd rather die than confess here.'
"That would be the pay-off. In any case you'd be wiser to
stack the deck on your side.'
Father Morin came to confess Danièle.
‘You're lucky that God sent you this illness,' he said. 'It
was high time. You were well on the way to becoming a
nasty little tart. God has shown you He loves you. Now you
must accept His love with joy and look after yourself in a
spirit of obedience. You can become as useful as a Carmelite
nun.'
Next day Morin brought the girl the host, and a few days
later she left for the sanatorium.
137
BÉATRIX BECK
‘The sacristan isn't there,' said Morin to Christine, 'and
we've a funeral to-morrow. Would you like to help me hang
up the black stuff?'
After having got rid of a few untimely worshippers,
Morin locked himself into the church with the young
woman. He climbed up-like a cat up a drainpipe,' said
Christine—and she passed him the silver-studded draperies
of black.
'Go and get me that cross over there,' he ordered her.
'Wait, it's too heavy, I'll come down and get it myself. No,
bring me it after all, he's carried it long enough for you.'
When the job was finished Morin kneeled before the altar
and recited aloud the Pater, the Ave and the Gloria.
Christine, who was kneeling a little behind him, gave the
responsions.
'It'll seem silly to you,' Christine told me, 'but that was one
of the most beautiful days I've ever spent. I can't explain
why.'
'I understand.'
'He has the favour of grace, you can almost feel it
descending on him.'
'Yes, you can see it.'
'Sometimes I wonder,' said Christine, lowering her voice
and hesitating before the enormity of what she was about to
say: 'Sometimes I wonder if he mightn't be a saint.'
138
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
This last word, coming from a Catholic whose faith was
as solidly rooted and inveterate as was Christine's, had a
meaning as precise as that of a legal verdict.
'Something awful has happened,' said Christine, quickly
taking off her blouse and slipping on her working dress.
Her brother- and sister-in-law had left their village in the
mountains, on foot, to visit relations in another village a few
hours' walk away. Ten days later they had still not arrived.
The grandmother, who had been left to look after their
children, decided they must have pro- longed their visit; the
relations were angry that they had not come.
Search parties went out into the mountains. Every
morning Christine went to look at the recent arrivals in the
morgue, which she described to us with a mixture of
humour and pity. She spent one whole Sunday getting her
brother-in-law's supply of wood in, and she seemed to hear
his laughter behind her.
One morning she announced:
‘They've been found,' and then put a stop to our congratulations by adding. Their bodies, I mean, you fools. In a
ravine.'
'An accident?'
'Accident!' snorted Christine. 'It's the Gaullists.'
Her brother-in-law Sangredin, when people reproached
him with having three children by the time he was twentyfive, used to reply:
139
BÉATRIX BECK
'God feeds the young of the birds in the fields.'
Christine went to fetch the smallest girl, who was her goddaughter, aged two. Betty Sinant, the grand- mother's
landlady, heard a tremendous row through the partition.
Christine was shouting:
'I want to carry out my duties as a godmother and so I
shall.'
The grandmother said:
'My three grandchildren were given to me to look after
and it's not you who's going to start taking them away from
me.'
'Where do you think you're going to find the cash to feed
three of them? I'm not asking you for all three, but I tell you
I'm not leaving here without Nicole. You're so old you can't
hardly stand up, and you want to keep three kids.'
Christine, victorious as usual, came down from the
mountains with her god-daughter, whom she taught to call
her 'Mummy.' She quickly made identical dresses for
Chantal and Nicole.
One of our colleagues remarked, not without admiration:
'Madame Sangredin is a real brute, but she can be quite the
opposite when she wants."
I had once lived for a long time in the brother-in-law's
village, and I asked an old woman whom I knew well: 'It
wasn't an accident, was it?"
'Oh, yes, it was an accident,' she said nervously. "The path
is dangerous, you know.'
140
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'But both of them?'
'My guess is, one fell while trying to catch the other.'
‘They were unpopular hereabouts?'
'He was. People were frightened of him. He recruited for
the S.T.O. The Good Lord has punished him.'
'Surely somebody gave the Good Lord a helping hand?' I
said with a smile.
The old woman raised her hand in a gesture of ignorance
but could not prevent a brief gleam in her faded blue eyes.
It was soon gone.
'Once the dead are dead,' she said, 'there's no more
hatred. Everybody went to the funeral. And the little ones
will lack for nothing, everyone will see to it that they're all
right.'
'Me, I never answer the doorbell,' I told Morin. 'It might
be the Gestapo.'
'It might also be someone who needs your help.'
"Then should I answer the bell?'
'So it seems to me. You lack trust in God.'
Henceforth, with a beating heart, I hurried to the door
whenever the bell rang: it was the man to read the gasmeter, or the electricity or an insurance agent. One day it's
bound to be two men in green uniforms, I thought with
distress.
He arrived at nightfall. This was the man for whose sake
I had mastered my fear, the stranger whom Morin had urged
141
BÉATRIX BECK
me to receive. When he rang the bell I experienced an
exceptionally strong temptation not to answer. Still, I drew
back the bolt and opened the door wide: I was face to face
with an emaciated, ugly man.
'Madame Aronovitch,' he said, taking off his hat, 'I saw
your name on the letter-box. Please help a person of your
own religion.'
I made him come in at once. He told me that he had been
hunted from town to town, together with his wife and his
son of five: that he knew nobody in this town and had no
money left; that he had had the idea of going from
apartment house to apartment house in the hope of finding
a Jewish name on one of the doors. He was a musician, and
his name was Rosenbaum. I got up to fetch my handbag,
saying with embarrassment:
'I've only two hundred and ten francs left, and that's got
to last me for everything till the end of the month.'
'Not that, madame, not that,' Rosenbaum protested. 'I
never intended to ask you for money. But I should be
grateful for your personal assistance.'
And Rosenbaum awaited my suggestions with all the
appearance of serene assurance.
That same night he joined Pierre Bernhardt in the maquis.
Lucienne found a home for his wife and child on a farm. I
could hardly contain myself for joy and devotion to God.
142
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
Lucienne Bernhardt had just had a second daughter. I
suggested I go and live with her, until her husband came
back, and help her look after the baby. I hoped secretly that
she would refuse, but she accepted my offer eagerly.
I was weak enough to tell Morin how distressing I found
it to live with a woman who was so utterly preoccupied with
money.
'She's quite right,' he said. 'It's the chief thing.' And he
began to laugh.
Lucienne's house was far out of town and I went to work
by bicycle. One evening, coming out of the post office, I
realized that my Rosinante had been stolen. So, from then
on, I had to walk several miles each day. My feet in the illfitting sandals became blistered, and I developed a limp.
Morin noticed this; he examined my sandals with the expert
eye of a cobbler.
‘They're not made of sealskin,' I said with a laugh.
'What's the matter with your feet? They look dreadful.'
'It's all the walking. My bicycle has been stolen.'
‘Your bicycle has been stolen?'
'Yes. Even though it was padlocked.'
'Me, I never padlock mine and no one has stolen it yet.'
As I was getting ready to leave Morin went and fetched
his bicycle:
'Keep it for a few days. All you've got to do is leave it
outside the house here when your feet are better.'
'Oh no, Father Morin."
143
BÉATRIX BECK
'I'll lower the saddle, it's too high for you. Come here so
as I can test the height.’
'If you don't mind, Father Morin, please don't lend it to
me. It'll only be stolen like the other one.'
'It doesn't make any difference whether it's stolen from
you or from me. It's the same thing in the end,' replied
Morin setting busily to work with the spanner.
'I'll burst the tyres.'
'You'll find a repair kit and so on in the tool-bag.'
'Suppose you're sent for, to visit a dying man…'
'A dying man!' repeated Morin with a gust of Homeric
laughter. 'I'll run like lightning, and no doubt he'll wait for
me, this dying man of yours.’
He slung the bicycle over his shoulder and ran down the
steps four at a time. I hurried after him. After a noisy
descent, accompanied by metallic bangs and crashes as the
old bicycle hit the walls or the banister, while I protested
and Morin replied by chanting: gloria alleluia! we at last
reached the street.
'What a row we made. How am I going to get away with
it?' said Morin, glancing up at the windows of the curacy.
'Go on, off you go, and don't get kidnapped.'
I had a hard time mounting the machine. Although it had
been lowered, the seat was still too high for me. It was
shaped like the pointed beak of a bird, and it hurt me. As I
set off into the shadows I could feel Morin's mocking eyes
on my back. On this clerical bicycle I felt like a witch on her
144
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
way to attend a black mass. I rode on, unsteadily, and
suddenly crashed on the pavement, though by this time I
was luckily out of sight of my spiritual guide. I got up, a
mass of bruises and, not without difficulty, hoisted myself
once again up on to the ecclesiastical machine. I trembled at
the thought of the comments I would have to put up with
from Lucienne, who already referred to me as a pi-jaw, a
holy water rat and an eater of little Jesuses, even though she
had told me, after making me promise to keep it secret, that
she said prayers every night for Pierre's safety.
145
BÉATRIX BECK
146
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER NINE
The atmosphere was changing. I heard a German soldier
attempt to engage a child of ten or so in conversation, and
also the latter's reply:
'Go to hell.'
