M. BERGERET ON FILM CENSORING
A late October sun of unusual splendour lit up the windows of M. Paillot’s bookshop, at the corner of the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries. But it was sombre in the back region of the shop where the second-hand book shelves were and M. Mazure, the departmental archivist, adjusted his spectacles to read his copy ofLe Phare, with one eye on the newspaper and the other on M. Paillot and his customers. For M. Mazure wished not so much to read as to be seen reading, in order that he might be asked what the leading article was and reply, “Oh, a little thing of my own.” But the question was not asked, for the only otherhabituépresent was the Lecturer in Latin at the Faculty of Letters, who was sad and silent. M. Bergeret was turning over the new books and the old with a friendly hand, and though he never bought a book for fear of the outcries of his wife and three daughters he was on the best of terms with M. Paillot, who held him in high esteem as the reservoir and alembic of those humaner letters that are the livelihood and profit of booksellers. He took up Vol. XXXVIII. of “L’Histoire Générale des Voyages,” whichalways opened at the same place, p. 212, and he read:—
“ver un passage au nord. ‘C’est à cet échec, dit-il, que nous devons n’avoir pu visiter les îles Sandwich et enrichir notre voyage d’une découverte qui....’”
“ver un passage au nord. ‘C’est à cet échec, dit-il, que nous devons n’avoir pu visiter les îles Sandwich et enrichir notre voyage d’une découverte qui....’”
For six years past the same page had presented itself to M. Bergeret, as an example of the monotony of life, as a symbol of the uniformity of daily tasks, and it saddened him.
At that moment M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, entered the shop and greeted his friends with the slight air of superiority of a traveller over stay-at-homes. “I’ve just got back from England,” he said, “and here, if either of you have enough English to read it, is to-day’sTimes.”
M. Mazure hastily thrustLe Phareinto his pocket and looked askance at the voluminous foreign journal, wherein he could claim no little thing of his own. M. Bergeret accepted it and applied himself as conscientiously to construing the text as though it were one of those books of the Æneid from which he was compiling his “Virgilius Nauticus.” “The manners of our neighbours,” he presently said, “are as usual more interesting to a student of human nature than their politics. I read that they are seriously concerned about the ethical teaching of their kinematography, and they have appointed a film censor, the deputy T. P. O’Connor.”
“I think I have heard speak of him over there,” interrupted M. de Terremondre; “they call him, familiarly, Tépé.”
“A mysterious name,” said M. Bergeret, “but manifestly not abusive, and that of itself is a high honour. History records few nicknames that do not revile. And if the deputy O’Connor, or Tépé, can successfully acquit himself of his present functions he will be indeed an ornament to history, a saint of the Positivist Calendar, which is no doubt less glorious than the Roman, but more exclusive.”
“Talking of Roman saints,” broke in M. Mazure, “the Abbé Lantaigne has been spreading it abroad that you called Joan of Arc a mascot.”
“By way of argument merely,” said M. Bergeret, “not of epigram. The Abbé and I were discussing theology, about which I never permit myself to be facetious.”
“But what of Tépé and his censorial functions?” asked M. de Terremondre.
“They are extremely delicate,” replied M. Bergeret, “and offer pitfalls to a censor with a velleity for nice distinctions. Thus I read that this one has already distinguished, and distinguishedcon allegrezza, between romantic crime and realistic crime, between murder in Mexico and murder in Mile End (which I take to be a suburb of London). He has distinguished between ‘guilty love’ and ‘the pursuit of lust.’ He has distinguished between a lightly-clad lady swimming and the same lady at rest.Surely a man gifted with so exquisite a discrimination is wasted in rude practical life. He should have been a metaphysician.”
“Well, I,” confessed M. de Terremondre, “am no metaphysician, and it seems to me murder is murder all the world over.”
“Pardon me,” said M. Bergeret, “but there, I think, your Tépé is quite right. Murder is murder all the world over if you are on the spot. But if you are at a sufficient distance from it in space or time, it may present itself as a thrilling adventure. Thus the Mexican film censor will be right in prohibiting films of murder in Mexico, and not wrong in admitting those of murder in Mile End. Where would tragedy be without murder? We enjoy the murders of Julius Cæsar or of Duncan because they are remote; they gratify the primeval passion for blood in us without a sense of risk. But we could not tolerate a play or a picture of yesterday’s murder next door, because we think it might happen to ourselves. Remember that murder was long esteemed in our human societies as an energetic action, and in our manners and in our institutions there still subsist traces of this antique esteem. And that is why I approve the English film censor for treating with a wise indulgence one of the most venerable of our human admirations. He gratifies it under conditions of remoteness that deprive bloodshed of its reality while conserving its artistic verisimilitude.”
“But, bless my soul,” said M. de Terremondre“how does the man distinguish between guilty love and lust?”
“It is a fine point,” said M. Bergeret. “The Fathers of the Church, the schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Descartes and Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, have all failed to make the distinction, and some of them have even confounded with the two what men to-day agree in calling innocent love. But is love ever innocent—unless it be that love Professor Bellac in Pailleron’s play described asl’amour psychique, the love that Petrarch bore to Laura?”
“If I remember aright,” interposed M. Mazure, “someone else in the play remarked that Laura had eleven children.”
Just then Mme. de Gromance passed across the Place. The conversation was suspended while all three men watched her into the patissier’s opposite, elegantly hovering over the plates of cakes, and finally settling on ababa au rhum.
“Sapristi!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, “she’s the prettiest woman in the whole place.”
M. Bergeret mentally went over several passages in Æneid, Book IV., looked ruefully at his frayed shirt cuffs, and regretted the narrow life of a provincial university lecturer that reduced him to insignificance in the eyes of the prettiest woman in the place.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh, “it is a very fine point. I wonder how on earth Tépé manages to settle it?”