💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › octave-mirbeau-the-baby.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:09:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Baby
Author: Octave Mirbeau
Date: 1885
Language: en
Topics: fiction
Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1448, 2021.
Notes: Translated from the French by Robert Helms.

Octave Mirbeau

The Baby

Motteau gave his testimony as follows:

“There you have it, your honor. You’ve listened to all these people —my

good neighbors and my good friends. They haven’t cut me any slack, and

that’s fair enough. They felt uncomfortable as long as I was in

Boulaie-Blanche, and as long as there were no cops between them and the

barrels of my shotgun. They may not like me, of course, but they’re

careful not to let their hatred show, because they know that Motteau is

not someone to be played with. Today, it’s a different story. See? I

shrug my shoulders and I laugh in spite of myself.

“Maheu —one-eyed Maheu —who’s come to tell you that I’m a murderer and a

thief —OK, fine! It was Maheu that, last year at the Gravoir Auction,

killed Blandé’s guard. I was with you, you hoodlum, I don’t deny it. And

Léger, the hunchback who was churning out hypocrisies a minute ago

—Léger robbed the church of Pontillou six months ago. Oh, he won’t have

the balls to deny it. We pulled that one off together, —ain’t that

right, Léger?

“You don’t know, do you, your honor, who it was that wrung the neck of

Monsieur Jacquinot, that night when he was coming home from the Feuillet

Fair? You’ve thrown a lot of innocent people in jail for that one, after

your endless investigations. It’s Sorel —Sorel who demanded my head a

moment ago, OK? What? Ain’t you gonna protest, comrade? There’s no way

he can, don’t you see? While he strangled the old guy, I went through

his pockets —ha! This surprises you? But look at them! We’re not proud

anymore, are we, boys? We’re not arrogant. We’re turning pale, we’re

shaking, and we’re saying to ourselves that when we turn in Motteau for

the same thing we want to clear ourselves of, we’re just turning

ourselves in, and the same guillotine is going to cut through all of our

necks.

“Your honor, what I’m telling you is the truth, and you can believe me.

We’re all like this in Boulaie-Blanche. Blessed Mother! You better

believe it! For two leagues, all around the hamlet, there’s nothing but

heather and gorse bushes on the one side, and nothing but sand and rocks

on the other. Here and there are some thin little birch trees, and then

of course plenty of those stunted pines that can’t really grow. The

cabbages, even —they won’t come up in our gardens at all! The place is

cursed. How do you expect us to live in it? Oh, there’s the Bureau of

Charity, isn’t there? Come on —it’s just a cute little joke. It gives

nothing, or, it gives you nothing unless you’re rich. And so, since

we’re not far from the woods, we begin by doing some poaching. Sometimes

this brings in something, but then there’s the dead season, and besides

that there’s the guards who’ll track you down, and trials, and jail. My

God —jail! Here we go again! We’re fed, then we build traps while we’re

waiting to get out. I ask you, judge, what would you do in our place?

Would you work somewhere else? Go and get a job on a farm? The problem

is, when we say we’re from Boulaie-Blanche, it’s as though we’d just

come in from hell. They run us out of there with their pitch forks. So

we’ve got to steal! And when someone makes up his mind to steal, he must

decide to kill. The one thing doesn’t go without the other. If I tell

you everything here today, it’s because you’ve got to know what’s what

in Boulaie-Blanche, and that the fault really lies with the authorities,

who never bother to do anything for us, and who isolate us from life

like mad dogs, or as if we had the plague.

“Now I’ll get to the present business.

“I got married just about a year ago, and my wife got pregnant in the

first month. I gave it some thought: a baby to feed, when we can’t even

feed ourselves —it’s stupid. ‘We have to make it disappear!’ I told my

wife. Fortunately, close to our place there’s an old woman who wanders

around, and she’s good at working out schemes like this. In return for a

hare and two rabbits that I gave her, she brought my wife some plants

and then some powders that she put together to make —I don’t know what

concoction to drink. This didn’t do a thing —nothing. The old hobo lady

told us, ‘Don’t worry yourselves: it’s as good as dead. I tell you it’ll

come out dead.’ Since she had a reputation around the neighborhood for

being a sorceress who knows her stuff, I didn’t concern myself any

further. I said to myself, ‘That’s good, then. It’ll come out dead.’ But

she lied, the old thief, as you’ll see in a minute.