The soldier walked away in dismay, saying:
'Not very nice.'
In the window of a shop that sold electrical appliances
there appeared a notice: 'Batteries will be on sale again after
the liberation of the town.’
One afternoon, looking out of our office windows, we
saw the French flag floating on a nearby hilltop. Shouting
for joy, our eyes filled with tears, pushing and shoving, we
climbed up on to the window-sill where we waved our
handkerchiefs or our scarves and blew kisses, which we
were certain that the men of the Resistance would be able
to see through their field-glasses.
People laid in stocks of the three colours. The chemists
were robbed of their blue and red bowls. Women dyed their
linen, cut it up, sewed the pieces end to end. Sky-blue
dusters, indigo face towels, vermilion sheets were hidden at
the bottom of cupboards awaiting the day when they could
147
BÉATRIX BECK
be brought out to bedeck the town. Lucienne dipped one of
her baby's nappies in the blood of a rabbit, remarking:
'I'm no fool!'
We would have dyed our shirts and slips.
One morning the town awoke to find that it was free. The
Germans had stolen away during the night, every one of
them, leaving behind camouflaged tents, olive blankets,
water-carts.
Then the maquis, dirty, thin and ragged, came pouring
down from the mountains, singing. The crowd, wearing
head-dresses, ribbons, scarves and favours of azure, purple
and white, waltzed in the squares, danced farandoles in the
streets and climbed up the statues that they too might be
swathed with the tricolour. Sabine hugged me so tightly that
my metal cross was pressed against my breast- bone and
hurt me. The typist pointed at the picture of Petain:
'We'll have to get rid of that thing.'
Christine, pale and puffy-eyed, took down the
photograph which she pressed to her heart, saying:
"They're sure to do me in.'
'Maybe not,' I said.
Christine guessed that my reason for not wearing a
tricolour ribbon was that I did not wish her to be the only
girl without one, and she hurried off to a draper's shop,
where she bought me a yard of French flag.
Natural goodness is a matter of course. But goodness on
the part of a woman by nature as nasty as was Christine
148
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
always fills me with religious respect. It is a sign of grace and
of spiritual victory.
The Americans arrived, as fresh as tourists, and asked:
'What's this town called?’
The population embarked on a career of beggary,
importuning the new arrivals for food and cigarettes. They
showed them their black bread.
'You really eat that stuff?' guffawed the Americans.
The children were trained to beg for chocolate. The
newspapers attempted to remind their readers how they
should behave, but without success.
Lucienne Bernhardt brought home her elder girl,
Jacqueline, my god-daughter, and asked me to take her into
town, where she was to be operated on for tonsils and
adenoids.
The numbers of sick and wounded were such that there
was no empty bed in the hospital, and as soon as Jacqueline
had been operated on I had to take her home, carrying her
in my arms since there was no car to be had. I found this
tall, six-year-old girl a heavy burden. I sat down with her on
the roadside, but immediately a soldier appeared:
'It's not allowed, madame, it's dangerous; you've got to
keep on moving.’
The road was filled with people, like myself, leaving the
town. In the sky there appeared streaks of bright metal,
falling obliquely and in formation. 'Bombs!' The people
149
BÉATRIX BECK
screamed: 'The Germans are bombing us!' As though it were
a single, huge animal the crowd lay down. I placed
Jacqueline in the bottom of a ditch and covered her with my
body. The child's beautiful, southern eyes followed the
course of the bombs languidly, as she murmured:
'Like the silver paper around chocolates.'
Panic broke out several times: ‘They're coming back!
They'll murder everyone!' A wild rush for the woods and the
mountains ensued. The fleeing people dragged every- one
they met with them, and cried as they passed by houses:
'Hurry, hurry! They're right behind us!' With a rucksack on
my back, a basket in one hand and pulling Jacqueline along
with the other, I ran beside Lucienne, who looked so fragile,
and who was carrying Agnes, a fat little girl, in her arms.
Pierre Bernhardt came back from the maquis wearing a
braided uniform. He brought with him several cases of
foodstuffs, cloth, clothing and a collection of miscellaneous
objects ranging from a potato-peeler to an alabaster Cupid.
He clipped a watch set with small precious stones about his
wife's wrist
'You're sure it won't bring us bad luck?" she asked.
I found myself with nowhere to go, since I had lent my
flat to a family of refugees. Christine arranged for me to
have an attic in her house; it was painted shell pink and was
150
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
furnished with a round table of the Empire period, a Louis
XV chair and a modern-art divan bed.
I thought I would leave France in the country until I had
regained possession of our own two rooms, but Miss Aimée
Plantain, who had come to town to see the pro- cession of
shaven-headed girls, asked me to take my daughter away at
once.
'She wears us out,' remarked Miss Aimée Plantain, 'she's
a proper nuisance.'
I went to fetch France after work. Since we had missed
the last tram we had to walk back in the dark. On the road
we met two American soldiers, also going to town, who
offered to carry my rucksack. In the old days I would have
hurried on without answering, but Morin had taught me that
it is as ungenerous to refuse a kindness as to deny a request.
So I accepted their offer with many thanks. One took the
bag, the other hoisted France up on his shoulder, and thus
we went on, discussing the miseries of the occupation and
the joys of being liberated. I should have liked to leave my
two companions once we had reached the town, but they
insisted on escorting me home. When we had reached the
house the one who had been carrying France put her down,
but the other held on to my bag, stating:
‘I'm coming up with you.'
I gazed at him in dismay. He took hold of the door
handle. The other fellow did not move.
'Are you mad?' I asked.
151
BÉATRIX BECK
'Aw, come on,' he said self-confidently, as though my
protest was purely formal.
'You can see I've got my little girl with me.'
'It don't matter.'
'I've only one room. Let me take her home. Give me back
my bag.'
'I'll give it you upstairs.’
'It's got my little girl's clothes in it. They're all she has.
Please give them back to me, please.'
The other soldier had sat down on the curb and was
waiting stolidly. The conversation had taken place in
English. France, who could not understand a word, looked
anxiously from one to the other of us.
'I'll give them back to you upstairs.’
'Can't you see, you're just wasting your time? Give me my
bag, I beg you. I've no money and no clothing coupons to
buy her any new things.’
He shook his head
'Forget it. Give her her stuff,' said the other soldier, in a
bored voice.
My tormentor's face hardened. A rebuff before a witness
must have seemed intolerable to him. I knew that crying
made me very ugly. So I let my tears flow freely and raised
my wet face to the American. France began to cry too:
'Let 'em alone. Give her back her stuff,' grumbled the one
who was sitting down.
152
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Come on, honey,' said the other, attempting to take me
in his arms.
'Is he trying to kill you?' panted France behind me
The worst of it was that my desire was at least as violent
as that of my enemy, who was a huge, splendid, tawny
animal.
I thought of shouting for help, but to have awoken the
neighbours, there in front of Christine's house, and to have
been found by them in the middle of the night in the
neighbours, there in front of Christine's house, and to have
been found by them, in the middle of the night, in the
company of two American soldiers, would have been even
worse than my present predicament. I showed him my
cross.
'Fine,' he said approvingly. 'Let's go on up.'
After all, I thought, why should I debase myself by
pleading in this fashion for the sake of a few pieces of
clothing. Observe the lily of the fields, Solomon in all his
glory…
'Keep the child's clothes if you really want them,' I said
carelessly. 'Good night to you both and I hope you get home
all right.'
The American snatched the bag from his shoulder, hurled
it brutally to the ground, and walked off with his friend.
France gave a cry of anguish:
'My dolly's broken!'
153
BÉATRIX BECK
And she threw herself on the bag, sobbing. I had to
unpack it, then and there on the pavement, and show her
that the little celluloid doll which she took into her bath was
undamaged. She covered its naked body with kisses.
I slung our possessions over my shoulder and led the
child indoors. As we started up the stairs she asked:
'Are they a new sort of Germans?'
The open-air dancing and the flights from phantom
Germans were a thing of the past. Now came the settling of
scores; inhabitants of our town slaughtered one another, in
the streets, without any formalities. An American soldier
was inadvertently among those killed. True, jeep drivers had
already run over three persons, of whom two were children,
and soldiers queued up in front of the hotels, accompanied
by the ladies of their choice, leaving only the refuse for the
natives.
'My father hasn't missed a single shooting,' said one of the
girls in our office. 'He's seen them all.'
A widow took her two daughters, aged eleven and twelve,
to witness one of these executions, saying:
'Watch carefully and see your daddy avenged.'
I saw a group of my neighbours, including a woman, drag
along a fat, livid man dressed in shirt and slippers. Stumbling
for fear, he kept beseeching them:
'Ask Dédé, I never did anything, Dédé knows me.'
They were punching him to make him go faster.
154
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'I can prove it,' he cried in a choked voice. 'Come to my
house, go and find Dédé.'
He fell down, bawling:
'Dédé! Find Dédé!'
His escort kicked him until he got up.
'I'm innocent,' yelled the fat man.
'Shut up!' was all the answer he got, and someone struck
him on the mouth.
Passers-by stopped, shopkeepers appeared on their
doorsteps and everyone watched the scene with an
expression of reserve.
Soon the little party had disappeared, together with the
condemned man who by now had stopped calling for Dédé.
