The Embrace of Unreason Read online

  His mother was restored to him, at the expense of his motherland, when war with Germany broke out in July 1870. All of Charmes crowded the train station under a broiling sun to cheer recruits headed for the front, many of them obviously drunk, with shouts of “On to Berlin!” Days later, the sober and the drunk lay dead en masse near towns whose names became synonymous with catastrophic defeat: Froeschwiller-Woerth, Forbach, Wissembourg. By August 10 the Germans had surrounded Strasbourg. On August 14, they entered Nancy. French soldiers trooped through Charmes hour after hour, beating a retreat in steady rain and camping wherever night overtook them. Charmésiens who had cheered them at the station a few weeks earlier now visited their muddy bivouacs. “It was an immense and squalid confusion,” wrote Barrès. Alsace and Lorraine were essentially lost after two weeks of fighting.

  Compelled to supply tons of bread, rice, and meat to the German army based at the nearby village of Chamagne, Charmes had already been severely taxed when, on October 14, two battalions descended on the town with orders demanding that each landlord billet as many men as he had windows in his house. Barrès’s parents were fortunate: the quartermaster assigned them only one soldier, a Bavarian. They were additionally fortunate in not being taken hostage, having their house burned down, or suffering any of the lesser indignities meted out at random as punishment for attacks on German patrols. Not so lucky were their relatives, one of whose fingers were chopped off with a saber. During the winter of 1871–72, Maurice’s maternal grandfather, Charles Luxer, traveled on a hostage wagon to Germany, where he contracted pneumonia and died.

  The Treaty of Frankfurt, whose draconian terms France formally accepted on May 10, 1871, may have worked to Maurice’s advantage. Sent out of harm’s way when Charmes was overrun, the boy came home after some months to a family more convivial for including a foreigner under its roof. In the division of Lorraine mapped out at Frankfurt, the southern Moselle valley, including Charmes and Nancy, remained French. But the treaty stipulated that French territory should continue to be occupied by imperial troops until France paid Germany the enormous ransom of 5 billion francs. It would take France more than two years to raise that sum. Until then Maurice had the company of the Bavarian, who often walked him to school in full dress.

  Photographs of Maurice at age eight show a miniature version of the haughty, ascetic figure Barrès cut in later years. One boyhood friend later recalled that whenever classmates ran wild he assumed a “resigned, ironical air,” opened a book, and divorced himself from the scene. Rough-and-tumble play alarmed him. But the primary school, where not much was taught or learned, had at least the virtue of being in Charmes and thus releasing him to his family every day. That arrangement changed in his eleventh year. On July 27, 1873, the German garrison paraded through town for the last time. Church bells rang jubilantly. Three months later Maurice himself left Charmes, dejectedly, to enter a Catholic boarding school at Malgranges, near Nancy.

  Although parents could visit with their children every Saturday, Barrès remembered feeling cast away, and alone, in a world that discredited every reason he had ever had to love himself. The son and grandson of small-town notables now found himself snubbed. The bookish boy who, unlike his new peers, had never conjugated amare was given to understand that some knowledge of Latin separated the wheat from the chaff. And in the little gray suit chosen for him by Claire—complete with baggy knee pants, a high, starched collar, and buttoned boots—he inspired as much ridicule as Charles Bovary entering a Rouen schoolroom fresh from the countryside in yellow trousers too short to cover his blue socks. “Rambunctious kids were taken aback by his distinguished air, and made imbecilic remarks about his attire,” wrote a sympathetic witness. Worse awaited him in class. Where teachers set their pupils examples of insensitivity, one outstanding sadist hung a board around the boy’s neck listing his spelling errors. There were other incidents, all vividly remembered fifty years later. At eleven, Maurice cried himself to sleep every night in a cold dormitory room (virile discomfort à l’anglaise being the rule especially in pensions for the well-heeled) and found consolation in prayer, reciting David’s seven psalms of penitence.

