By Father Richard Antall
G. K. Chesterton
once wrote of the "lucid and cool cruelty of the French short story."
Perhaps no one achieved that lucidity more than poor mad Henri-Rene-Albert-Guy
de Maupassant, a Frenchman who died at the age of 43 in 1893.
Perhaps you read Maupassant's "The Necklace" in school. It's
about a woman who borrows what she thinks is an expensive necklace to show
off at a fancy party.
She loses the necklace, and being too embarrassed to admit to her friend
what happened, she goes into debt to replace it, and only years later discovers
that her friend had loaned her costume jewelry.
Most of Maupassant's work has the same calloused look at the pretensions
of the bourgeoisie, even though he was popular with the people he viewed
so coldly.
Like another syphilitic madman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maupassant seems to
have had a malevolent kind of gift of prophecy. Both men, benighted and
despairing, saw what was coming for us.
George Orwell once said that secularists were too busy sawing the branch
on which they sat from the tree of older civilization to notice the state
of things at the bottom. Both Maupassant and Nietzsche took some notice,
which explains their despair.
Maupassant has a short story I have thought of several times. The story,
a mere five pages, reads like current newspaper reports of murderous parents.
"Rosalie Prudent" is the title and the name of its anti-heroine.
Her prudence is part of the writer's cruel sense of what is really important
to the "respectable" middle class. She is "prudent"
in a horrible way. The servant of an upstanding bourgeois family, Rosalie
becomes pregnant by a visiting nephew of her employers. Prudently, she prepares
for life with her child, seeking counsel from a midwife, sewing clothes
at night, planning to move elsewhere for a job.
The child is born, and she is alone. She manages to deliver by herself,
and then suddenly she has more labor pains. There were twins! She could
not take care of twins by herself. Therefore, she smothers the two children
in their bed and buries them.
She did not go to a motel with a boyfriend, nor was she in the restroom
during a high school prom, like some contemporary examples of women who
gave birth and declared the sentence of death on their children in the same
moment. Nevertheless, Rosalie prefigured them, and Maupassant had a frightening
clairvoyance about her trial.
At the trial, the woman gives her story, and "half the jury were blowing
their noses violently to keep back their tears. Women were sobbing in the
courtroom." After describing how she buried the babies apart "so
that they couldn't talk to each other about their mother," Rosalie
sobs terribly.
Maupassant makes it clear that the sadness she feels is about her fate,
though, and not properly remorseful. She "couldn't keep two."
That was her problem. Maupassant does not ask why she didn't think of an
orphanage or fight for her babies' lives. He is merely the reporter who
ends his story: "The girl Rosalie Prudent was acquitted."
Her acquittal by the bourgeois jurors can be taken as symbolic. There are
always those who will regard the baby as an imposition too heavy to place
on the life of the mother. There will always be those who say, as some did
when the mother killed her child on prom night, "Because access to
abortion is problematic, these things occur."
Sentimentality has generally been opposed to rationality. Feelings substitute
for principles. What happens to me is more important than what happens to
others. The subjective reigns supreme, and thus murderers become victims.
As tragic as situations are, as much as God's mercy waits for people who
do awful things, there will be no forgiveness where there is no contrition.
Our society today, like Maupassant's, operates so much on the basis of
pretense and pretensions, of "prudence" and of a sentimental cruelty.
The stupendous hypocrisy of President Clinton about partial-birth abortion
is the epitome of this
attitude.
The ancient Greeks had a horrible myth about the way a woman could exact
revenge on her husband by means of her children. Abandoned by an unfaithful
Jason, the witch Medea kills their two children for revenge. The ugliness
and inhumanity depicted were self-evidently shocking.
Not today. Perhaps today Medea would be given a CNN trial, complete with
celebrity lawyers and the inevitable and insatiable media performers. Her
defense would be that she was really the victim of abuse, and Jason would
be more likely to be tried in the capricious court of public opinion.
Then there would be the hiatus while she spent some token time in jail,
or just took off a few months to write her memoirs. At last would come the
book tour and the secular apotheosis of celebrity.
Who would speak today for Medea's children? We have become so inured to
inhumanity that we are shockproof. This has been the slippery slope that
we have descended as a civilization. Some have seen this coming from Roe
v. Wade.
Actually, as Maupassant shows, the seeds were sown long before. A century
ago, he predicted that we could blame the victim and make a victim of the
perpetrator. He saw that at times so-called compassion was perhaps more
like confusion, and that sentimentality could be capable of great cruelty.
What can one say but "God help us"?
Father Antall is author of The Way of Compassion: Into the Heart of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. (Our Sunday Visitor, $8.95 plus $3.95 shipping). Reprinted with permission of Our Sunday Visitor.