Read Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture for Free Online Page A

to stagger past fifty-nine.
    Many of the singers I listened to expressed a vibrant anti-clericalism; but the indulgent Père Fleury in the next cell to mine only complained at the volume of secular ranting when he was in the middle of confessing a pupil. Most of the Fathers treated my atheism—like my nationality, my long hair, and my austerity in the face of wine—as something basically odd but tolerable. Père Marais, one of the more ironical and inflammatory priests (who fondly remembered London bus-conductors shortening “Thank you” to “Kew”) used to apostrophize me with an amused eye: “You just wait for the next world, you civilians, then we clergy will show you who's going to be saved. You may have the upper hand now but later on you're really going to be in the shit.” Père de Goësbriand, from an aristocratic Breton family, who was much teased for having been shot in the left buttock during the war (“Running away, Hubert?” “We were surrounded!”), overheard me arguing one day with Père Marais, and afterwards voiced his anxiety: if I hadn't been baptized, he pointed out, then I had no soul and hadn't a prayer of getting to Heaven. He was much preoccupied with this final destination; on another occasion, he told me with a confidential wink, “Of course, you don't think I'd put up with all this if there wasn't Heaven in it for me at the end, do you?”
    The physics teacher, Père Daumer, a fleshy, hip-heavy, hairless man who was never out of his cassock (his nickname among the pupils was “The Third Sex”) also displayed moral concern for me.
    After I had been in residence a few weeks, he took me aside and explained that some of the words I was hearing over meals at my end of the refectory table were vulgar and not repeatable in polite conversation. * I, in return, worried about Père Daumer, who despite a severe conservatism in religious matters was a devotee of films on television, and was thus obliged to wade through a lot of soul-tarnishing stuff: Godard's A bout de souffle had aroused his particular disapproval. However, such was his cinematic passion that he would doggedly stay in the fag-fogged TV room until the credits. Then he would rise and pronounce judgement before going off to bed. “Not worth the trouble” was a favourite verdict. Once, to my delight, he gave some piece of sinful froth the full treatment. “Lacking both interest and morality,” he remarked, doffing his little square black cap at me. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Barnes.”
    There was considerable doctrinal disagreement in this house of Eudistes. Not from Père Calvard, an ardent Breton patriot who managed to combine Druidism and Catholicism with no ideological difficulty; nor from the football-mad Père Le Mauff, who would briskly assert, “Metaphysics is rubbish” before going off to tend his hive of bees, his broken-winged buzzard, his month-old fox-cub. The dispute was the sempiternal one between Ancients and Moderns, and embraced teaching methods as much as beliefs. Père Tupin, a young firebrand who believed in “dialogue” with pupils, and would even discuss masturbation with them, had recently got into trouble with the authorities for taking the words of a pop song as text for his sermon. (He got into trouble with me over this too, since to my amazement he hadn't chosen Brel or Brassens but a piece of dreck warbled by someone like Sylvie Vartan.) Presiding over these theologically sultry days at the College was Père Denis, a Père Supérieur renowned for his fair-minded timidity, his desire to approve of most things he set eyes on, and a certain tentativeness in conversation. Père Marais used to recall at frequent intervals— and always with undiminished glee—an outing with the Père Supérieur and one of my predecessors as lecteur d'anglais. At one point they had passed a dog. “Tell me, Monsieur Smith,” the Superior had asked with an exact but hesitant civility. “Do you have dogs in England?”
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