An excited crowd poured out of all the side-streets into
the main thoroughfare and hastened off, though where they
were going I did not know. I joined them out of curiosity.
We arrived on the Fair Ground, which was already crowded.
‘They'll be here any minute.'
‘What time will it be?'
'Not long to wait now.'
'How many are there?'
'Five of them.'
'Oh, I heard there were six.'
'We won't see anything from here.'
'Stop pushing.'
Some boys had climbed up on to the roof of a urinal.
'Have the soldiers arrived?'
155
BÉATRIX BECK
'Yes, they're there, can't you see them?*
'I can't see a thing because of that lady's hat.' An
enormous shout of joy greeted the arrival of a lorry. The
back was opened and, one by one, five long, deal boxes were
taken out and laid on the ground side by side. "The coffins!'
said the crowd, exultantly.
Five youths got down from the lorry and walked past the
coffins. I noticed one, in particular, for his hair was of a
striking red and he wore a shirt, open almost to the waist,
coloured indigo. A newspaperman, at almost point-blank
range, photographed the condemned as, with hands tied
behind their backs, they walked slowly on. I saw nothing
more. The crowd gave a thunderous roar. My feet left the
ground and I was carried forward, not by my own volition,
over the bodies of those who had fallen down and were now
crying aloud as the crowd trampled over them. I ended up
a little way behind the firing squad. Each of the young men
had been bound to a stake. Their calmness confounded me.
Amidst the crowd's yells of joy and encouragement, the
soldiers fired at each of the five boys in turn. The redheaded one fell forward with a most graceful abandon. I
envied the executed, who had now left this frantic mob for
God's heaven.
‘The best thing,' said a woman, 'is that they shot them in
exactly the same spot where the Boche shot our people.’
The next day I went to see the photographs displayed in
the window of one of the local newspapers. The five young
156
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
men had joined the milice, but had played a most
insignificant part in its activities. The oldest was twentytwo, the youngest, the red-headed boy with the shirt so blue,
seventeen. Their bosses had been given enough time to
escape over the Spanish frontier.
Christine caught cold and sent me a message by her
daughter asking me to come and cup her.
She was wearing a wine-coloured dressing-gown with a
design of green parakeets and lemons, and lay on her big,
cheap, modern bed. At its head there hung an ancient
crucifix, which seemed strangely out of place in this
standardized, minor employee's bedroom.
While watching Christine's flesh fill the cups, which made
them look like huge mushrooms, I told her about the
shooting of her milice friends.
‘You hoped that would upset me?' she asked with a smile.
'It's probably because you have no heart that you can love
everyone, as our religion tells us to. Isn't that so?'
Christine began to laugh, which made the cups tremble.
'It's easier for me to shake hands with ten people than to
kiss one,' she said.
'Yes, quite, but Christianity tells us we must kiss all ten of
them, we must kiss all the world.'
'It's possible to love everyone if you're not involved in any
one single particular love.'
157
BÉATRIX BECK
'You have a single particular love for your daughter,
haven't you?'
'If anybody tries to hurt her I become a regular tigress.
But apart from that, no, I'm not so maternal. I can be just
as interested in other children as in her. I do the best I can
for her, but I'm not really attached to anyone.'
'If you lost her you'd miss her, wouldn't you?' 'I never
miss anyone,' replied Christine, smiling like Buddha.
'I can't come any more,' I said to Morin, 'because I've got
my daughter at home now and I can't leave her all alone.'
'So we won't see each other again?' asked the priest with
a smile.
'No,' I answered resignedly.
'Would you like it if I came to see you? I wouldn't be a
nuisance?'
'Oh, thank you!'
'I can't give you a date, because I don't know when I'll
be free, but one of these evenings.'
I had just put France to bed when there was a very soft
tap on the door. Morin, with his beret in his hand, had to
stoop in order to pass under the lintel. I had never spoken
of him to my daughter, nor had I told her that he would
probably be calling on us. So I was greatly surprised when
France, on catching sight of him, gave a shout of joy,
jumped out of bed in her striped pyjamas, and ran into his
arms. Morin picked her up, perched her on his shoulder,
158
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
jigged her up and down, swung her about in the air and hung
her upside down, holding her by the feet. All this time the
little girl was choking with laughter.
'You're wonderful at games,' she said.
'Oh, we learn a thing or two at the seminary, you know.
Go back to bed now, before you catch cold.'
He sat down beside her bed and took a small book from
his pocket, which he gave her: First Steps Toward Jesus. She
hurled the book enthusiastically up at the ceiling. On its way
down it knocked over a bottle standing on a shelf, which fell
to the floor and broke.
'Well, well, that's the way,' said Morin, 'there's joy for you.
Do you never get spanked?'
'No, it wouldn't do any good.'
'I don't mind telling you, if you were my little girl…’
'Oh, I wish I was your little girl,' said France. She showed
him her naked doll and he helped her wrap it up in a scarf.
At the office, in front of all the other girls, Christine said
to me loudly:
'Somebody told me that to see you with your daughter
anyone would think you were the eldest child in a big family
and had been left to look after the baby while the parents
went out.'
They all wanted to know who had said this to Christine.
Luckily the only answer she gave was to laugh heartily and
hurry from the room.
159
BÉATRIX BECK
One day I saw Christine in her church. She was coming
down one of the side aisles and seemed to be walking on
the clouds. Her face, normally so sharp, bore an expression
such as I had never seen there before, one of pure
spirituality and divine peace. To see my friend of every day
with this new face made me think of the Transfiguration.
Later I said to her:
'I saw you this morning at mass.'
'Oh, you were there.'
'I wish you'd tell me what you were thinking about when
you walked down the right-hand aisle.'
'I don't believe I was thinking. I seldom do.'
'But what was happening to you at that moment?'
'I don't know. Why do you ask?'
'Because you had a look of unimaginable holiness. I
couldn't make out how I even managed to recognize you.'
Christine was weighing parcels. She laughed and said,
placing a package on the scales:
'My family, we were brought up in such a religious
atmosphere, that we pray as easily as we breathe.'
Christine and I enjoyed boxing and fighting one another.
She would wave her scarf and be the toreador, while I played
the part of the bull. These childish games served as an outlet
for our desires.
Christine's way of leaving her place of work was to jump
on a table and thence into the street. Instead of handing us
the mail she would throw it in through the window.
160
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
In summer she would strip completely naked before
putting on her working frock.
'It saves me such a lot of money on underwear,' she
explained.
She dyed white cotton with Indian ink in order not to
have to buy a reel of black, and at the same time she spent
hundreds of francs on make-up and trinkets.
Between two gay songs, Christine often said:
'I am the strong woman in the Holy Book.'
And beneath all her chatter, so she was. She belonged to
that race of Virtues, carved in stone on Strasbourg
Cathedral, driving their lances through the skulls of Vices.
Christine would dab one girl's face with the tip of her big
paste brush. She would snip off a lock of another girl's hair
with her enormous scissors. The girls laughed at her jokes,
but behind her back they were often catty about her.
'She's as coarse as a fishwife.'
'She should have been a barmaid.'
'She calls her little girl Sangredin. "Come here,
Sangredin," she says. The little girl takes it quite for granted.'
'The other girls sneer at me,' Christine said to Morin,
'because I jump on tables and generally make a monkey of
myself.’
'Go right on jumping up on tables,' her confessor
encouraged her. 'Don't worry about what other people say.'
161
BÉATRIX BECK
162
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER TEN
The refugees who had been living in my flat went away
and France and I moved back in. On the first occasion that
Morin came to see me, in what he maliciously called my
bourgeois residence, France was already asleep in our
sitting-room. I led Morin into the kitchen. His face was
gloting from the cold outside and he went across to the
stole, crying:
What a fine fire!'
He had no fire, as I knew from Christine. I offered him
the only chair and sat down myself on a stool. He noticed
that his shoelaces were broken and set about mending them
by means of knots, which, he informed me, were called
grannies. I could not help my eyes wandering from his
soutane to my skiing trousers. This odd sartorial inversion
seemed to me the silent re-establishment of an essential
equilibrium. I was surprised to find myself thinking,
foolishly:
'Change as you will, I shall yet always be your
counterpart.'
I blamed my visitor for the bad effect that his present,
First Steps Toward Jesus, had had on France. She had cut up
the pages of my Larousse ‘to make little books for her
163
BÉATRIX BECK
animals to read.' As a result I had given her a spanking, while
she bawled:
'You see my mote, ow! ow! and you don't see, ow! the
beam in your own eye. You've got to p-p-pardon me sseventy times s-seven times. No more, no more. You'll go
to hell.'
'How would you feel,' I asked her, sitting her on my knee
and kissing away her tears, VI threatened you with going to
hell like you do me?'
'Oh, me,' replied France, her sobs quickly replaced by
smiles, as she flung her arms about my neck, 'there's no
danger of hell for me. Hell isn't made for children, it's
specially for grown-ups.'
‘Hell . . .' said the priest thoughtfully. 'On Sunday I
preached a sermon about hell.'
‘What did you tell them?'
'Saint Theresa of Lisieux said: ‘What does it matter, Lord,
that I burn for all eternity in hell if that be your will?’
