Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles par Claude Louis-Combet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles par Claude Louis-Combet Joseph A. Reiter Louis-Combet, Claude. Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles. Corti, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7143-1248-8. Pp. 173. Animals have populated literature and imagery from the very beginnings of artistic expression, revealing a fascination, awe, and fear of the many species inhabiting the planet. Some creatures have taken on religious and symbolic meanings. Others mirror or satirize human behavior. In this collection of ten narratives, written between 1997 and 2021, Louis-Combet paints a world where animals are mostly victims of human cruelty and insensitivity. The tales are probing, nightmarish, erotic, filled with guilt and self-loathing. Some are from the world of fantasy. Others are autobiographical, mostly from the seminary years of the author. Louis-Combet abandoned a religious vocation but, as one sees in his writings, not an intense spiritual life. He studied philosophy, which he went on to teach, and is a prolific writer of fiction, and of art, literature, and photography criticism. He also developed pedagogy courses for troubled youth, perhaps influenced by his own adolescent conflicts, and continues to write at age eighty-eight. The first tale of the collection, "Le bœuf et la grenouille," misleads the reader, who expects a Rousseauist reinterpretation of fables. Louis-Combet invents an epilogue to La Fontaine, where the bœuf envies the size, color, beauty, and voice of the frog, resulting in his demise as he tries to imitate the amphibian: "il cria si fort qu'il en creva" (13). The second story, "Les larmes d'une truie," clearly states the intent and direction of the texts: "L'animal vivait dans la simplicité de sa nature. L'homme dans sa complexité de sa nature, dans sa dualité et sa duplicité. Lui seul avait le pouvoir de faire du mal" (18) and with that an intense feeling of sin, guilt and self-loathing, precisely what Louis-Combet experiences at the seminary. He desperately strives for purity and innocence through prayer, self-harm, walking, and through literature. Louis-Combet details his encounters with cats, insects, rabbits, or snakes, including the serpent represented in the statues of the virgin Mary. He recounts the slaughter of the seminary's pig, César, who had become the postulants' pet. The butchers, his priest teachers, have compelled him to collect the animal's blood, "tout au long du rituel de la mise à mort, le corps avait rayonné" (78). Equally disturbing and sadistic is a scout initiation scene, also overseen by a cleric, which includes the forced eating of a roasted snake, after which Louis-Combet is dubbed, ironically as the reader sees later, Cobra pacifique. The most fanciful piece in the collection is a dictated letter to the eccentric and mythomaniac English poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) by the chimpanzee he claimed to have seduced. She, named Bloody Mary, recalls his Pygmalion-like efforts to humanize and beautify her, and thereafter the sorrows of abandonment: "Quand j'ai compris que vous ne reviendriez plus et que, plus jamais je ne vous verrais, je me suis mise à vieillir à toute allure" (135). The collection concludes with a previously published essay, fittingly, on the topic of writing about animals, a creative process, argues Louis-Combet, that inevitably exposes the truths of human existence. [End Page 269] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French