Crime and the Supernatural in the Novels of Bernanos

Extract

The posthumously published Un mauvais Rêve, recently translated into English, adds a third murderess to those with whom we have already become acquainted in the novels of Bernanos published in his lifetime. Certain basic features are common to them all. The words of Abbé Donissan to Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan would seem to apply to all three: ‘Vous êtes comme un jouet, vous êtes comme la petite balle d’un enfant, entre les mains de Satan’. They are all victims of demoniacal possession. They are therefore victims in a deeper sense than are the unfortunate persons whom they murder, more or less gratuitously. The murder they commit is but the exterior manifestation of the deep corruption within, a corruption which in each case has its origin in childhood, indeed farther back still, in the blood which they have inherited. ‘Vous n’êtes point devant Dieu coupable de ce meurtre’, says Abbé Donissan to Mouchette, and with the terrible insight that he has acquired in his grim encounter of the preceding night he reveals her vicious antecedents. The ‘communion of sinners’ of which the curé of Ambricourt wrote in his diary is strong and has deep and wide ramifications. When the sham priest of Mégère, Evangéline, is awaiting the train that will presumably decapitate her, the author adds his thoughts to hers and evokes the sin of her mother, in whose false position as a defrocked nun with an illegitimate child and in whose sacerdotal obsession her own aberration had its origin.