The Patagonian Hare by Claude Lanzmann

Author:Claude Lanzmann [Lanzmann, Claude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857898753
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

Chapter 13

1958, I am thirty-three. For me, this is the year of ‘Le curé d’Uruffe’, of Général de Gaulle’s return to power, of my trip to China and North Korea and of the presentiment, which quickly became obvious, that my relationship with Castor had to take a new form. What links these moments in my life is something much deeper than mere chronological confluence.

In Uruffe, an ordinary parish in Lorraine, the curate put a bullet through the neck of Régine Fays, a member of his flock, a girl of twenty, pregnant by him and about to give birth; then, having murdered her, he cut open her belly, delivered the baby and put out the child’s eyes with a penknife although not before, in an expeditious abridgement of the liturgy, he had baptized the baby and given it the last rites. It was a crime the like of which occurs once in a lifetime and France Dimanche asked me to cover the trial, which opened before the cour d’assises of Meurthe-et-Moselle on 24 January 1958, a cold morning, with all of Nancy shrouded in snow and ice. I will not recount here the disturbing life of Guy Desnoyers, the ‘murderer of Uruffe’ as Le Figaro had the audacity to call him in its issue that first day, with an adept sleight of hand managing simultaneously to extricate the curate from the Church and the Church from the curate. I followed the whole trial, including those parts of it that were held in camera, and I was present for the passing of the lenient sentence, which allowed the curate, guilty of double murder and a thousand sins, to escape the death penalty, the result of mitigating circumstances that were never stated during the two-day trial conducted by a prosecutor anxious above all to avoid raising any difficult questions.

I wrote an article for France Dimanche that I would delight in rereading today; it was satisfactory, to my mind, for what it contained, but unsatisfactory because considerations of space made it impossible for me to do an in-depth analysis. France Dimanche – the unity of self is found here – was like a pilot-fish, like the first stage of a rocket; I decided that I could not leave it at that, that I wanted to write another article, free of all constraints, for Les Temps modernes, a publication that had always afforded news items a status and a dignity every bit equal to that of literature and philosophy. Sartre and Castor eagerly devoured anything to do with human passions in the newspapers, they read crime novels, and at Les Temps modernes we never baulked from publishing accounts of the most deviant acts if we felt them to be revealing. So I set to work at my desk on the rue Schoelcher early in February, but Castor was determined not to miss out on her sacrosanct winter holidays and had planned that we would go skiing in Courchevel. I explained to her again that I could not juggle skiing and an article that was taking up all my time.

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