Silence linked us, perfect in its completeness. It lasted for
a long minute, until Morin, fiddling with the poker,
remarked:
‘You're quite right to be a little sharp with your daughter.
But you want to be careful not to overdo it. When I was a
boy I got some thrashings! More than my fair share.'
I looked at Morin with astonishment. In all the years that
I had known him this was the first time he had ever talked
about himself. The bitterness in his voice completed my
164
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
amazement. With these few words he had destroyed the
whole picture of his childhood as I had envisaged it. I had
imagined that his father had died when he was small and
that he had had to act as head of the family, looking after a
gentle mother and his two sisters.
'As often as not I was sent to bed without my supper,' he
went on in the tone of a child whose heart is heavy.
'Why was your father so hard on you?'
As one glimpses a landscape through a window, so I saw
Morin reprimand himself harshly: 'What on earth have you
been saying to her? This is a fine way to look after the people
entrusted to your care. What a fool you are. Are you a priest
in order to evoke your flock's pity for yourself? Forgive me
Lord. Help us.'
‘Why was your father so hard on you?' I insisted.
'It wasn't my father,' he said regretfully. 'My father never
laid a finger on me.'
`Who was it then?'
'My mother.'
The Virgin lifted her hand against the child Jesus. It
seemed to me natural that Morin should have chosen a
Madonna with unyielding features to dominate his
workroom.
`Why did she beat you?'
'It was when I came back late from school. With a birch
rod, you know, against the calves of my legs, tac, tac, tac. I
used to clench my teeth.'
165
BÉATRIX BECK
`But it wasn't your fault if you were late home, was it?'
`Yes, it was my fault. We used to fight in the road, all the
way back from school. Four miles.'
'And she ill-treated you, just for that?'
'I used to lie, too. I told lots of lies.'
'Because you were frightened of her?'
Morin did not answer. He was obviously anxious to be
done with this conversation, which was so far removed
from our usual style.
‘Did she beat your sisters too?'
'No. My sisters, they . . . they were always honest and wellbehaved.'
'She was too hard on you, your mother?'
`She thought she was doing what was right.'
`So you didn't have a happy childhood?'
`How silly you are! Of course, naturally, I had a happy
childhood and there's no need for you to pucker up your
face like that. I wasn't given the birch every day, after all. Is
that what you imagine?'
`What made your childhood happy?'
'The atmosphere in our home. It was good.'
`What was it like in your home?'
'We were woken at six. At seven we set off for school; we
had to be there by eight. On Sundays my father went off to
watch his goats, taking two or three newspapers with him.
'My mother told me that once her father saw a hare on
his way to church. He said to himself: "I'll go home and get
166
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
my gun. No, I won't, it might make me late for mass." When
he passed by the same spot, on his way back from mass, the
hare was still there. He fetched his gun, aimed and got it.'
'You didn't bear any grudge against your mother?'
`Yes, I did feel resentful.'
`And when you were at the seminary, were you still
resentful then?'
Morin burst out laughing at this idea.
'I was resentful as long as she birched me. Once she had
stopped, the other did too.'
'How old were you when you went to the seminary?'
'I was twelve when I entered the preparatory seminary.'
'How did you come to wish to be a priest, since you were
rather a naughty boy?'
`What's that got to do with it? If a man becomes a priest
it is because he wished to save other men's souls, and that's
all there is to it. A really horrible child might be inspired
with the same idea.'
With an effort I succeeded in mastering my emotions.
'Your mother,' I said after a silence, 'was harder than
other mothers. But you, you were a child like other children.'
'I was one of the wickeder sort. Once I broke a cow's leg
by trying to make it jump a fence. I needn't tell you that the
man who owned the cow tanned my hide in no uncertain
fashion.'
'He didn't cure you. Even now you still try to turn cudchewers into high-jumpers.'
167
BÉATRIX BECK
Morin's glance became a golden-brown bird singing in a
thicket of pine. He replied:
`That is what I am for.'
'You're liable to make the poor creature break her leg.'
'It doesn't matter, once she has jumped.'
With my eyes on the ground, I thought of the
conversation we had just had. In a very low voice, speaking
to myself, I murmured:
`I hate her.'
No sooner had I spoken these words than my breath was
taken away by a gush of water. Through it I could see Morin
laughing. He had picked up a bowl filled with water that had
been standing in the sink and had thrown the lot in my face.
`You're not going to throw up, I hope. Dry your face.'
While my face I said, ridiculously enough:
'Yes, yes, Father Morin, thank you, it's quite all right, it's
nothing,' as though it were despite himself that he had
subjected me to this shower-bath. I took the apron and
kneeled at his feet while I mopped up the water on the tiled
floor.
'I'll teach you to hate people, you barbarian,' he said.
'I'm sorry.'
`That's all right. You're a good tortoise. Tortoise,' he
repeated in a dreamy voice, his eyes fixed on some far off
and invisible object. Then, returning to immediate reality:
`You're extremely ill-mannered to ask a lot of questions
like that.'
168
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
‘Yes, Father Morin.'
`You annoy people.'
'I know.'
`Aren't you ashamed of yourself?'
Still on my knees in front of him, I began to laugh:
'It is my conscience that told me to make you lose your
temper: I am instrumental to your sanctification.'
`It's possible.'
He gazed for a moment at the glowing embers in the
stove. Then he said:
'And also you're instrumental to your own sanctification.'
'Sundays I'm run off my feet,' said Morin, 'what with the
scrubbing-board all morning.' `The scrubbing-board?’
’My chasuble, if you'd rather. All those masses, I get fed
up.' 'You don't look fed up.'
`I did a baptism just before coming here, and it put me in
a bit better mood.'
I thought of the definite characteristics that this priest had
imprinted on a child who would no doubt never see him
again.
As I leaned down to poke the fire I saw Morin's foot
moving rapidly up and down, up and down. The serene
expression on his face contrasted strangely with that quick,
nervous movement.
169
BÉATRIX BECK
Despite my happiness in having become a Christian, the
pain of my conversion remained alive. The fish rejoiced at
having been hooked out of its swamp and thrown into the
river, but the wound that the hook had caused refused to
heal.
'Surely,' I said to Morin, 'at the seminary they must have
taught you the art of catching people.'
'Yes, they call that pastoral duties.'
'You must have been top of the pastoral class.'
'I never studied that, I was called up before I got to it.'
'Before you'd finished?'
`That was all I'd missed. So I was able to go as a chaplain
right away.'
'Where to?'
'Finland.'
`Was it tough?'
`Not always. We went around on skis, drawn by horses.'
‘I got a proper dressing down thanks to you,' Christine
said to me.
'Why? Who from?'
'I was unlucky enough to say you were too complicated
and I was told off, straight from the shoulder. I was told
that you were perfectly natural, complicated or not; that you
were trying to clarify your faith, that yours wasn't any old
coal-heaver's faith like mine was, that I'd do well to pick up
a few tips from you; that you were trying to elevate yourself
170
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
to humility, while I, on the other hand, was sliding down as
fast as ever I could into pride.'
'It's only behind my back,' I said, ‘that he's ever nice to
me. When he comes to see me he tells me I'm infatuated
with myself, an educated ass, a bear, and he says that you at
least, in spite of all your faults, live the life of grace.'
As it happened, the harshness from which Morin almost
never wavered in his dealings with me was to me a source
of singular joy.
When I was a child I had been deeply moved by Schiller's
story about the Knight of Malta: having conquered the
dragon and been expelled from the order by the grand
master, he bends down before departing to kiss the latter's
impassive hand. And now the grand master of the order had
appeared.
Was this masochism, or was it a soaring of my soul
toward purification and expiation, the joy of being pierced
through and through? It seemed to me to be both at once,
and mixed up together: My being, with one and the same
movement, rose like a lark and fell like a stone.
One Sunday France woke up too late for the children's
nine o'clock mass at Saint Mesmin's. Rather than wait for
the next one, which was not till eleven, I thought it better to
take her to the ten o'clock mass at Saint Bernard's.
At the door smiling young people were handing out
orange pamphlets, entitled: To help you follow the mass.
171
BÉATRIX BECK
Some passages were crossed out, others corrected or
expanded.
There is a connecting link between the Epistle and the Gospel, which
is called the Gradual because it used to be sung at the gradations or
steps of the ambo.
Morin, in his small, tidy hand, had here written in
brackets: 'the pulpit in the earliest churches.' I imagined him
adding this explanatory note to hundreds of orange
pamphlets. The thought of this homework filled me with
gaiety.
Opposite alleluia, Morin had written: 'means "praise
God" in Hebrew.'
Beside the Tract: 'so called because it is sung all together,
i.e. drawn out, Latin tractus.'
In the printed text the oblation was followed by a
commentary:
This prayer reproduces the words of the three young men whom
Nebuchadnezzar threw into the fiery furnace for remaining faithful to
the laws of God, and who offered them-selves up as a sacrifice in
expiation of their sins and those of their people.
Morin had thought to enlarge on this:
'Neb., king of Babylon, who tried to force the Jews to
worship a golden statue.'
The little orange booklet informed us:
Canon comes from a Greek word meaning: he who leads.
And Morin had drawn an analogy which took me
somewhat aback:
172
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
`Similarly the canon, or barrel, of a gun is the part which
leads the bullet in a particular direction.'
