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Title: The Sacred Bird Author: Octave Mirbeau Date: 1890 Language: en Topics: fiction Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1450, 2021. Notes: Translated from the French by Robert Helms; “L’Oiseau Sacri” first appeared in the literary supplement of the Paris anarchist paper La Rivolte #3 (Sept. 27, 1890), reprinted from L’Echo de Paris.
A few leagues from my cottage, in one of the most fertile areas in
France, there lies a certain immense property. For only the past ten
years the place has belonged to a well-known banker, but it isn’t used
for hunting parties. The chateau was partly demolished during the first
revolution. Nothing remains of it but an uncrowned brick tower and some
charred walls that invade the weeds, which grow into trees, and the
moss. The banker considered rebuilding it according to its original
design, but then abandoned the idea because of the expense involved. He
already had an historic estate near Paris that sufficiently accommodated
his pride. But here the beautiful and well-preserved outbuildings have
been converted into residences, and they make superb figures in the vast
park, planted with giant trees, woven with royal lawns that roll down,
waving, to meet the Forest of P___, which is a State Forest renowned for
its high stands of timber. To the right, at a distance of ten
kilometers, interspersed here and there with groves and thickets, lie
the lands that depend economically on the estate. The new owner has much
aggrandized the primitive place. All around the chateau, he has bought
up the fields, the farms, and the meadows, so as to create for himself a
sort of inviolable kingdom, where he could be the sole master —a harsh,
implacable master who did not take his property rights lightly. He did
not have any political designs on the country. The peasants, lured by
the banker’s gold, have little by little ceded the soil they once
possessed. They have left to work elsewhere. Only a few old people
lingered, aside from some woodcutters and paupers. It’s sinister, and
makes one shudder, to encounter one of them.
I recall looking there as a child, and seeing the fields covered with
crops, the grassy meadows, and the farms, from which the alert and
joyous sounds of work-songs would escape. How it’s all changed, today! I
recognize nothing of my old haunts. One could say that a bad wind has
passed by, which has dried up the sap of bygone days with its power,
destroying all of that generous gaity in one stroke: the wheat, the
barley, and the oats as well. Even the hedges, big and leafy along the
drainage ditches, have been razed. To the left and right of the road, up
to the edge of the forest, the fields are symmetrically planted with
somber gray thorn bushes, and here and there, squares of buckwheat and
alfalfa had been planted and then left to rot on the stalk. The fences,
bristling with their closely pressed wooden pickets, defend the
approaches of the untresspassable estate where the pheasant struts
about. Here, all is sacrificed to the pheasant, and the pheasant enjoys
the style of a sacred bird —a deified bird, nourished by perfumed
berries and precious grains that are served by gamekeepers, devoted and
vigilant as those ancient priests with braided beards who watched over
the sacred ibises in ancient Egypt. Instead of the mossy-roofed
farmhouses, there are pinnacled kennels comprised of huge, turreted
aviaries. The rigid trellises of steel wire now run along where I, in
another time, would see the hazels and the aspen trees climb, ever so
thin and light against the sky with their silver leaves. From place to
place, the guard houses fire their evil looks onto the countryside from
dreaded windows.
The poor people who wander along, and the vagabonds, looking for the
night’s shelter, pass quickly over this piece of earth, where there is
nothing for their fatigue and their hunger, and where the very banks of
the roadside ditches are hostile. If by chance a small-time traveling
salesman, that misunderstood and pitiful wanderer of the markets and
fairs, should linger on these thankless roads, the gamekeepers will soon
be chasing him off. They’ve hardly gotten unhitched, and tethered their
skinny nag, just lit a fire out of dead leaves and branches by their
wagon, with its poles raised in the air and its awning torn, to cook
some potatoes for supper, and already the gamekeepers have arrived.
“Move along, you thieves! What are you doing here?”
“But the road belongs to everybody...”
“And that wood you’ve stolen —does that belong to everybody? Bullshit!
Get moving, or I’ll write you a summons!”
Sometimes a pheasant will accomany these menacing words with the mocking
sound of its wings.
One sees the sacred creatures in troops behind the trellises, running
under the shadowy tufts of the thorn bushes in their little tracks,
slipping between the rustling alfalfa stalks, and perching proudly on
the fence rails. They powder themselves with sunlight in the road,
insolently wearing the plumage of their ill-gotten wealth. One is
obsessed with the pheasant: everywhere you aim your eyesight, you see a
pheasant. With shouldered rifles and a savage air, the gamekeepers stand
along the road at intervals, and keep watch over the birds which might
be crippled by some passing peasant who bashed them with a stick. These
men in military caps, who stare at you with a brutal glare, their
gun-barrels gleaming, and these fields that are either mowed short or
covered with dark leaves, all become an obsession. You forget where you
are. It seems that you walk on ravaged, conquered soil, in enemy
territory. It brings back evil memories of other times and blurry,
painful visions of past defeats. Yes, it’s the same sadness, the same
silence, the very bereavement of the Earth, the same heaviness below the
horizon! What’s going to happen? What corpses, what panic, what
disasters wait, just past a bend in the road? This recollection of
somber days, of the broad plains we marched over, it enters into your
heart, pursues you, and terrifies you. And the spikes of the fences
bristling from either side of the road, with the points shining, had me
thinking of victorious bayonets, waving as far as the eye can see, under
the implacable cruelty of the sky.
