A Refreshed ‘Diary’

I held my breath as I opened Diary of a Country Priest, newly translated by Michael Tobin. How would the first two sentences read? The earlier English translation by Pamela Morris of the 1936 French original refers to a “low plain where good and evil are probably evenly distributed” in the priest’s parish, as in all of them. This is unclear and misses the point that the parishes’ spiritual temperature is not very high. To my relief, Tobin gets it right. He renders it: “good and evil find a kind of balance in them [the parishes of the time], only the center of gravity is set low, very low.” We immediately enter into the spirit of the reaction of the eponymous country priest to the contemporary life of Catholics, beset with ennui and mediocrity, as he begins the journal that chronicles his activities, spiritual struggles, and encounters with others in his new assignment in a rural area of France.

The curé develops ambitious plans to inject life into the parish, which he doggedly tries to put into practice. But he meets with resistance and almost total failure. His children’s catechism class is derailed by Séraphita, a precocious girl who outshines the other pupils. When the curé compliments her on her attentiveness in class, she says, “It’s because you have such pretty eyes.” She spreads false rumors about him, trying to ruin his reputation. A sermon he gives evokes ridicule, as does a comment by the local nobleman, a count, that he had indulged in a flight of fancy. His efforts to bring together a group of boys to form a sports team meet with little interest.

The curé’s appearance, thin and gaunt, and awkwardness of manner do not work in his favor. He feels ineffectual, isolated, and frustrated. All this is compounded by physical weakness and a stomach problem, later diagnosed as the cancer that will take his life. But the worst of his trials is spiritual aridity, difficulty in praying, and feeling abandoned by God; he refers to his “bitter interior silence.” Here we have one of the several resemblances between the priest and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who felt rejected by God and fought off blasphemous thoughts so terrifying she wouldn’t reveal them to anyone.

The curé of Torcy, from a neighboring parish, periodically visits him and lifts his spirits. As one of the several stand-ins for Bernanos in a novel Robert Speaight calls “a dialogue with himself” (Georges Bernanos: A Biography, 1974), Torcy’s comments on the Church and society reflect the views of the author. Seminaries no longer produce real men but “choirboys” who read a lot, don’t accomplish much, and don’t understand that they are working for the Bride of Christ. They want to be loved, but a “real priest is never loved.” These words are prophetic of the destiny of the country priest, who is misunderstood, calumniated, and mocked. Torcy emphasizes the importance of spiritual childhood in the Church: “God gave the Church the task of keeping this spirit of childhood, this innocence, this freshness alive in the world.” These words apply to the country priest, who is himself a striking example of spiritual childhood.

In this respect, the country priest exemplifies the Little Way of St. Thérèse. Though she was conscious of her mission, he is ignorant of the graces accorded to him and instead is all too aware of his shortcomings and failures. Yet there are instances when, like the saint of Lisieux, he is able to read others’ souls and provide them exactly the counsel they need. The foremost of several striking instances is the conversion of the countess, still embittered by the death of her young son. She is locked within herself, living off her grief, neglectful of her daughter, and distant from her unfaithful husband. In a dramatic scene, the curé confronts her with her pride and her indifference to God, which is a form of hatred. He reminds her that her sin will cut her off from contact with her son for all eternity. His words, inspired by his prayers as he asks for divine help in his struggle for the countess’s soul, bring her to accept God’s will and to hand over everything to Him, even her pride, which she can’t release. She is at peace and dies that very night, but not before writing a letter to the curé in which she refers to him as a child: “The anguished memory of a little child drove a wedge between me and everything else. And now another child has delivered me from that terrifying loneliness.” The curé, for his part, notes that in his encounter with the countess, “I understood the meaning of fatherhood.”

The death of the countess, an obstinate sinner at the very end of her life, is only one example in the novel of how people face their end. The book is, in this respect, a meditation on death. There is the suicide of Dr. Maxence Delbende, an atheist who, in his severe criticism of the Church for not doing more for the poor, echoes the sentiments of Bernanos. The physician possibly sees no way out of his financial difficulties, brought about by his extravagant largesse to the needy, after a wealthy aunt removed his expectation of an inheritance by turning over her estate to the financial advisor of a bishop in return for an annuity. The country priest asks about Delbende’s salvation but is rebuked for this by the curé of Torcy. Surprised that the younger priest is concerned for the salvation of such a charitable man, he exclaims, “If anyone else had asked me such a question!” and adds, “God alone is judge…. And Maxence was a just man.” Here, then, it is implied that an unbeliever was saved due to his righteousness.

In an encounter reminiscent of the occasional lighthearted scenes in expressionist films, providing a contrast with their dark thematic ambiance, the curé, on his way back from a pastoral visitation, meets a young motorcyclist headed in the same direction, who, it turns out, is Olivier, the nephew of the countess. He offers the priest a ride, which, to his surprise, the curé accepts. What an exhilarating experience for the curé! It is his first real experience of youth, a few moments’ compensation for his impoverished childhood and his isolation in the seminary (due in part to his self-consciousness about his low social status): “I felt young, really and truly young, with a companion as young as I.”