  The sense of being unassimilable—a pariah at worst, a Triton among the minnows at best—went deep. It pervaded all his dogmas and enthusiasms. Whether glorifying egoism in novels he wrote during the 1880s or exalting the collective unconscious thereafter, Barrès would never cease to feel isolated. At Malgranges, life became tolerable but never much more than that. The school compelled him to exchange his incongruous wardrobe for a smart blue uniform. Several boys befriended him. His mother learned, with apparent satisfaction, that he had played the part of the Virgin Mary in a play. After several years of application to Greek and Latin, he earned honorable mentions. And novels by Dumas, Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, and George Sand peopled his imagination with characters who made the dearth of close companionship less painful. What he couldn’t do yet, for lack of a proper model, was invent himself. “Was I to become a likeness of my schoolmates?” he wrote in his memoirs. “I couldn’t have done it even if I hadn’t been repelled by the idea. Too weak, too timid, prodigiously imaginative, desirous of another world. But what world? I had no model for what I unconsciously aspired to be. My predestined journey interested no one, was suspected by no one, neither by masters, nor my parents, nor myself.”

  At the Nancy lycée, which he entered in 1877, his private syllabus came to include works reflecting not only an appetite for literary adventure but a more subtle respect for the anguish that set him apart. One can only suppose that Pascal’s Pensées, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and Flaubert’s Salammbô dignified his isolation, each in its own way. Did he see himself as the vexed unbeliever whom Pascal challenges to wager on God? Did the adolescent “desirous of another world” discover a kindred spirit in the author of “N’importe où hors du monde”? Did he identify with Flaubert’s lovelorn hero Matho, who, leading a revolt of mercenaries against Carthage, moves from camp to camp around the besieged citadel more like a Romantic outcast bewitched by the beauty hidden behind its walls than a generalissimo? His literary affinities all spoke of the unconsummated and the unattainable.

  As well as a home for those affinities, Maurice found a mentor to help him furnish it with philosophy. During his final year of lycée he met Professor Auguste Burdeau, who, since his arrival at Nancy five years earlier from Paris’s elite École Normale Supérieure, had galvanized the school. For bright boys stifled by a faculty of timeservers, his presence was charismatic. He lectured fluently on Herbert Spencer, on Schopenhauer, on the great Hellenist Louis Ménard, on Hugo, on a hundred works outside the canonical program, but above all on Kant. The fact that the government had honored him for courage under fire during the Franco-Prussian War added luster to his erudition. Several months of Burdeau’s tutelage marked Maurice forever. “Those who did not begin their studies in the aftermath of the war will no doubt be disconcerted by the prelude to Les Déracinés,” a literary critic wrote in 1908, referring to the novel in which Barrès portrays Burdeau as Paul Bouteiller. “The fact of the matter is, however, that that generation of lycée students was fascinated by professors of philosophy. Bouteiller is not an exception; he is a type. Erudite, curious, and self-assured young masters succeeded the sober, solid Cartesians of the old regime and the somnolent Cousinians of mid-century France. They were as grave as Germans, as ardent as apostles. The vague and passionate way they had of teaching philosophy conferred upon it the seriousness of a religion.”4 Barrès himself later wrote that Burdeau was “the first superior man” he had encountered. “Well, if not superior,” he added, begrudging him the full compliment, “at any rate a man of energetic will, bent on high attainment.… He had what it took to dazzle a callow youth.”

  Burdeau eventually fell victim to Maurice’s conviction that the intellectual paragon, far from enlightening his disciples, had estranged them from their vital core with Kantian universals. By 1880 Maurice was already warming to
the idea popularized by Hippolyte Taine, among others, that “race” and “milieu” explained more of human truth than pure reason. Still, not everything broke when Burdeau fell. Barrès would never lose respect for the master’s ability to bend an audience to his will. He may have loved sorrow. He also loved eloquence, high pulpits, and Napoleon.

