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The Bon Dieu of M. Jammes

Romance of the Rabbit by Francis Jammes. Nicholas L. Brown

The Freeman May 1921, 211–212

Priapus at eighty-five, except for an occasional rheumatic complaint and the necessity of watching what he ate, might be expected to lead a very mellow life, sweetened by the reminiscence of his own follies. He could be visited, by those who were interested, in his pleasant little cabin on a hillside, a cabin situated in the midst of a soft, orderly lawn. Although by now quite complacent in his senescence, he would probably maintain a lingering interest in delicate young women, so that it would give him great contentment to pat them reassuringly on the shoulder. This Priapus at eighty-five, with perhaps a little amber stain on his white beard near his lips, is the Bon Dieu of Francis Jammes.

But indeed M. Jammes’s Bon Dieu is distressingly careless of his dignity, as witness this description of him in the story “Paradise” which has been translated into English in the collection entitled The Romance of the Rabbit:

The Bon Dieu had his hat and stick on the ground. He was garbed like the poor on the great highways; those who have only a morsel of bread in their wallets, and whom the magistrates arrest at the town gates, and throw into prison, since they know not how to write their name.

With all suspicions Manichæism safely hidden away in the records of the universities, the Bon Dieu potters about in a creation of mild conveniences, always has a few moments to spare to listen to this complaint or that, and draws his pleasure from a reservoir of cosmic devotion. The cats, recognizing his leniency, do not even bother to obey him, but, on the other hand, what greater tribute is possible than that of the sage-plant: “And full of trust and serenity, without pride or humility, a sage-plany let its insignificant odour rise toward God.”

The peculiar satisfaction which comes of a tour through M. Jammes’s heaven is that it has been so carefully laid out. In “The Romance of the Rabbit,” for instance, the scissors-grinder’s dog will be found performing his task with vigour into eternity an interesting readjustment of the Tantalus-Ixion-Sisyphus idea of the Greeks. Even though there is no knife for him to sharpen, he goes on turning the wheel, his eyes shining with “the unquestioning faith in a duty fulfilled.” The wolves, too, have been carefully provided for:

At the summit of a treeless mountain, in the desolation of the wind, beneath a penetrating fog, they felt the voluptuous joy of martyrdom. They sustained themselves with their hunger. They experienced a bitter joy in feeling that they were abandoned, that never for more than an instant—and then only under the greatest suffering—had they been able to renounce their lust for blood.

Another great instance of the Bon Dieu’s delicacy of feeling in such matters is the fact that, although the general rule is that humans must not enter the animals’ heavens, young girls are permitted to play in the heaven of the birds.

Such a well-ordered heaven is also reflected in a well-ordered earth. M. Jammes understands the friendly attitude of his favourite arm-chair, he listens to the symbolic croaking of the frogs, he registers the humble smell of cow-dung, and when the mother of a dead boy offers him the dead boy’s wagon, a flood of tenderness fills his heart: “I felt that this thing had lost its friend, its master, and that it was suffering.’’ He is content with the almost primitive reaction of animating his inanimate surroundings, or of giving speech to the little animals so that they may speak exactly as men. His expression has an exceedingly limited diapason, but it is always accurate. He sees at once the clay road shaking with heat, the panorama of fields and farm-houses broken by the churchspire, and a little bunch of half-rotten leaves pulsing above a mouse. Through it all, his point of view is so astonishingly biased, so completely safe in its Ptolemaicism, so unquestioningly rooted in his almost cosmic assurance that the world is man’s, that he can write like this to a truck-garden:

Légumes du jardin

Dites-vous

Qu’il est doux

attachéches á vos rames

De mûrir doucement pour une sainte femme.

It was Paul Clandel who restored M. Jammes to the faith—he has called himself a converted fawn: but even while maintaining a complete disdain for le catholícisme des vicilles femmes, he nevertheless expressed his theories in Catholic terms, as we may see in this paragraph from the Mercure de France of 1897, eight years before his conversion:

I think that the truth lies in the praise of God: that we must celebrate this in our poems, if they are to be pure: that there is only one school, a school where, like children who imitate as exactly as possible some model of beautiful handwriting, the poets copy a lovely bird, a flower, or a young girl with charming ankles and graceful breasts.

In this peculiar mixture of Christianity and paganism there is manifest one of the richest and most productive tendencies of modern French literature.