Back at the rectory, their conversation continues. As we would expect, in airing his views about Church and state relations over the centuries, the nature of justice, sin, and the role of soldiers, Olivier reflects Bernanos’s opinions. For both, for example, the last true soldier, Joan of Arc, represents the quintessential Christian warrior. (In Joan, Heretic and Saint [1929] Bernanos celebrated the fact that France was saved by a child who was the flower of knighthood.) Of particular interest are Olivier’s reflections on death. As a member of the Foreign Legion, he frequently risks his life in combat. In one sense, he holds life cheap, something to be given up in the heat of battle without much forethought. Some of his comrades have even fallen with blasphemies on their lips. Yet he holds that the practice of prayer has value in the relentless struggle against fear. He parts from the curé with this remark: “I wouldn’t want any priest beside me on my deathbed.” There is thus a counter side to his bravado in combat and an apparent indifference to his potential loss of life.

The curé, following the advice of Torcy, consults Dr. Lavigne in Lille, who diagnoses him with terminal cancer. As it turns out, the doctor himself has a fatal malignancy as well. Returning to the office to retrieve the prescription he had forgotten to take, the priest walks in on the doctor as he injects himself with what he acknowledges to be heroin. Here we find yet another reaction to death: escape through drugs. Lavigne, however, holds out a little hope. After thinking about the curé’s injunction to accept death joyfully, he comments, “Perhaps…I owe the truth to people like you.” But the curé, after learning his days are numbered, breaks down before the physician. Embarrassed by this, the curé finds it hard to understand the reason for his weeping. But it is because he shares Bernanos’s love for life and this sweet world and finds it hard to contemplate leaving it when in his youth and limited experience he has scarcely been able to appreciate it. The curé reflects that his tears are tears of love.

Not having the money for a hotel room, he turns to his friend Louis, a former priest, who lives in Lille with his mistress in somewhat sordid conditions. There he spends his last night, after offering friendship and compassion to Louis’s lover, who is unnamed. Both are ill with tuberculosis, and she believes she will succumb before Louis does. In her great charity, she hides this from him and the fact that he, too, is consumptive. Her demanding work as a cleaning lady, necessary to supplement Louis’s insufficient income (which, in his vanity, he delusively thinks he’ll be able to increase), undoubtedly will shorten her life. She offers an example of sacrifice for another in the face of death. What is her attitude toward her condition? “I think of all the people I’ve never met who are in the same boat as me…. I try to make myself little and slip in among them — not just the living…but the dead too, the ones who suffered, and the people yet to come who will suffer like us.” She doesn’t understand this suffering but is consoled to be in solidarity with the homeless, the sick, and the insane — with the mass of afflicted humanity.

At night, on his folding bed, the country priest contemplates his life, his youth that will now have no end. He sees youth as his continual companion, which was limited in what it could give but had enabled him to love souls “the way a child loves.” An immense peace floods his soul as he becomes reconciled to himself. Hours later, Louis finds him blacked out on the floor. Regaining consciousness, the curé asks for and receives absolution from his friend. When Louis expresses regret that the priest he called for has not arrived in time to administer Extreme Unction, the curé replies, “What difference does it make? All is grace.”

Here he is repeating verbatim the words of St. Thérèse. When she was in the final stage of tuberculosis, she was told she could possibly die during the night without the ministrations of a priest. She responds, “Undoubtedly it is a great grace to receive the sacraments, but if God does not permit it, that is well too…. All is grace.” We can be grateful to Tobin for his exact translation of the curé’s last words, ineptly rendered by Morris as “Grace is everywhere,” which fails to communicate that it was a grace for the country priest to die exactly where and how he did, with his acceptance and childlike confidence of absolution from a renegade priest and the deprivation of anointing and Viaticum. His is the most sublime attitude toward death, one of complete openness to the dispositions of divine providence.

Tobin’s translation is fluent and accurate. He corrects another error of Morris’s by accurately translating the pommes the country priest eats as “potatoes,” not “apples” (the French word can signify either). This is significant because the priest in many ways recalls the Curé of Ars in his obscurity and humility. Potatoes were a staple of St. John Vianney’s meager diet. We could wish, though, that Tobin had avoided some overly modern expressions, such as “Yikes!” as Lavigne once exclaims, but this is a minor issue.

George Bernanos (1888-1948) wrote this masterpiece after the literary success of several earlier novels. It was a work of predilection for him, one to which he was always eager to return. It is radiant, communicating tenderness, with the transcendent always there beneath the surface. The curé, through all his failed efforts and ineptness, is able to reach souls, to read into them, to be severe with them (with others besides the countess) in an effort to save them. This is the portrait of a saint who, like a child, is unaware of his greatness.

Ed. Note: Readers might be interested in Anne Barbeau Gardiner’s penetrating analysis of Diary of a Country Priest in our Vital Works Reconsidered series, “The Tears of a Cleric” (Nov. 2015), which complements the above reflections.

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