  When Maurice graduated from lycée, Auguste Barrès, who stood on heights only as a tourist, insisted that his son follow a pedestrian path by studying law in Nancy and practicing it in Lorraine, where well-trained notaires were sparse.5 Maurice did as bidden, with nothing to console him but the knowledge that a friend from lycée named Stanislas de Guaita would likewise be sacrificing Paris and literature on the altar of bourgeois convention. Stanislas, who was blond, robust, extroverted, born to two aristocratic lines, and in all these respects Maurice’s foil, had bonded with him.

  In law school Maurice distinguished himself almost from the first as a chronic absentee. Hours that should have been spent at stultifying lectures on the Roman code were instead devoted to reading poetry. Stanislas introduced him to Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, and Zola led him to works upon which literary naturalism based its claim to scientific authority. He was omnivorous, making great meals of Michelet’s history of France, political theory, Schopenhauer (about whom Burdeau wrote), anything on Napoleon, modern fiction, physiology, Goethe, Mickiewicz, and Philip Sidney.

  It wasn’t long before he moved from taking private notes to writing omnibus reviews for a local paper, Le Journal de la Meurthe et des Vosges, in which Stanislas had preceded him. Under the rubric “Échos de la Librairie,” he cast his net wide, with strategic praise for useful authors, among them Louise Ackermann, a poet whose Paris salon provided an audience for her verse. Maurice’s compliments won him an invitation, and in October 1881 he took advantage of it, hoping that Madame Ackermann would bolster his fantasies of literary elevation. She did. He chatted up Anatole France. He discussed poetry with poets whose work he knew by heart. He spied eighty-year-old Victor Hugo at the Senate library. He placed an article in a literary weekly of note (La Jeune France, to which he soon became a regular contributor). Claire Barrès, his staunch champion and close reader, rejoiced. “You were born with a caul,” she declared.6 But success only validated Maurice’s belief that a protective hood was the reward for assiduous courtship. “When one wants to arrive, when one is far from Paris and unknown, … when one has been told about the futile hours spent outside the doors of newspapers, reviews,” he wrote to Auguste Vacquerie, an old associate of Victor Hugo’s, whom he met through Louise Ackermann, “one dreams of a little word of recommendation reaching some editor on whose desk blotter one’s essay or study lies dormant.”

  At the Paris Law School, Maurice did little work to good effect, cramming for examinations and passing them. Trouble didn’t really brew until his second year. He began to loathe the prospect of a professional career for which he felt no calling. It lay in the middle of the road like a coiled snake. But more acutely distressing was his competition with Stanislas de Guaita for the favors of Guaita’s mistress. All at once, Maurice suffered a humiliating rebuff and the (temporary) loss of his boon companion. Was there a connection between this betrayal and his estrangement from Professor Burdeau? Was he intent on defending an imperiled sense of self by challenging his revered teacher’s intellectual eminence and disputing Stanislas’s feminine conquest? Whatever the cause, the result was obvious. Maurice moped. Claire Barrès, convinced that his childhood bout with typhoid fever continued to undermine her son, took him to the thermal resort of Bex, in Switzerland. There, doubts about his talent joined doubts about everything else. Beset by migraines, like his mother, he wondered whether he was mad or an idiot.

  But he may have been secretly resourceful. Maurice’s condition had the hallmarks of a flight into illness, with depression ultimately making the best case for suspending or abandoning the course prescribed by Auguste Barrès. Doctors agreed that his “brain cells” would need a sabbatical of six months or a year to “reform themselves.” His father, who continued to rate a secure livelihood in law above any alternative, stood firm, which meant that Maurice enjoyed no respite from his dilemma when he convalesced at home after returning from Switzerland. He prepared for law examinations to be held in November 1882, even as clandestine projects ran through his head helter-skelter: a weekly magazine, a novel inspired by his blighted love affair, a Taine-like study of the seventeenth-century poet Saint-Amant and his times, a long article on Anatole France, who had become famous with the recent publication of Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard. Maurice spent every spare moment reading. “The important thing,” he wrote to a friend named Léon Sorg, “is one’s Self. Well, I hope to perfect myself this year.” Had his friends Léon Sorg and Stanislas (with whom he had reconciled) not left Nancy for Paris, Maurice might have submitted to a schizoid arrangement, “perfecting” himself under cover of filial piety. Letters in which Léon described the greenness of intellectual and artistic pasture in the Latin Quarter was a powerful lure. Auguste Barrès would not hear talk of Paris, but what finally swayed him was a conversation with Albert Collignon, a professor of rhetoric at the Nancy lycée, whom his former student had enlisted to plead on his behalf. Father and son struck a bargain: Maurice could live in the capital with an allowance, provided he complete his law studies there.