A brilliant procession was moving up the central nave.
Surrounded by numerous choirboys, apparently of all ages
from six to fifteen, Morin, in his golden chasuble, sprinkled
the congregation, to left and right, to right and left, with
lustral water, and sang the while in his powerful voice:
'Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis
me, et super nivem dealbabor.'
King of Glory, Christ in majesty. Held by the hand I knew
so well, the aspergill became a branch of green hyssop. The
cloth of gold covers your tattered clothes.
`Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam
tuam,' responded the congregation as one man. Morin had
succeeded, during this brief period of the mass, in inspiring
them with a unanimous zeal. I saw him again, wearing his
alb, speaking to a boy in one of the side aisles. Another
priest climbed the steps to the altar. France followed the
ceremony of holy sacrifice in her illustrated missal.
Suspiciously she watched to make sure that the celebrant
was performing the correct movements at exactly the
prescribed Aimes. Morin walked among the faithful,
pointing out the place in this woman's prayer book,
speaking a few words to a man over there, taking a child by
the hand and leading him from the back of the church to
the very front row. He intoned the responsions with the
crowd, facing the people and leading them as a conductor
173
BÉATRIX BECK
leads his orchestra. Child of thunder. The way he kneeled
on the flagstones in the transept, the slow, ample gestures
with which he crossed himself, moved me terribly.
When going to the pulpit he went slightly out of his way,
so that he passed close beside me. His head was bowed, his
expression one of concentration, and the sleeve of his alb
brushed my cheek. This gentle contact, almost a caress,
overwhelmed me. A great bird, an angel, had touched me
with his wing, me a creature of the earth. I could well have
died. I was unable to retain my tears, which ran down my
cheeks as heavy as molten metal. I tried to conceal my face
by pulling forward the cotton scarf I was wearing about my
head. Never again, I promised myself, would I attend mass
at Saint Bernard's. 'My brothers,' Morin was asking from on
high, in the pulpit, 'is it the cold that numbs you? I hope that
the beautiful spring sunshine will stimulate you afresh.
There are people who tell their rosary during holy mass: it is
not the proper time. There are people who pray their little
prayers before a statue, even while the Most Sacred Host is
there, waiting for you, alive, here in the church. And then
everyone leaves before the last Gospel. Are you in such
haste to leave your God, you Sunday Christians? My
brothers, do not resemble those disciples who pressed so
close about Our Lord that they almost suffocated him while
preventing others from drawing near or even seeing him. If
you are Christians in name only, you drive away the
174
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
undecided, destroy their desire to come, whereas each one
of you should be an apostle in his own circle.
`I should also like to say this to you: sing our mass in our
church with greater strength, do not drag out the final notes.
If we sing better and more vigorously, if we follow our mass
with greater understanding and piety, it means automatically
that we shall also live a more Christian life. Let us put all our
life into our mass, and, in return, our mass will fill our life
and will make it finer and more beautiful. In the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, so be it.'
'There are two things of which I am absolutely certain,' I
said to Christine. 'And they contradict each other. The priest
is spiritually the most sublime man I have ever known. And
on Sunday, without any possible shadow of a doubt, he
deliberately passed close by me and brushed me with his
sleeve. You can imagine the effect that has had on me.'
`Yes, I'd already noticed,' said Christine. 'He sometimes
does things like that. It's not surprising that he gets bawled
out by his bishop.'
`Do you think it's just mischievousness on his part, just
fun? It must be what they call the wonderful freedom of the
children of God. "Love, and do whatever you wish." But
me, it knocks me sideways.’
'He does that sort of thing to goad us on,' said Christine.
`But of course it's a risk. He's not frightened, though. He's
no more frightened of that than he is of anything else.’
175
BÉATRIX BECK
In order to be healed, sick persons must for a time fall in
love with their psycho-analyst.
I was in bed but not asleep. Morin came up the stairs,
carrying and dragging after him enormous sheets of a
startling whiteness. My bedroom door opened and Morin
appeared, his arms filled with these sheets which he had
brought purposely for the consummation of our union.
Shouting for joy, I held out my arms to him. 'At last,' I cried,
'at last you've come. I couldn't wait any longer.'
I helped him tear off his soutane. Our bodies were joined
together. I achieved perfect bliss and I awoke. France slept,
her attitude one of abandonment, between the wall and me.
She seemed to be carried away upon a flowing river.
`Forgive me,' I prayed to God. 'Control my dreams. Do
not allow me to offend you, even in my sleep.'
I rode a galloping thoroughbred. On the pommel of my
saddle sat my child, who was called the Eaglet. I reached my
ancestral domain. All the countryside, so far as the eye could
see, all nature was mine, including the sea on the horizon
and the sky so close above my head, which was studded with
stars though it was midday. From all sides my people came
running to do me homage. A number of them were dead,
but this could not be seen. I set off on my steed down the
avenue which led to my castle. There is not even room for
a cigarette-paper between my knee and the flank of my
mount, I thought with joyous pride. I had never visited my
176
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
home before, yet I recognized everything. How had I
managed to come here on horse-back, I wondered, since
Ireland is surrounded by sea? My ancestral home was
nothing but a heap of broken stones. By the power of my
glance I raised up a clock-tower, supported by two flying
buttresses. To my great surprise three superimposed clock
faces appeared on this tower, each telling a different time of
day. It was while trying to decipher them that I awoke. Well
done, I said to myself; you've really passed a fine night. First
sacrilegious erotomania, then megalomania.
Did Christ dream? What sort of dreams could he have
had?
A dough-coloured dawn was spreading over the town.
Soon the bells would begin to ring for the first mass of the
day. I would hurry to church and partake of the healing host.
As usual I was tortured by thirst. My tongue was a foreign
body rattling against my desiccated palate. My ears were
filled with the clink of bottles, bottles of mineral water, all
fresh and beaded with cold. Travellers lost in the desert, I
said to myself, cannot suffer more than I am suffering. My
soul for a glass of water! The brass tap above the sink shone
malignantly. No, I shall not drink, I said to myself over and
over again. I will, I will take communion. In a little while, at
half-past six, I shall at last be able to quench my thirst. It
will be marvellous.
As soon as I had received communion my thirst vanished.
Back home busied myself with waking France, washing and
177
BÉATRIX BECK
dressing her, making her breakfast and sending her off to
school. I did not think of drinking.
'Is it the devil or my own perverse spirit that persecutes
me in this way? Or are the two one and the same thing?' I
asked Morin.
'I don't know,' he replied. 'The devil attacks principally
those Christians who are far advanced in the life of the
spirit, which would not seem to be the case with you. It
makes you want to laugh to hear me talk about the devil?
All right, laugh as much as you like, it's one upon him.’
It would soon be time for France to take her first
communion. She made ready for this by cross-questioning
Morin.
'Did the Blessed Virgin drive away or charm the serpent?
Is it after going to confession that people throw confetti?
When they brought the infant Jesus the presents in his
manger, did he already understand? Does Our Lord want us
to eat him like c-cannibals? Funny idea. There's no need for
me to say my prayers since I'm all right with God as it is. Oh
no, I don't want to pray for daddy, it would be naughty, it
would seem as though I wasn't sure he's already in Heaven.'
Morin, suppressing a smile, answered all her questions
carefully and gravely.
'The nuns,' complained France, 'are cross because I don't
go to catechism at Saint Mesmin's.'
'You don't want to let that worry you,' said Morin. 'If the
good sisters want to fuss, let them.'
178
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'You don't seem very fond of nuns, Father Morin,' I said.
'How anti-Christian you are!'
'Aren't I?' he said. 'But it's not true, I'm very fond of nuns,
at least some of them. It depends. There are some living not
far from here. They looked after the poor people, free of
course. It all went very well and they were quite accepted.
And then, one day, someone saw a big load of potatoes
being delivered at their house. That was the end of them.
They can hardly go on living in the town. They're known as
the taties.'
'Quite right,' I said, and Morin did not contradict me.
He invited us to visit him one Sunday afternoon so that
he might put France through her communion examination.
The little girl answered all the questions correctly.
'And now I shall confess you,' Morin said to her.
He led me out into the hall, which was full of people. A
self-assured patriarch, an elegant lady wearing a hat
decorated with what looked like black ice-plants, and a
number of young men, one of whom had used a grotesque
amount of brilliantine to smarm down his hair, were waiting
on a bench in the narrow hallway. After some ten minutes
there came the sound of a dance-tune being played on the
piano. France ran out, all dishevelled, and without taking
any notice of the people, shouted happily: 'Come and see
this, mama!'
As soon as the door had closed behind us the child set
about inventing dances to tunes that Morin improvized
179
BÉATRIX BECK
upon the piano. Her sandy hair flew around her shoulders.
She was flushed with excitement and her green eyes
sparkled. She spun and pirouetted and twisted and threw
herself down and leaped up again like an elf in a glade.
'We'll make you a tight-rope dancer,' said Morin, closing
the piano.
'Mama,' cried France, jumping up and down, 'I've no
more sins, they've all been taken away.'
On one of the three chairs there stood a wireless, half
dismantled. Morin suggested to the little girl that she sit on
his knee. She ran across and did so, pressing her cheek
against the priest's shoulder, while the latter talked to me
and took no further notice of the child. France, exhausted
and happy, gazed at the brightly-coloured posters, the fine
parquet floor and the piano.
