Sous le soleil de Satan

Germaine Malorthy, known as Mouchette, is sixteen years old and her blood runs hot. She is the daughter of an Artois brewer settled in Campagne, a man of brick and barley, a liberal from father to son, who reads the "Réveil de l'Artois" while slamming his fist on the table and considers priests to be poisoners of the conscience. Her mother, born ugly and wealthy, possesses an acute sense of the unstable equilibrium inherent in any woman's life. And Germaine, in the small garden with its pruned yews, beneath the veranda that smells of sun-scorched putty, has grown weary of waiting for heaven knows what, which never comes. One June morning, at the edge of the woods, flanked by her two dogs Roule-à-Mort and Rabat-Joie, she saw the Marquis de Cadignan smoking his briar pipe in his velvet coat and heavy boots, like a king. He is forty-five, with pale blue eyes of fathomless limpidity, and he poached girls like a wolf, silent on the scent. Three months later, Germaine is pregnant.

Father Malorthy goes to confront the marquis to obtain redress, but the fellow finds himself duped by an adversary far craftier than he, sent packing without having concluded a thing, save for the lie of having sworn that his daughter had confessed everything. Returning home, he orders Germaine to speak. She refuses, she defies him, she weeps the tears of a child, but her eyes are those of a wounded animal that will surrender nothing. When her father claims the marquis raised a hand against him, the little rebel's heart beats faster, not out of pity for her father, but at the image of the hero in his magnificent wrath. Evening falls. Germaine lies down on her childhood bed, which smells of floor wax and fresh linen, and for two hours she churns over enough schemes in her head to conquer the world. Then the ridiculous little garden expands to the dimensions of the night. She gropes her way to the door, descends the staircase step by step, and receives full in the face the outdoor air, which had never seemed to her so buoyant.

She runs to the château. The marquis finds her on his doorstep, standing stark and straight, at one in the morning. For the first time, she addresses him familiarly. He wants to send her away before daybreak; she refuses. He offers her five hundred louis; she refuses them. He speaks of a gamekeeper's lodge; she wants to leave tomorrow. And when he shrinks back further, she throws in his face the name of Gallet, the village's doctor-deputy—a ready-made lover, she claims, both wealthy and learned. Lie upon lie, each falsehood a new delight whose thrill constricts her throat like a caress. Cadignan, seized with jealousy, grabs her and throws her onto the leather sofa. She slips away, leaps up, and takes down the hunting rifle from the wall, a magnificent hammerless piece. He advances still, unafraid. The blast strikes him beneath the chin, shattering his jaw to pieces. Mouchette opens the window and vanishes.

Sometime later, Germaine is found at the home of Dr. Gallet, who has secretly become her lover. She has thrown herself into the arms of the soulless cad; she clings to this piece of wreckage. The cage of the small town has closed around her, the murder is ruled a suicide, the world has forgotten the marquis. Mouchette announces her pregnancy, demands an abortion. Gallet refuses, invoking the law, science, his position. She searches for the door, finds it double-locked, and this closed lock reminds her of something—another door, another night. She falters. Then, in a whisper, she makes him kiss the hand that killed. She confesses everything: the rifle, the blood on her shoes, the pond where she washed them. Gallet, petrified with fear, thinks only of protecting himself: he declares that she is mad, that he does not believe a word of it. Mouchette, driven to despair at not being believed, lets out a cry so terrible that the entire household comes running. She is wrapped in a sheet and put to sleep with ether. She enters an asylum and emerges a month later, having given birth to a stillborn child.

Far from Campagne, in a wretched presbytery, a young vicar named Donissan battles other demons. Heavy, clumsy, reputed incapable by his superiors, he secretly mortifies himself with a violence that frightens his parish priest, Abbé Menou-Segrais, who nonetheless divines beneath this thick exterior a vocation of fire. Donissan burns with the desire to save souls, yet he feels crushed by his own unworthiness, tempted by despair, that most subtle form of pride. He asks permission to journey on foot to the parish of a distant colleague. On the night road, in the hills of Artois, he encounters a jovial horse-dealer who accompanies him, guides him, and gradually reveals himself to be the devil in person—a familiar, sneering companion of a vile amiability. The horse-dealer knows his most secret thoughts, shows him his own image as if in a mirror of mud, and offers him the gift of reading consciences. Donissan understands, resists, wrestles hand-to-hand with the apparition on the muddy path, and collapses, only to be found at dawn by a carter, his face in the dirt.

This terrible gift he henceforth bears like a stigma. When he crosses paths with Mouchette on the road, he sees within her, at a single glance, all the evil and all the distress, the murder and the despair. He speaks to her with the violence of a prophet, commands her to repent, attempts to snatch her from Satan as one snatches a brand from the fire. But Mouchette, who has recognized in this coarse priest the only force capable of understanding her, cannot bear being laid so bare. She slits her throat before his eyes with a razor, in a gesture of lightning swiftness. Donissan, frantic, gathers the body in his arms, runs through the night, lays her upon the altar of the church, and begs God to resurrect her. For an instant, he believes he sees her eyelids flutter. But nothing happens, or if something did move within that body, perhaps it was a power other than grace that made it shudder. The parish priest Menou-Segrais finds him there, on his knees before the corpse, broken.

Years pass. Donissan has become the parish priest of Lumbres, a remote village where his reputation as a saint draws throngs of penitents. But the sanctity attributed to him tortures him more than sin. He hears confessions relentlessly, he sees souls laid bare with a lucidity that devours him, he bears upon his shoulders the weight of all the sins confessed, and still he doubts, he always doubts himself, his gift, the source of this gift. The bishop watches him, the clergy suspects him, a worldly writer named Saint-Marin comes to observe him as a curiosity. One evening, a mother brings him her dead child, and Donissan, in a final surge of desperate faith, clasps the child to his chest, warms him, begs him to live again. The child opens his eyes, breathes, lives. But Donissan collapses, his heart broken. He is found dead in his confessional, head bowed, hands clasped, like a soldier fallen at his post, his face finally at peace in the morning light streaming through the window of the church in Lumbres.