  Stanislas, Léon, and four other compatriots welcomed him at the Gare de l’Est when he arrived in January 1883.

  Some years later, Barrès recalled the experience of moving to Paris through the character of Sturel in Les Déracinés. “The young king of the universe!” he wrote. “Those first days were overwhelming. He loved the cold, which pinched him into believing that this beautiful, wholly new life was not a dream. His young, fresh mouth was open to shout his happiness, and savored the air. It wasn’t Paris but solitude that possessed him. A solitude more intoxicating than love.” Like Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, Maurice came from the provinces with his family’s blessings and at their expense to study law, but committed to dreams of literary glory. Unlike the hero of Lost Illusions, he realized his dreams and honored the family pact.

  As for solitude, Maurice may have had in mind the absence of village eyes and of judgments interfering with the accomplishment of his “new life.” Certainly there was not much solitude enjoyed or sought in Paris by the ambitious young man, who immediately reached out to writers he admired. The poet Leconte de Lisle, a leading light of the Parnassian movement, recalled that Maurice appeared at his studio unannounced on the very day he set foot in the Latin Quarter. After La Jeune France published his long essay on Anatole France, France invited him to dinner. One such event led to another, and Maurice followed every lead, like a spider hectically spinning its web around fireflies. At brasseries frequented by literati he made his presence known. It was difficult not to notice him. Lanky and elegant, dark-skinned, with a long, beaky nose, large, heavy-lidded eyes, a fringe of mustache, and a lock of black hair draped over his right temple—where it remained for the next forty years—he cut an odd figure, at once remote and nonchalantly familiar. Having very little published work to show for himself, he seemed bent on illustrating in person the Parnassian ideal of marmoreal eloquence. What struck people were his settled opinions about literature and almost everything else, pronounced in a nasal voice. Rachilde, who coedited the review Mercure de France, found him somber and conceited, “very much the prince of shadows.” Anatole France may have had something of the same impression. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked Maurice at their dinner. It isn’t known how a twenty-one-year-old in the throes of self-invention, whose smugness cloaked a multitude of demons, might have answered the question. “Why did I want Paris and the life of a writer?” he later recalled. “No very strong and clear reason, an orientation as determined as a bird’s but no reasonable reason, no clear idea of my future, not even a work plan. It was slender and invincible.… It didn’t really transcend the idea of celebrity.”
/>   By 1884 Maurice had a diploma from the École de Droit. By 1885 he also had some literary baggage in the form of articles, chronicles, and short stories. They didn’t amount to celebrity, but they did attract some notice. Opinion lined up for and against him, seldom on neutral ground. To Juliette Adam, the editor of La Nouvelle Revue, who rejected a story entitled “Les Héroïsmes Superflus,” about the triumph of fanatical Christianity over Hellenic culture in fourth-century Alexandria, he was a precious pup captivated by the sadistic eroticism of Flaubert’s Salammbô and the erudite pageantry of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine.7 To poets he dismissed with one swipe in a review for La Minerve, he was the executioner who quipped as he killed: “I have concluded that French poetry in 1885 resembles nothing so much as a duck that keeps on running after its head has been chopped off. It no longer quacks. It has no perceptible direction. But it does run well.” The provocations that made him obnoxious to some ingratiated him with others. His prose was mannered but supple and original enough to captivate young Marcel Proust ten years later.