“One night, under a beautiful moon, I killed me a roe deer. I was coming

back with the deer on my back, and I was all happy, because you just

about never get a deer, on any night. It was around three in the morning

when I got back to my place. There was a light in the window. This

surprised me, so I beat on the door, which is always barricaded from

inside when I’m not around. It didn’t open. I knocked some more, a

little harder. Then I hear this little crying, and some cursing, and

then a sort of dragging step that was dragging across the tiles. And

what do I see? My wife is half naked, pale as a corpse, and all splashed

with blood. First I thought that somebody’d tried to kill her, but she

said to me, ‘Not so much noise, idiot! Can’t you see I’m havin’ the

baby?’ Holy shit! It had to come one of these days, but then when it did

come, I was caught completely off guard. I came in, threw the deer in a

corner, and hung my shotgun on a nail.

“‘Did it come out dead at least?’ I asked my wife.

“‘Oh, yeah, dead —just take a look!’ she says to me, and I see on the

bed, in a bunch of bloody rags, some naked thing wiggling around.

“I looked at my wife, she looked at me, and for five minutes or so, we

were quiet.

“‘Were you cryin’?’ I asked her.

“‘No!’

“‘Did you hear somebody prowlin’ around outside?’ “‘No!’

“‘Why’d you have the light on?’

“‘It wasn’t two minutes the candle was lit, before you knocked,’ she

told me.

“‘All right’, I said. Then I grabbed the baby by the feet, and real

quick, like we do with rabbits, I gave it a good belt in the head. After

that I stuck it in my game bag and I got my shotgun down again. You can

believe me if you want, yer honor, but I swear, through the whole thing

I never even knew if it was a girl or a boy.

“I went to the Grand Pierre spring. All around, as far as you can see,

there was nothing but some scattered heather, growing in between the

piles of rocks. Not a tree or a house stood nearby, not even a path that

led to the place! As for living creatures, you’ll only see some sheep

grazing up there, and some shepherds, when there’s no more grass down in

the fields. Right by the spring there’s a deep clay quarry that’s been

abandoned for a few hundred years. Some undergrowth hides the open mouth

of the pit from your eye. That’s where I go to hide my gun, and to hide

myself when the cops are payin’ me a visit. Who would dare to venture

into that deserted place, which people seriously believe is haunted by

ghosts? Nothing to fear. I threw the baby in the quarry, and I heard the

sound of it hitting the bottom: ‘Plunk!’ Daylight was breaking, very

pale, behind the hill.

“Coming back, in the path from Boulaie-Blanche, I spotted a gray form

behind the hedge, something like the back of a man or a wolf, —you can’t

always make things out so well, in the half-light, even if you do it all

the time —and it was sliding softly, crouching down low, creeping along,

and it stopped.

“‘Hey!’ I yelled in a loud voice. ‘If you’re a man, show yourself or

I’ll shoot!’

“‘Look, Motteau, it’s me!’ said the form, standing up all of a sudden.

“‘Yeah, it’s me,’ I said, ‘and don’t forget, Maheu, there’s a load of

buckshot in my gun for nosy people.’

“And he says, ‘Oh, no problem! I’m resetting my traps. But you know...

it’s not only the deer that squeal when you kill them.’

“‘No!’ I told him, ‘There’s also chicken-shits like you, you ugly

one-eyed fuck!’ I aimed at him, but I didn’t shoot —I don’t know why. I

was wrong. Next day, Maheu went to get the cops.

“Now listen to me carefully, your honor. There are thirty households in

Boulaie-Blanche: that’s to say thirty women and thirty men. Have you

counted how many living kids there are in those thirty households? There

are only three. And the others —the suffocated ones, the strangled ones,

the buried ones: in other words, the dead ones —have you counted them?

Go and dig up the ground, down there in the skinny shadows of the

birches, or at the feet of those scrawny pines. Drop a pole down into

the wells. Turn over the gravel and sweep the sand away from the

quarries. Under the birches and the pines, at the bottoms of the wells,

mixed in with the sand and the pebbles, you’ll see more bones of

newborns than there are bones of men and women in the graveyards of the

big cities. Go into the houses and ask the men, both young and old, what

they’ve done with all the babies their wives have carried! Put the

question to Maheu, Léger, Sorel —everyone!

“All right! Maheu, you see that it’s not just the deer that squeal when

you kill them.”

END