The Torture Garden (Musaicum Must Classics). Octave Mirbeau

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СКАЧАТЬ profits, assisted him by her predatory ingenuity and sat stiff and distrustful, watching over the till as one mounts guard before an enemy.

      A strict Republican and a fiery patriot—he furnished supplies to the army—an intolerant moralist and a good man after all, in the popular sense of the word, my father had no pity and accepted no excuse for the dishonesty of others; especially when it was to his disadvantage. In such cases he could never cease talking about the necessity for honor and virtue. One of his great ideas was that in a well−organized democracy they should be made compulsory—like education, taxes and voting. One day he discovered that a teamster who had been in his service for fifteen years, was robbing him. He immediately had him arrested. At the trial the teamster defended himself as best he could:

      “But the boss never hesitated to 'rope people in'. Whenever he had played a good trick on a customer, he boasted about it as though he had done a good deed. 'The only thing is to take in the cash,' he used to say, 'no matter where or how you get it. To sell a dead cat for a live horse—that's the secret of business.' Well, I've done just what the boss does with his customers. I've roped him in.”

      These cynical remarks made a bad impression on the judges. They sentenced the teamster to two years in prison, not only for having pilfered a few kilograms of grain, but chiefly because he had slandered one of the oldest business houses in district... a house founded in 1794, whose long−standing, steadfast, and legendary respectability had been the ornament of the town from generation to generation.

      I remember that on the evening of this celebrated decision my father had gathered some friends at table: merchants like himself and, like him, rooted in this inaugural principle that to 'rope people in' was the very soul of trade. You can imagine how indignant they were about the defiant attitude of the teamster. They talked of nothing else until midnight; and out of the confusion, epigrams, discussions and little glasses of brandy, I distilled this precept: which was, so to speak, the moral of the episode and at the same time the synthesis of my education:

      To take something from a person and keep it for one self: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it Can be doubled without danger.

      It was in this moral atmosphere that in some way or other I grew up and developed entirely alone, with no other text than the daily example of my parents. Among the shop keeping classes children are generally left to their own devices, for no one has time to bother with their education. They educate themselves as best they can, at the mercy of their own dispositions and the pernicious influences of that environment, which is generally degrading and confined. Spontaneously, and without the need of any outward pressure, I contributed my own portion of emulation or invention to the family swindles. From the age of ten I had no other concept of life than theft, and I was convinced—oh, quite ingenuously I assure you—that to 'rope people in' constituted the foundation of all social intercourse.

      College determined the bizarre and tortuous direction I was to give to my own life, for it was there I met the man who was later to become my friend—the celebrated Minister, Eugene Mortain.

      The son of a wine−merchant, groomed for politics (just as I was for business) by his father, who was the chief electoral representative of the district, vice−president of the Gambettist committees and founder of various leagues, opposition groups and professional syndicates, Eugene bore within him from infancy the soul of 'a born statesman'.

      Although the recipient of a free scholarship, he immediately overawed us with his obvious superiority in effrontery and rudeness, and also by a solemn and vacuous manner of speaking which did violence to our enthusiasms. Besides, he inherited from his father the profitable and efficacious mania for organization. In a few weeks he had made short work of transforming, the college campus into a meeting place for all sorts of societies and clubs, committees and sub−committees, of which he simultaneously elected himself president, secretary and treasurer. There was the football association, the top association, the leap−frog society, and the walking dub; there was the horizontal−bar committee, the trapeze league, the one−legged race syndicate, etc. Every member of these various associations was obliged to contribute to the general fund—that is to say, our comrade's pockets—monthly dues of five sous which, among other advantages, entitled him to a subscription to the quarterly journal which Eugene Mortain edited as propaganda for the ideas, and the defense of the interests, of the numerous 'autonomous and solitary groups,' as he proclaimed.

      Evil instincts and appetites which were common to us both immediately bound us together and made of our close partnership a greedy and incessant exploitation of our comrades, who were proud to be syndicated. I soon discovered I was the lesser power in this duplicity, but the realization of this fact made me cling only the aster to the career of this ambitious companion. As compensation for lack of an equal division. I was always assured of being able to pick up a few crumbs... they sufficed me then. Alas! I have never had more than the crumbs of the cakes my friend devoured.

      I rediscovered Eugene later, during a difficult and distressing episode of my life. By dint of 'roping people in' my father had ended by being roped in himself, and not in the figurative sense which he applied to his customers. An unfortunate stock of provisions which, it appeared, poisoned an entire barracks, was the occasion for this deplorable incident, which crowned the total ruin of our house founded in 1794. My father might perhaps have survived his dishonor, for he was aware of the infinite indulgence of his epoch; but he could not survive his ruin. An attack of apoplexy carried him off one beautiful evening. He died, leaving my mother and me penniless.

      No longer able to count on him, I was definitely obliged to get myself out of the mess alone and,tearing myself away from the maternal lamentations, I fled to Paris where Eugene Mortain welcomed me with open arms.

      That worthy was rising little by little. Thanks to parliamentary protection, cleverly exploited, to the agility of his nature and his absolute lack of scruples, he was beginning to be well spoken of in the press, and in political and financial circles. He immediately employed me to do his dirty work, nor was it long before, living as I did in his shadow, I absorbed some of his notoriety, by which I did not know how to profit as I should have. But I was most lacking in the ability to persevere in wrongdoing. Not that I experienced belated qualms of conscience, remorse or fleeting desires for honesty: there is a diabolical streak in me, a relentless and inexplicable perversity which suddenly forces me, without apparent reason, to drop the best conducted of affairs and loosen my hold on the most greedily gripped throats. With practical qualities of the very first order, an acute flair for life, the audacity even to conceive the impossible and an exceptional alacrity in materializing it, I still have not the necessary tenacity of a man of action. Perhaps beneath the scoundrel that I am, there lies a misled poet? Perhaps a mystifier who enjoys mystifying himself?

      However, in foreknowledge of the future, and feeling that the day would inevitably come when my friend Eugene would want to get rid of a man who symbolized to him an embarrassing past, I had the cunning to compromise him by circulating derogatory stories, and the foresight to keep in my possession incontrovertible proofs. For fear of a downfall, Eugene was forced perpetually to drag me about after him like a ball and chain.

      While awaiting the supreme honors towards which the muddy stream of politics was bearing him, here, among other honorable matters, were the nature of his intrigues and the subjects of his preoccupation:

      Officially, Eugene had a mistress. She was then known as the Countess Borska. Not very young, but still pretty and desirable, now a Pole, now a Russian and frequently an Austrian, she naturally passed for a German spy. Therefore her salon was a hangout for most of our illustrious statesmen. Many political affairs were bandied about there, and amid considerable coquetry, many notable and dubious transactions found their inception. Among the most frequent guests of this salon, СКАЧАТЬ