'Father Morin,' she said, pulling at one of the buttons on
his soutane. He seemed not to hear her, and went on talking
to me about Christian communism.
`Father Morin,' she insisted. He looked down at her.
'I love you,' she said, gazing straight into his face. At these
words I felt the blood rush to my face.
'Fine,' said Morin approvingly. 'I love you, too.'
France gave a deep sigh of contentment, closed her eyes
and would probably have fallen asleep in the arms of her
confessor, had I not thought it time for us to leave.
France made her first communion at midnight mass.
When she came out of the church she turned somersaults in
180
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
the snow for joy. We celebrated with a bowl of powdered
soup.
'We're the happiest people in all the world,' said France.
'It's true,' I replied. When she was asleep I took a little
Christmas tree from the cupboard. Instead of candles and
ornaments, which were unobtainable at that time, I
decorated it with pictures that I clipped to its branches with
clothes-pegs. At the foot of the tree I placed a little cradle
for the celluloid doll that we had almost lost to the
American.
From beneath his cape Morin drew an object wrapped in
newspaper and shaped like a walking-stick.
'Here,' he said. `So you can see in the cellar.
It was a candle, a 'funeral candle' he insisted teasingly.
The only kindling wood I could buy was too big for my
stove and I had to split the pieces so that they would fit in.
The head of my axe was for-ever coming off the shaft and
I tied them together as best I could.
'I'll split some wood for you,' announced the priest.
'Oh, no,' I protested. 'Not you.'
'Give it me,' he said.
Since I refused to hand him the axe he tried to take it
from me by force. Our hands became intertwined as we
struggled for the hatchet, and they might well have been cut.
His leg was hard and tense against my own.
'Stop it,' he said roughly.
181
BÉATRIX BECK
I let go of the axe and moved away. He leaned down, and
his long, fringed belt swung from side to side as his body
moved in time to the quick strokes with which he split the
wood. His expression was one of concentration. What
forest, constantly- reborn, was he felling thus? Pioneers, ah!
pioneers.
'There,' he said as he handed me back the axe for which
we had fought. I took it and drove it into the chopping
block. Morin looked at me and said:
‘Jenny the Axewoman.'
My heart missed a beat. It was the first time that my
director had ever called me by a name that implied neither
criticism nor mockery. For a moment I saw that in his eyes
I was beautiful.
He took the axe from the block, sat down on it himself
and examined the cutting edge. He asked:
'You haven't got a bit of wire, have you?'
The angelic woodcutter now looked like an executioner,
a headsman.
`If you were a Protestant clergyman, would you marry
me?' I asked suddenly, and my voice was throaty.
'Of course I would,' he cried.
'No, I'm asking you seriously. I must know. If you weren't
a priest would you take me to be your wife?'
`Yes,' he answered briefly and struck one of the bundles
of kindling a violent blow. I felt both overwhelmed and
stripped bare. With a single gesture, a single movement, he
182
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
had given me everything and taken everything away. If at
least the man I loved had had a brother to whom I could
belong, then my blood would have been indirectly mingled
with his. I would have been able to give birth to children
who might, perhaps, have resembled him. My heart became
a bird of prey.
Morin had got to his feet. He threw his cape about his
shoulders and left, scarcely saying good-bye.
He did not come back until the spring. The window was
wide open. He leaned his elbows on the sill and gazed out
at the mountains saying:
`It's really beautiful.'
I did not know the names of all the peaks, and those that
I did know I often confused with one another.
'But every child of five knows what they're called,' said
Morin. Stretching out his arm towards each peak in turn, he
told me its name, lovingly. We went and sat down.
From the courtyard below there came a song:
Will you make me a present,
Curé, my dear friend?
If you'll come to beddy-byes,
Simone, my Simone,
My little sweetheart.
What'll we do with the baby,
Curé, my dear friend?
If it's a little bitch
183
BÉATRIX BECK
We'll make her a nun,
Simone, my Simone,
My little sweetheart.
And if it's a baby boy
A cure like his daddy.
An icy calm flowed through my veins as I got up. I
seemed to be walking through a vacuum. I crossed to the
window, which I closed slowly and gently and felt, while so
doing, as though I were gagging someone. The obscene
voice became incomprehensible. As I went back to my chair
my eyes met those of Morin and there was almost a smile in
his. He shook his head and clicked his tongue a little against
his teeth:
'Tut! Tut!' a sound of indulgent disapproval. We went on
talking austerely about essence and accidents.
184
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On the floor above ours there lived a little Sicilian girl. She
was the same age as France and was called Amanda. One
evening she came to call on me, curtseyed, and asked:
'Madame, might France come and play with me on the
rubbish heap?'
Amanda's mother had died a little while before, at the age
of twenty-four, as the result of an attempted abortion.
Throughout her agony, which lasted for several hours, she
repeated over and over again:
'Forgive me. Forgive me.'
'Yes,' said Morin, when I told him of this. 'She understood.
'We had a lovely time,' Amanda told France. 'First we went
to the cinema and then to mama's grave.'
Amanda was to make her first communion at Easter, and
she asked France for advice:
`Why is it wrong to say "in God's name?" I think it's nice to
talk to God about his name.'
France replied, with authority:
'It's very nice to say "in God's name," it's a prayer.'
185
BÉATRIX BECK
And the two little girls, kneeling face to face with heads
bowed and hands folded, repeated fervently and ever more
loudly:
`God's name. God's name. God's name.'
They had decided that the courtyard was a meadow
swarming with snakes, which they crushed beneath their
heels:
`Good-bye, little meadow,' said Amanda. 'You can grow
your flowers now, all the vipers are killed.'
On Sundays Amanda's father took her to his favorite cafe.
But the little girl envied us on our walks, and he allowed her
to go with us.
From the crests of the circling hills there was a view over
the whole town with its red or pink roofs. It was divided
into three parts by the curving river and its swift tributary.
Around the edges of the town there rose the factory
chimneys and, scattered across the town itself; were the
eight church spires. At one of these I could not stop gazing.
‘To think,' I said to myself; 'that at this moment Morin is
down there, singing. It's vespers now.'
As the crow flew, the distance between him and myself
was small. But on foot it was several hours' walk from where
I stood to Saint Bernard's. You bitch, I thought, you were a
fine one to pray for Marion Lamiral.
In order that I might keep God's friendship despite the
profanity of my thoughts, and for the sanctity of Leon
Morin and for all the world, I underwent such penances as
186
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
presented themselves to me. Thus I remained thirsty, while
Amanda and France drank at wayside springs with shouts
of joy. I kept on my feet while they sat down to rest. As
often as possible I arranged that we avoid the road along the
hilltops. At last God gave me strength enough to run
happily with the two children along the top path without
even glancing once at that house of his which I loved the
most.
Sometimes we set off with Christine Sangredin, her
daughter Chantal and her nephew. Didier, who was eleven
years old, was an object of great interest to the three girls.
Each, according to her own character, attempted to win the
boy's favor: Amanda pretended she could not climb without
his help, France shouted at him every few minutes that she
had found something wonderful, an apple, a strangelyshaped stone, a snail-shell. Chantal made the most of being
Didier's relation, saying:
`Do you remember, at home… ? Do you remember, in
your house, when my auntie said . . .?'
On one picnic Didier stripped off his shirt and Amanda,
Chantal and France could not take their eyes from the boy's
torso. France was so absorbed in her examination of him
that it was all she could do to find her mouth. Chantal
stretched out her delicate index finger and ran it along
Didier's spine, while the latter went on placidly stuffing
himself.
187
BÉATRIX BECK
`Stop that, what's the matter with you?' said Christine,
slapping her daughter's hand.
'If a girl can't even touch her own first cousin…’
grumbled Chantal. And she began affectedly to lick the red
mark on the back of her hand.
When the children were temporarily out of earshot
Christine availed herself of the opportunity to tell me that
Didier wished to be a priest, but that he would doubtless
change his mind when he grew older. She added that she
was sure she loved her nephew as much as her daughter,
perhaps even more.
We passed by a little, lowly church. Christine suggested:
'We could go in, if you wanted.'
‘Like this?' I asked. We were wearing shorts and our backs
were bare.
'God doesn't give a hoot,' Christine informed me.
'I daresay, but his ministers do.'
`His ministers, who care about them?'
Impetuously she thrust open the door and her hand, like
a thirsty animal, plunged into the font.
Our offices took up the ground floor of the building.
Upstairs there lived a Jewish couple who had been arrested
by the Germans, together with their two children, on
information given by another tenant, a Madame Cochel. A
little later we had recognized Madame Goldschlager's
diamond ring on Madame Cochel's fourth finger.
188
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
At the time of the liberation the informer, informed upon
in her turn by the concierge, had been arrested. Six months
later we saw her in the entrance hall, coming home, her face
pale and her features drawn. Like the other girls, I was
horrified to see her again. We were disgusted that she should
have gotten off so lightly. Suddenly Christine came running
out of the office, shook the criminal warmly by the hand,
told her in a very loud voice how glad she was to see her
back, and said that she would be only too pleased to be of
any help in case of need. Madame Cochel blushed and
thanked her, her eyes filling with tears.
