«Si le privilège des poètes est d'exprimer le mystère, ne l'expriment-ils authentiquement qu'ils ne réfutent du même coup l'ordre quotidien des choses comme arbitrairement établi et ne prennent parti pour le "désordre" ? Ou tout au contraire la quotidienneté des choses, soit la "banalité", ne constitue-t-elle pas en soi le mystère trop apparent pour qu'il soit seulement reconnu ?"Le rare, le merveilleux, c'est d'atteindre le but ; le vulgaire, le normal, c'est de le manquer."»

Le Nommé Jeudi : Un Cauchemar

Retraité de l'administration indienne, le squire Vane vit retiré dans son domaine de Cornouailles. Un soir, il s'enfonce dans un bois aux prétendus pouvoirs maléfiques et ne reparaît plus. Ses invités, le poète John Treheme et le critique américain Cyprian Painter, vont mener l'enquête.

Les arbres d'orgueil

"And the young woman of the house," asked Dr. Hood, with huge and silent amusement, "what does she want?" "Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. "That is just the awful complication." "It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr. Hood. "This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric, "is a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs. MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite.

La sagesse du père Brown

HAROLD MARCH, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds, with very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forget them. For his errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it was the place of appointment named by no less a person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his so-called Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Nous avions publié, en 2009, la première des biographies écrites par Chesterton, celle du poète Robert Browning. Celle qu'il écrit en 1923 sur saint François, peu après sa conversion au catholicisme, est plus tardive mais tout aussi éblouissante de fraîcheur et d'intelligence. Il ne serait d'ailleurs pas impossible de tracer une filiation entre les deux livres. L'admiration de Chesterton allait au Browning "démocratique", qui, dans L'Anneau et le Livre, donnait la parole à tous, du criminel au pape, car "nul n'a jamais vécu sur terre sans avoir un point de vue propre". L'homme qui parlait aux oiseaux n'était déjà pas si loin. D'ailleurs Chesterton voit d'abord dans saint François "un poète dont l'existence entière fut un poème". Certes, il existe beaucoup de livres sur saint François d'Assise, et beaucoup d'un abord plus savant. Mais personne n'a jamais mieux saisi l'esprit de saint François que Chesterton. C'est ce que montre avec brio Anne Weber dans sa préface : "A chaque idée toute faite, à chacune de nos représentations à la fois vagues et stéréotypées, le Saint François de Chesterton oppose une tout autre vision correspondant à une tout autre réalité." Du coup : "Nul besoin d'être soi-même "catholique orthodoxe", comme Chesterton, ni catholique tout court, ni même d'être croyant. Du moment qu'on est un être humain, comment ne pas être ébloui face au merveilleux personnage que l'on découvre et qui ressemble si peu à l'idée que l'on se fait communément d'un saint, ni d'ailleurs à rien de ce qu'on a jamais connu."

Saint François d'Assise

Patrick Dalroy, un jeune Irlandais à la force physique peu commune, rentré au pays après une campagne légendaire contre les Turcs, apprend de la bouche de son meilleur ami, que le tyran du Comté s'apprête, sous l'influence hautement maléfique d'un fanatique musulman, à fermer toutes les vieilles auberges du pays.

On devine la suite : le roman est tissé d'exploits et d'aventures dignes du chevalier à la Triste Figure. Nos amis sont bien décidés à rétablir la loi de la dive bouteille dans leur pays menacé par l'Infidèle de mourir de soif. Le tempérament de Chesterton peut alors se déployer dans tout son éclat, renouant avec la plus belle tradition picaresque anglaise, celle des Sterne, Fielding et autres Smollett.

Livre prophétique, L'Auberge volante, écrit Pierre Boutang, « pourra éveiller et instruire ceux qui, en l'Occident européen, songent encore à relever certains défis, et restent fidèles à leur héritage ».

L'auberge volante

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous-nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

The Innocence of Father Brown

THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window.

The Wisdom of Father Brown

The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

Le Nommé Jeudi : Un Cauchemar

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