One little story may find a place here. I remember a young friend of mine who had caught syphilis in New York and who showed me a loaded revolver with which he intended to kill the woman who had infected him. I laughed at him. "The poor girl may not even have known she was ill," I said. "Don't be a fool; take my advice and always blame yourself for the mishaps of life, and no one else."
CHAPTER XIV
In the second volume I promised that I would end this volume with an account of my life up to date, and so now I must tell what has befallen me in this past year, 1926.
I was astonished one day here in Nice to get a citation to appear before a Judge Bensa, to answer a charge of "outrage aux bonnes moeurs"-an outrage on good morals; and the Judge informed me that the outrage in question was the publication of the second volume of My Life.
"Why not the first volume?" I asked.
"Oh, because that was published in Germany; we have nothing to do with it; but this volume was printed in France, so we must take note of it."
"My crime, then," I said, "is that I wished to benefit French printers and to give them work; for if I had published the second volume in Germany or Italy, I should not have been molested."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Have you sold the book in France?" was the next question.
"It was 'privately printed,'" I said, "as you can see. I didn't anticipate any sale in France and therefore I did not trouble to get the book into the shops; but later, here and there, a book-seller whom I know has told me that he has been asked for a copy of My Life by Americans or Englishmen who wished to complete their sets of my books, and so I have given these book-sellers copies to sell, always on condition that they should not be exhibited in the windows or held for ordinary sale. The sale in France has therefore been very restricted: certainly in all, I have not sold fifty copies. It has never been mise en vente (exposed for sale)."
The Judge took note of this, but said it didn't matter whether I sold thirty, or three, or three thousand; it was the fact of the sale that was important. I bowed, of course, to this judicial reasoning.
At first my advocate, Maitre Gassin, told me that the case would certainly not come before any court. It was ridiculous, he thought, to make the printing of a book in France a crime, when nothing was done with the book printed in Germany and brought into France by the thousands; but the second or third time I saw him, I found that he regarded the case much more seriously.
"We are not rich in France," he said, "and I felt they would never spend the two or three thousand francs in getting your book translated, but I have seen the authorities, and they tell me that the prosecution has been started from Paris, and the money for the translation of the book has been paid. You have got some enemy or enemies in Paris who are making their influence felt."
I had already obtained from M. Bensa, the judge, a note of the pages which were objected to in the second volume of My Life: some forty in all out of four hundred, and among these marked forty were three or four pages together.
The moment I looked them out, I found that one of them was my description of English gormandizing at the Lord Mayor's banquets in the city of London, and another dealt with the conduct of Sir Robert Fowler, who was twice Lord Mayor, and his gluttony and disgusting behavior at Sir William Marriott's table when Lady Marriott had to leave the room.
Now this episode is merely revolting, and I had put it in simply because I thought it a duty to give as complete a record of my life as I could, and the habit of over-eating and over-drinking reigns in England all through the middle classes. I have told how Prince Edward put a stop to it in the best class by introducing the habit of going at once to coffee and cigarettes after dinner, instead of guzzling bottle after bottle of Burgundy or claret, which was the custom of the upper classes till he came.
Again I found that anything I had told of Prince Edward's liking for naughty stories and for witty limericks had also got me into trouble, and was marked down as offensive. Another passage especially objected to was the account of how Lord Randolph Churchill became infected with disease.
From these indications it seemed to me that the persecution came from the English Foreign Office; and this inference I have since found to be correct.
The publicity given by the prosecution will certainly add to the sale of the book, which accordingly is now about to appear in several other European languages.
Yet the prosecution was annoying if only for the cost; and just because the accusation seemed ridiculous, I became anxious. I had once tasted prison through contempt of the English Judge Horridge by commenting on the conduct of a case which never came to trial, just because the whole thing was ridiculous. I was punished without a shadow of reason. Now I was to be punished again, just for telling some truths about England and Englishmen in a foreign country. The case, I am told, won't come on for some months, but I dread it most because of the unreason in the charge.
Here for example is a book, La Garconne of Marguerite, which tells of love between men and boys, and girls with girls, yet this book has sold five hundred thousand copies in France, and the author has not been brought before any court except the court of the Legion of Honor. Verlaine, too, the great poet, has given to the world posthumously a book of poems adorned with the lewdest illustrations, and all singing the praise of unnatural vices.
Finally, I have before me a copy of a publisher's circular, issued expressly as from the Libraire du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, with the sanction therefore of the Office of Foreign Affairs in Paris, wherein I find exposed for sale at low prices Le Marquis de Sade, Gamiani, Les Memoires de Suzon in French, and The Pearl in English-all frankly pornographic works.
My offense is after all nothing but the description of the normal love of man for woman; and I am to be punished for twenty pages in 400 and for selling thirty or forty volumes in France, every one of which, I believe, has been sold to Englishmen or Americans. My crime is that I have given work to French printers rather than to German or Italian printers. Yet my advocate, Maitre Gassin, tells me that the matter is serious and being pursued with fiendish earnestness.
One fact I must record here. As soon as news of my prosecution got into the press, all the French writers whom I know, notably Barbusse, Morand, Willy Breal, Davray, De Richter, Maurevert, and others, wrote in my favor, expressing their contempt for such persecution. Every French author of note appears to be on my side and all agree with the great phrase of Vauvenargues: "Ce qui n'offense pas la societe, n'est pas du ressort de la justice" (That which does not offend society, has nothing to do with justice).
But no English or American writer has taken up the cudgels for me or written one word in my defense. Far from that, not a single English or American writer has even considered the book fairly or tried to see any merit in it, and while English journals have usually taken the indecency for admitted, American journals, such as the New York World and the Nation, have covered me with cheap insults. All this, of course, was to be expected. But I may be permitted to believe that the genial conduct of the French writers shows a higher level of understanding and a nobler humanity.
A previous experience substantiates this belief. I was in Paris when Zola published his Nona, which described the life of a courtesan in Paris. The book came as a shock to every reader in the city. Not only did it sell over fifty thousand copies in the first week, but the day after it appeared, everyone who counted had read it and could talk of nothing else.