`You see what your friend, Madame Sangredin, is up to?'
they said to me, hatefully. 'What are you waiting for? Why
don't you do the same?'
Just because one's friendly with someone, it doesn't mean
one has to imitate or even approve of everything that person
does.'
`You're a practicing Christian like her. So why don't you
run up and forgive her too? Quick, go and shake Madame
Cochel's hand. Go and kiss her.'
`Tell her it doesn't matter about the Goldschlagers. Tell
her God forgives everything.'
`No, God does not forgive everything,' I cried. 'Thanks
be to God, there is such a place as hell.'
'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that
trespass against us,' chanted a sardonic voice.
189
BÉATRIX BECK
`Yes,' I said, and I was trembling. 'We forgive people who
have injured us personally. But Jesus Christ never said:
"Forgive the injuries done to your neighbors." Do you think
I imagine myself capable of forgiving in the name of the
Goldschlagers? in the name of the Goldschlagers' ashes?'
But I felt more and more worried.
Was Madame Sangredin right?' I asked Morin.
`Yes, she acted according to the dictates of her
conscience,' he replied.
`But me, as a Christian, should I forgive a woman who
was an informer?'
`You don't even know the whole story.'
‘Perhaps, but I saw the Jewess's ring on her finger with
my own eyes. She had the insolence to actually wear it.'
'The priest gives absolution, the firing squad has its own
duties to perform, and both are necessary,' said Morin.
These just and charitable words restored my peace of
mind. Thenceforth I. prayed for the informers: 'Oh Lord,
make the tribunals of man inflict the punishments that they
deserve, so that You may call them to Your heaven.'
`I've been home for three days,' said Morin happily. 'I
helped bring in the hay.'
`Are your sisters at home?'
`Yes. The elder is married, my other one isn't.’
‘Has the married one got any children?'
`Yes, three, and she's expecting a fourth in September.'
`How old are they? What are they called?'
190
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'There's Rene, a boy, he's five, and Martine who's three
and Anne-Marie, eight months.'
I imagined Morin, the big rake in his hand, the dry hay
sticking to his soutane. Working beside him would be his
younger sister, a kerchief about her head. Rene would push
Martine over and then help her to get up again. Not far
away, the barn. My God, I thought, will I never be able to
get through a single hour without offending you?
On many subsequent occasions I found myself asking
Morin about his nephew and his nieces. He spoke of them
as though they were strangers.
`The boy . . . The little girl . . . It seems they were
frightened about the baby, she had a nasty boil. It's
wonderful there. Twenty miles from here. I go once or twice
a year.'
When talking about the children to whom he was
teaching the catechism or those of his parishioners, Morin
did not preserve this detached attitude. He said, with relish:
'My kids,' and, 'It's tremendous how fast they're growing up
just now. They're very quick to learn.'
One scorching Saturday afternoon I was polishing the
floor of my room, behind lowered blinds, while a ridiculous
song ran through my brain.
'Take virgin wax to wax the bridal suite, bridal suite, bridal
suite.'
191
BÉATRIX BECK
At the same time I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Hail
Mary. My prayers and my refrain were atrociously mixed up
together.
Apart from the bed, the only pieces of furniture in the
room were a toboggan and a crucifix which I polished with
the same, bitter vigor until they both shone equally. I
straightened the cretonne cover over my bed as carefully as
though I were performing a ceremony. Then I went into the
kitchen, and was just beginning to do the washing, when
there came a ring at the bell. It was Morin.
'Hello,' he said, and he sounded in a hurry. 'I've brought
you some books for Daniele—Madame Sangredin told me
you're going up to the san to-morrow. And I've got one for
you too, here, take it.'
He handed me a thick, gray volume, the title of which
took up several lines. My eye caught only the words:
Traditional dogmatism and empirical criticism.
`It looks terribly heavy,' I said. 'I don't suppose I'll
understand it.'
Morin, who was about to leave, opened the book and
accepted my suggestion that he sit down beside me at the
table while he tell me something about it. I listened
attentively to his explanations, but now a curious the
phenomenon took place. Not only did I fail to grasp
meaning of what he was saying: each one of his words, taken
separately, struck my ear as a note of music, quite
unconnected with the language of speech. Through the wall,
192
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
with a burning clarity, I could see the room I had made
ready, the bedspread with its morning glory pattern. My
forehead became beaded with sweat.
'My goodness, it's hot,' said Morin maliciously.
In his black uniform and his stiff white collar he seemed
bathed in coolness, while I, naked beneath my linen blouse,
was sweating painfully. I felt as though Morin were calling
to me from the far bank of a stream. I drove the point of a
knife into the top of the deal table. Morin took it from my
hands, the haft brushing my fingers as he did so, and placed
it in the drawer. He opened the book and pointed to certain
passages with his first finger. I could see each letter quite
distinctly: each one was a drawing, a little person whom I
recognized but whose name I could not recall. The key to
reading was lost. My teeth chattered noisily together. I
attempted in vain to keep them clenched. From the far side
of the wall I was watching us. God, exercise my desire for
this one, single hour, and thenceforth I shall bless the
eternal torment.
Temptation does not exist. To be tempted would be to
long for that which one knows to be bad. It would be
madness. The very fact that I desired made my desire are
good in my eyes. My desire and I were one and visible.
Ironic triumph! Whereas my spirit had never succeeded in
imparting to me that simplicity which Morin so urged me to
achieve, my flesh did it with lightning speed.
193
BÉATRIX BECK
Morin raised hand. His black sleeve fell back to reveal the
cuff of a blue shirt, a layman's shirt. Everything is possible,
I thought. I stretched out my hand towards Morin and said:
'Come.'
He jumped back. My hand touched nothing. He got up
and with three strides was at the door. With a single word I
had destroyed my universe. All my attempts at the Christian
life had resulted only in this animal cry. Morin was walking
back towards me, his expression so rigidly severe that I
thought: 'He's going to beat me.' I closed my eyes and heard
his voice, comforting me:
'It's not Mademoiselle Sabine any more. Well, so much
the better, it's a step forward
'Look at people when they're speaking to you,' he
ordered, after a short silence. His expression was that of a
shrewd peasant.
'If only you called on God as you call on the male of the
species,' he said. 'That is real prayer.'
'You won't come to see me any more,' I said, stating a
fact.
'Of course I shall. Why shouldn't I?' he answered heartily.
And then, in his mocking tone:
'And we'll discuss hypostasis together. I’d miss it if we
didn't.'
He was standing by the door again, his hand on the knob,
and he turned to fact me once more:
'You must go and confess.'
194
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'No!' I protested. 'I couldn't possibly ever tell anyone
about it!'
'If it were me whom you told,' suggested Morin gently.
'Since I know already. . .’
'You!' I echoed. I was struck with horror and could not
hold back my tears. 'You?'
'I, too, have to force myself to go to confession. But I do
go all the same, and often.'
'You go all the same, and often,' I repeated with sarcasm
and anger. 'You never commit any sins, so I suppose you
accuse yourself of the sins of others.'
'It's a pity there's nobody to hit you over the head with a
hammer,' said Morin. 'You'll come this evening, won't you?
Any time after half past-five. I'll wait for you till you come,
no matter how late you are.'
'My little girl is coming back from school.'
'You'll bring her with you. I'll confess to her too.'
He walked out, saying over his shoulder:
'Good-bye. See you later.'
I heard him running down the stairs four at a time. I felt
God as an infinite absence, a void that could never be filled,
a lack, a supreme deafness and dumbness. Atheism would
have been more tolerable. I washed my face. My soul was to
me a brothel.
France came home and I told her where we were going.
'What sins have you committed?' she asked with curiosity.
'That's no concern of yours,' I replied with feigned gaiety.
195
BÉATRIX BECK
'If you tell me yours,' she insisted, 'I'll tell you all about
mine.'
To increase my affliction of mind I said to myself, over
and over again: 'Christ taught us that concupiscence is the
equivalent of adultery.' But this thought overshot the mark:
I desired, therefore I possessed, I told myself, and I exulted
in this idea, despite myself and from the very bowels of my
distress
'This is going to be fun,' said Morin, sliding back to the
panel.
'Father, help me.’
'You don't need my help. I'm listening.'
'I almost . I said . . . I, I don't know what the word is for
what I did.'
'You're pretending to be a piece of dead wood at this
moment. You know what they do to dead branches?'
'Yes.'
`What do they do?'
'They break them off.'
'And when they've been broken off, what happens to
them?'
'They're burned.'
`Right. I'm listening.'
'I, I tried to lead astray, to…’
`Finish your sentences, if you don't mind.'
'I wanted to make a priest break his vows, I wanted myself
to break the ninth Commandment, and the tenth too.'
196
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'There we are,' said Morin. 'It is perhaps not entirely your
fault. To-morrow you will see Daniele. Try to make sure that
your visit does her good. In fact you can be of mutual help
to one another.
'As a penance you will read every evening, on your knees,
one page of the book I brought you, since you listened so
attentively to the commentary. And now, go in complete
peace.'
I went, almost in peace.
That evening France, who had been playing in the
courtyard with Amanda, came upstairs purple with anger:
`Amanda is a naughty girl.'
