Mouchette by Georges Bernanos

First published:Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, 1937 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: The Artois region of northern France, near the Belgian border

Principal Characters:

• Mouchette, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl
• Arsene, a local poacher and liar, who rapes her
• Mouchette’s Mother, who dies before she can hear of Mouchette’s rape
• Mathieu, the game warden
• Philomene, the village sitter-with-the-dead
• Menetrier, a local farmer
• The Narrator, a priest

The Novel

Mouchette is the brief story of a humble girl’s last miserable hours. It is a tale told with a marvelous economy of words and in a limpid style, taking the reader through the series of encounters the child experiences in her misery. The tale begins as Mouchette slips away from the singing class at the village primary school, where she has been rejected both by the teacher and by the other students. She takes to the road. Having cut across the taillis (a stunted wood, periodically cut back for charcoal making), she takes refuge between two trees to shelter from a rainstorm. By this time, she has lost both a shoe and her scarf. (Even the finest of details Georges Bernanos makes reverberate meaningfully in subsequent stages of her wandering and loss.)

Mouchette is then found by a friend of her smuggler-father, the drunk poacher Arsene, who takes her to his hut. There he gives her a drink from his small remaining stock of alcohol. He boasts graphically of having saved her from the “cyclone” raging outside, confesses in detail to killing the gamekeeper, Mathieu, and falls unconscious in an epileptic fit. Mouchette cradles his head and, though she hates music at school, sings lovingly and beautifully to him. When he recovers, Arsene rapes her. A brief glimmering of hope is thus extinguished. The small fire in the hut has become ashes. Mouchette takes to the road again.

At dawn, she arrives at the hovel where she lives only to find her father and brothers snoring drunkenly, the neglected baby crying, and her mother lying mortally ill. Mouchette succors the baby as she did Arsene and learns from her mother that the poacher lied to her about the storm the previous night. Mouchette’s mother dies before she can hear her daughter’s confession of her secret, however, and the girl again flees, alone, any dream of happiness or even of tenderness gone.

A Sunday-morning encounter with the gamekeeper, Mathieu, and his wife confirms Arsene’s deception. A savage in the eyes of the close-knit villagers, a miserable outcast in her own fumbling imagination, Mouchette defiantly announces to Mathieu that Arsene is her lover and then leaves.

The girl is invited into the house of the ancient, macabre Philomene, the professional watcher over the dead in the community, who has had her eye on Mouchette for some time. Philomene, it seems, thrives on death. She gives the fragile dress of a long-dead young lady whom she looked after in her early days of domestic service to Mouchette as a present.

Mouchette, now filled with ideas of her own death, goes to a local pond alone, where she leaves a strand of the torn muslin dress. A farmer, Menetrier, observes her and then goes on his way. Mouchette realizes that no caresses are ever going to come her way here, not from her family, not from Arsene, not from the village community, not from the Church. A voiceless voice speaks in her head, and she slides into the water, glances once at the sky, and drowns. Such is Georges Bernanos’ view of man’s inhumanity to man, or here to a young girl, on the road of life.

The Characters

The summary of events, sketched above, gives a most inadequate rendering of the power of this elegantly crafted tale. It also does little more than suggest the complex responses aroused in a reader by Bernanos’ rendering of his innocent heroine’s death following a series of rejections on all fronts. The book’s focus is exclusively on the inarticulate Mouchette in her few moments of joy and in her lifetime of suffering. At least (such is Bernanos’ skill), it seems like a lifetime; in fact, however, it cannot be more than eighteen hours from the start to the finish of the action. No other characters’ motives are examined by the omniscient narrator.

The reader follows with increasing sympathy Mouchette’s growing confidence in her abductor, her half-desirous, half-terrified involvement in her rape, and her painful realization that she has lost her virginity to a liar. Such is the potent effect of the stunted landscape, the incessant downpour, and the closed rural society that the reader comes to sympathize deeply with Mouchette and even to feel like something of an accomplice in her suicide. People do not understand her, she is unable to express herself adequately, and so she is rejected. Her life is miserable. With all the stubbornness, timidity, and incomprehension of a small animal, she is hunted from place to place, from person to person, increasingly degraded with each encounter. From the potentially life-giving meeting with Arsene, she travels to her ominous encounter with a devotee of Death (in the person of the wake-goer, Philomene).

The minor characters in the story are developed only insofar as they have an impact on the “chase,” to use Bernanos’ hunting metaphor; they are the dogs who pursue the game to its death.

Critical Context

Mouchette is the archetypal, suffering adolescent found in many of Bernanos’ fictions, but here, in his last conceived novel—Monsieur Ouine (1943, revised 1955; The Open Mind, 1945), a later novel, was started in 1931 but not finished until 1940—she is also a fully realized individual. Mouchette and her thoughts and feelings are the constant center of attention in this remarkably compressed work. Bernanos, fresh from the spectacular success of his Journal d’un cure de campagne (1936; Diary of a Country Priest, 1937) is here at the top of his stylistic bent.

He portrayed in Mouchette yet another of his self-giving saint-heroines. She is one, however, for whom, in her poverty, there is no exit except in suicide and God. In an interview, the author said that the inception of the novel came from his being struck by the sight of a truckload of Spanish peasants going uncomprehendingly to their deaths at the hands of one of Franco’s firing squads. Bernanos had already written in his early Sous le soleil de Satan (1926; The Star of Satan, 1927; also known as Under the Sun of Satan) of a character named Mouchette who killed herself. Bernanos stated, however, that the two girls have nothing in common except the same tragic loneliness in which they lived and died. It was his fervent hope that God would have mercy on both of them.

This simple Christian avowal is typical of Bernanos in all of his works and in his life. What is unusual here is that no priest figure is present, beyond the narrator. The reader is told that no one in the village is attending Mass now, including the Sunday on which Mouchette dies. The pattern of the humiliation, rejection, and death of Christ is played out only by her. She needs love and sympathy to realize herself; they are not available. Such, more than in the writings of other well-known French Catholic novelists, such as Francois Mauriac, is Bernanos’ sympathetic position as he views the wretchedness and poverty of much of humanity. As long as communication remains a problem for individuals, Bernanos deserves to be read for the compassionate voice that sings in Mouchette.

Bibliography

Asti, F.D. “Failures in Communication in La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette,” in Nottingham French Studies. XX (1981), pp. 42-62.

Blumenthal, Gerda. The Poetic Imagination of Georges Bernanos: An Essay in Interpretation, 1965.

Bush, William. Georges Bernanos, 1969.

Hebblethwaite, Peter. Bernanos: An Introduction, 1965.

Speaight, Robert. Georges Bernanos: A Study of the Man and the Writer, 1974.