The second, Edouard, married the daughter of one of the suppliers of fabric to the paternal business who owned a small textile factory on the Côtes-du-Nord. Maria-Barbara, my sister-in-law, is—as so often happens with only daughters—so prolific that I doubt if she knows just how many children she has. True, she seems to have called a halt to childbearing for the moment, since the birth of the twins, Jean and Paul.

Which leaves the youngest of the Surin brothers, myself, Alexandre. I can’t but laugh to think what any proper, right-minded family history would have to say about me. “Probably excessively spoiled by his parents, he showed no aptitude for any career but stayed at home with his mother while she lived and, after her death, gave free rein to his evil propensities, abandoning himself thereafter to the most frightful depravities.”

Let us get the facts right. My father having engaged in just two lines of business—public works and textiles—my two elder brothers inherited the one and the other respectively. There was nothing left for me. Nothing but my own little darling whom I take after and who was never happy with that Antoine she married. Her coming to live with me in Paris was entirely her own choice: she no longer felt at home in the house in the rue du Chapitre, swarming with Gustave’s daughters and regimented by the dragon he married. It is my pride and comfort that I gave her the only really happy years of her life.

On the twentieth of September 1934 an equinoctial storm of unusual violence ravaged Brittany with incalculable consequences for me. The fact was that on that day Gustave was killed on one of his own sites when a crane fell and buried him under three tons of household rubbish. His grotesque and disgusting end might have amused me but that it pained me indirectly because of my darling little Mama’s grief. I had to go with her to Rennes for the funeral, shake hands with all the local worthies, and face up to my sister-in-law, made more formidable than ever by her widowhood, the dignity of head of the household and the black weeds it invested her with. But all this was nothing compared to the family conclave which had to be got through on the following day. I had been thinking that my brother’s inheritance was no concern of mine and planning to go off and browse along the banks of the Vilaine—which is a misnomer because you can pick up some nice slips of boys there, and not too shy. Hm, well, yes, the widow must have got wind of my roving fancy because she buttonholed me that evening in front of the whole family and told me in that voice of hers, like someone murdering an old cello, ‘Tomorrow, Mâitre Dieulefît, such an old friend, is coming to preside over a family conclave. We are all relying on you, dear Alexandre. Your presence is quite indispensable.”

The harpy must have known me very well to be so insistent!

I have never known whether the plot was hatched by the whole family beforehand, but all of a sudden I found myself, at the end of an hour and a half of stupefyingly boring chitchat, with an enormous and totally unexpected pit gaping before me. Out of the aforesaid chitchat, to which I had been paying only the remotest attention, it suddenly emerged with apodictic inevitability that Gustave’s business interests were considerable, that they could not be left without anyone to run them, that that person ought to be a member of the family, and that I was the only eligible candidate.

I? I can still see myself, utterly flabbergasted, pointing with one finger at my chest and staring dazedly around at the ring of marble faces about me, all nodding repeated assent to an implacable fate. I? Step into his still warm shoes, that mean old devil who used to escort his dragon of a wife and his four ugly daughters to high mass in the cathedral of St. Pierre on Sundays? I? Take charge of that ridiculous, unsavory business? The indescribable absurdity of it choked me.

I got up and went out and tramped furiously all over town. But that evening, when I went up to my little boyhood room in the rue du Chapitre, I found on my bedside table a rather lavish booklet, soberly printed on art paper and bearing the enigmatic title: TURDCO and Its Task of Repurgation. An invisible hand was seeing to it that a certain idea should run its course.

Repurgation! The word might have come out of a medical treatise on the digestive system or a study of theological casuistry. That neologism—no use looking it up in any dictionary— was Gustave all over in the way it conveyed his attempt to make up for his horrible calling by putting on airs of intestino-spiritual research. But what did I not learn on that night of September 26-27, 1934, a night only to be compared with that of the great Pascal’s nocturnal ecstasy!

I learned that until the reign of Philip Augustus—who was responsible for the capital’s first public cleansing service—herds of pigs, running wild through the streets, constituted the sole provision for the disposal of domestic refuse which people simply dumped outside their doors. For several hundred years the oxcarts trundled back and forth between the city and the public garbage dump, which was the responsibility of the chief surveyor, the Grand Voyer of Paris. A retired guards officer, a Captain La Fleur (of all things!), in the reign of Louis XV, drew up the first set of articles and conditions, laying down schedules and times of collections, the size and shape of vehicles employed, and also the composition of the gangs of workers, male drivers and female sweepers, jailloux as these menial characters were called here. A whole picturesque and odoriferous history opened before my eyes, punctuated by such sensational events as the introduction by M. le Prefet Poubelle of that revolutionary article the garbage can. But most of all, I learned that night that TURDCO (The Urban Refuse Disposal Company) was a far-reaching organization extending to six cities—Rennes, Deauville, Paris, Marseille, Roanne, and Casablanca—with all of which it had contracts for “repurgation.”

Little by little I began to be attracted by the negative, I might almost say inverted aspect of this industry. Certainly it was an empire that spread through city streets and had its country acres —the dumps—also; but equally it penetrated into people’s most intimate secrets, since every deed and every action left its mark on it, the irrefutable proof of its doing—cigarette butts, torn-up letters, vegetable peelings, sanitary napkins, and so forth.