It was very cold that day, and since I’d walked for quite a while, I was
thirsty, and so I stopped at the door of a little house that crouched
sadly alongside the road and I asked for some milk. At the back of the
room there was a man, eating a morsel of grayish bread. He didn’t turn
around. Some ragged children were swarming around him. A shotgun was
mounted above the fireplace. Out of this sad interior there breathed a
violent stink of poverty! A baby with a terrified face started crying
when he spotted me. Then a woman, the likes of whom I’ve never seen,
appeared from out of the shadows. She was badly ematiated and wore a
tortured expression, like a specter of misery. Her eyes carried a
hateful glow so openly murderous that I was intimidated by them. She
looked me over for a few mute and terrible seconds, and then, shrugging
her shoulders, she said:
“Some milk! You’re asking for some milk? Well there’s no milk around
here! There’d have to be some cows for that! But take a look around!
There’s plenty of pheasants —the pheasants of sorrow!” She gazed in
front of her with a ferocious air, and saw the fields of thorn bushes
that stretched into the distance, protecting with their shade and
nourishing with their berries the “bird of sorrow” that had taken both
her cow and her field away from her.
The man had not lifted his head. Sitting on a stool with his back turned
and his elbows on his knees, he continued to chew on his piece of hard
bread. On the packed dirt floor, crouching in a tangled heap of skinny
gooseflesh, the children were still terrified by my presence and
continued to cry. I entered this hovel and was I moved by its poverty.
“You certainly look awful, my friends,” I said, handing out some small
change to the kids. “Why haven’t you left this place? Everyone else is
gone.”
“And just where would we go?” the woman asked me.
“I don’t know —it doesn’t matter where. And you have no work here,
right?”
“He trims the trees at the chateau, but the bastards fired him because,
according to them, he goes out at night, waits behind things till a
pheasant comes along, and kills it. Three times now, those thugs have
grabbed him and locked him up for eight days at a clip. He just got out
again, the day before yesterday.”
“Shut up!” the man shouted to his wife, turning the tragic face of a
hunted animal in my direction.
“Why should I shut up?”
“Shut up!” he yelled again with an imperious voice.
At that moment, a gamekeeper appeared in the doorway. The woman threw
herself in front of him, shaking with anger, to prevent him from
entering.
“What do you want here? I won’t let you in! You have no right to come in
here! Beat it!”
The gamekeeper wanted to come in.
“Don’t touch me, you murderer,” she shrieked, “don’t you dare touch me,
or you’ll regret it. That’s all I’ve got to say to you!”
The gamekeeper asked, “Is Motteau here?”
“It’s none of your business.”
““Is Motteau here?”
“What do you want with him this time?”
“Again this morning,” the gamekeeper said, “I found a pheasant’s feather
on the White Road, and I recognized Motteau’s footprints on the ground.”
“You’re lying!” the woman yelled.
“I’m lying?”
“Yes, you’re lying.”
“No, really, I’m not lying. And tell him to watch out, because the day
we catch him, there’s gonna be one hell of a...”
“Watch out yourself, you murderer! Thief! Because... because...”
“All right, shut up.” Motteau said to his wife. Then, addressing the
gamekeeper, he said, “You’re making a mistake, Bernard. It’s not me. I
can’t take any more of your jail. It ain’t me. I was sick last night. I
had a fever. It isn’t me.”
“I said what I said,” the gamekeeper replied. “And that shotgun, over
the fireplace! At any rate, we’ve got to confiscate your...”
“This gun?”
“Yeah, that gun...”
“That’s nothing,” Motteau explained. “It’s just an old shotgun, and it
doesn’t shoot. No, it’s not for your pheasants. Not that gun.”
The two men exchanged a look of raw hatred. Then, after throwing me a
suspicious look, the gamekeeper repeated,
“I said what I said.”
As his wife moaned, Motteau returned to his place on the stool and got
lost in a dark dream. Staring at his shotgun, he was saddened by its
rusted barrels, and he lurked on vengeful nights in ambush, waiting for
the bloody drama in the thorn bushes, underneath the moon.
THE END