Without letting her finish whatever it was she had to say
I spanked her for being a tell-tale and a sneak.
'Alas,' I said to myself while she cried in a corner, 'you're
a bad mother. Admit that the reason you spank your child
so hard is that you can't make love instead.'
Daniele was lying on her back, her face lightly made up,
her eyes sparkling. There was a deep blue ribbon knotted
about her hair which had grown very long. She wore a
nightgown which would have suited a bride, for it was much
decorated with lace and buttons of mother of pearl.
When I reached her bedside she held out her arms
gracefully, though without moving her body. 'Now I must
kiss consumption,' I thought, and my heart almost stopped
beating. I raised Daniele up and enfolded her in my arms; I
197
BÉATRIX BECK
zealously kissed her clammy face. Our lips met and I
thought I swallowed a few droplets of her saliva. God's
irony, I thought. The kisses that all your being cries out for
are denied you and here you are, against all the revulsion of
your body, hugging this frightful tubercular woman.
`Up here,' said Daniele, 'we lose all interest in the people
down below. Their worries seem so very un-important to
us.'
She glanced towards the bay window in which was
framed a grandiose landscape of fields and forests and
mountain peaks.
'I'm happy up here,' she said. 'Much more than down
there.'
The idea of death did not seem to touch her.
'I'm going to preach the Gospel to the nations of the
earth,' said Morin, seated on the chopping block and playing
with the ax. 'Or rather to the villages of the province.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
`I'm leaving Saint Bernard's for a little village, but since
there aren't any priests in the other villages there-abouts I
shall be traveling around. There'll be two of us, and two girls
in another village to help us. They call that a mission.
Nowadays France has become a country of missions. It's
not that I like the idea of going there.'
'Why shouldn't you like going there?' I asked in a voice as
calm as Morin's, while I thought: 'A perfect disappearance,
198
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
oh Lord. Perfect are your ways, oh Lord of Hosts. The
desert will remain beautiful, even though there be no oasis.'
Whether or not Morin had initiated his departure, this made
no difference to its nature: it was cruelly fortunate.
'In the country,' said Morin, 'before you start discussing
serious matters you always have to talk a bit about rabbits
and pigs. Besides, I love parish life when it's going on
smoothly and down there it most certainly isn't smooth. The
villages are split over politics.
‘On the other hand, one thing that is good is that the
people have been without a priest for donkey's years and are
completely dechristianized. So there won't be any
deviations, it's practically virgin soil. But it'll take
generations to achieve anything.'
While seeing Morin to the door I found France in the hall.
She straightened up, and had undoubtedly been listening at
the keyhole. Her hair had been cut like a boy's, because of
lice at her school, and her eyes were like glow-worms.
Standing there in her faded pink pyjamas which were too
small for her, with her bare feet on the tiled floor, she
looked like a boy of equivocal charms.
'I'm worried about your behind,' said Morin. 'I rather
think something nasty may happen to it.'
'It doesn't matter,' said France, 'if I only knew what you've
been talking about.'
199
BÉATRIX BECK
'What is it you're so anxious to know?' asked Morin,
picking her up and balancing her upon his knee while he sat
on the sill of the window through which had come the song:
Simone, my Simone.
'What did God do before he made the world?' asked
France. 'Didn't he do anything?'
`Nothing.'
'He must have been bored. Wasn't he?'
'I don't know. Yes, perhaps he was. He made the world
through love.'
'Why don't you ask him what he did before?'
`Those are matters that can never be known.'
'Not even by you?' the little girl was astonished.
'Not by me or by anybody else.'
'Won't we ever know?'
'When we're dead we shall know.'
'Oh, I do want to be dead!' cried France, with happy
impatience.
'While you're waiting to be dead you'd best go back to
bed. And if you get up again, or do anything else silly, I'll
come here myself and give you a wigging and then you'll
see.'
Carrying France on his shoulder Morin, for the first time,
entered our bedroom. He put the little girl into bed and,
leaning down, tucked her up carefully.
'I wish I knew a prayer that doesn't exist,' she said.
200
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'A prayer that doesn't exist?'
'Yes, a prayer people don't know. So as not to be always
saying the same things to God. It's not nice.'
'We'll find one for you,' Morin agreed. He kneeled on the
floor, beside the bed, and recited softly:
The lamb looks for the bitter bramble,
It is salt it wants not sugar,
Its feet make a patter like raindrops in the dust.
When it wants something, nothing will stop it,
It forces its way through, butting with its forehead.
Then it bleats for its mother who runs up, anxious…
Lamb of God, the saviour of man,
Lamb of God, who counts us and names us,
Lamb of God, see us and pity us for what we are.
France had fallen asleep. Wonderful is the irony of God,
I thought. I have longed that this man should come into this
room. Here he is, not the perjured accomplice whom I
desired, but radiant with holiness, lulling asleep my child, a
lamb of his flock, with a poem. God, thank you for loving
him more than I can love, for doing more than I have asked
you to do. Thank you for your solitude.
Our office was moving back to Paris and I would be
leaving the town at about the same time as Morin. He had
told me that he would come to say good-bye but the days
passed and I wondered with an anguish that was not with201
BÉATRIX BECK
out resignation, whether he had perhaps already left. I could
have gone out in the evenings, for France was spending the
holidays in a camp, but I had no wish to take the initiative
of going to the curacy of Saint Bernard's.
'The priest is leaving to-morrow,' Christine told me. 'He
asks if you can come and see him this evening. He hasn't
had time to call on you.'
The door swung ajar and the wooden peg on the end of
its string tapped against the board with the holes; the
addresses had all been rubbed out. The little square of
cardboard bearing the words: 'Leon Morin, priest,' had
vanished. I rang the bell. No one came. I heard the sound
of hammering and walked in, hesitantly. The draught blew
out the curtains in front of the windows. The books were
packed into cases. On the white walls whiter patches
showed where the posters had been and a great white cross
against a white background marked the place where the
crucifix had hung. The hammering stopped. Morin came
out of his bedroom, looking somewhat exhausted.
'Good evening,' he said. 'Weighing the anchor.'
On his desk there stood a spirit stove, tin plates and cups
such as campers use, and a small sewing kit. His feet were
bare in sandals identical to my own. He followed my glance
and explained, with a smile:
'I'm out of socks.'
I offered to help him finish his packing.
202
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
'Thanks, but it's done, it's all in there,' he said, pointing at
the boxes of books. 'There's only my rucksack still to be
packed, and I'll do that to-morrow morning.'
'You've sent your piano on ahead?'
'It was hired. The owners have taken it back. I won't have
time to play.'
'That is sad.'
`No, it's not. I'll make holes in a reed.'
'I shall go now. Thank you for everything.'
'You've no questions you'd like to ask me on this last
evening?' he said, and his tone was that of the practical man.
`There'll be questions as long as I live, so I had better say
nothing.'
'Wipe the chair with the cloth over there. Sit down. Now
then, what's the theme to-day?'
'Nothing, a very minor point. What I don't understand is
this: you say the Jansenists were heretics . . . But how about
the miracle of the Holy Thorn?'
`Why should God not perform miracles for heretics? Do
you think He loves them any less than other people?'
'It's as a result of your influence that I had come to
imagine God was a Catholic.'
'Let us call him a Catholic in our temporal language, but
that does not stop him from being a great many other things
as well. You know what Our Lord said: "In my father's
house are many mansions.’
`Contradictory mansions?'
203
BÉATRIX BECK
'It's possible. It is above all in our spirit that the contradictions exist, Monsignor Mole.'
The apparently absurd nicknames that Morin pinned on
me suited me to perfection: I felt just like a blind creature
underground, buried alive but burrowing energetically.
I got up, saying:
'This time I really am going.'
`All right, au revoir.'
'Au revoir is just a phrase.'
`No, we shall meet again. Not in this world. In the next.'
Never had Léon Morin's gaiety seemed to me so lively.
'Mind you don't fall over the packing-cases,' he said as he
saw me to the door. And his laughter was hard as a blow.
'God be with you,' he said on the landing.
I gripped the banister, my feet moved, and I found myself
in the street that was like a trench. I had a hard time
recognizing where I was. I could not walk straight. I reeled.
Neither in this world nor in the next. How could the soul
be distracted from the vision of beatitude in order to
contemplate human affections? There is nothing that can be
added to the supreme and total good. Morin had told me
that a Catholic is only bound to believe in the points
enunciated in the Apostles' Creed. There is not a word in
this prayer which promises that eternal life will unite those
who have known one another on earth. But if such a
reunion were to take place it would be my soul alone,
stripped of my body, that would see again the soul of my
204
LÉON MORIN, PÊTRE
guide. After the resurrection of the flesh I would have only
a glorified body, incapable for ever of being overwhelmed
in that of another, incapable for ever of transmitting life. I
would enjoy immortality but would no longer be able to
summon new beings to eternal life. The loss was irreparable,
I offer you, Lord, what I have been privileged to lose, a loss
before which heaven itself is impotent. May my prayer not
seem a sacrilege to you. There is sufficient sanctity in the
world to sanctify my prayer.
I walked through the silent night of God, hastening like
those Arabian donkeys whose masters ensure that there be
always an open sore on their flank, and thus that they can
make them go the better.
205