ERNESTINE.
"Ah, mesdames, what will you have? The French peasant is like that.
When he is in a rage nothing stops him--he beats anything, everything;
whatever his hand encounters must suffer when he is angry; his wife,
his child, his servant, his horse, they are all alike to him when he
sees red."
Monsieur Fouchet was tying up his rose-trees; we were watching him from
our seat on the green bench. Here in the garden, beneath the blue
vault, the roses were drooping from very heaviness of glory; they gave
forth a scent that made the head swim. It was a healthy, virile
intoxication, however, the salt in the air steadying one's nerves.
Nature, not being mortal and cursed with a conscience, had risen that
morning in a mood for carousal; at this hour of noon she had reached
the point of ecstatic stupor. No state of trance was ever so exquisite.
The air was swooning, but how delicate its gasps, as if it fell away
into calm! How adorably blue the sky in its debauch of sun-lit ether!
The sea, too, although it reeled slightly, unsteadily rising only to
fall away, what a radiance of color it maintained! Here in the garden
the drowsy air would lift a flower petal, as some dreamer sunk in
hasheesh slumber might touch a loved hand, only to let it slip away in
nerveless impotence. Never had the charm of this Normandy sea-coast
been as compelling; never had the divine softness of this air, this
harmonious marriage of earth-scents and sea-smells seemed as perfect;
never before had the delicacy of the foliage and color-gradations of
the sky as triumphantly proved that nowhere else, save in France, can
nature be at once sensuous and poetic.
We looked for something other than pure enjoyment from this golden
moment; we hoped its beauty would help us to soften our landlord. This
was the moment we had chosen to excite his sympathies, also to gain
counsel from him concerning the tragedy we had witnessed the day
before. He listened to our tale with evident interest, but there was a
disappointing coolness in his eye. As the narrative proceeded, the
brutality of the situation failed to sting him to even a mild form of
indignation. He went on tying his rose-trees, his ardor expending
itself in choice snippings of the stray stalks and rebellious tendrils.
"This Guichon," he said, after a brief moment, in the tone that goes
with the pursuance of an occupation that has become a passion. "This
Guichon--I know him. He is a hard man, but no harder than many others,
and he has had his losses, which don't always soften a man. '_Qui terre
a guerre a_,' Molière says, and Guichon has had many lawsuits, losing
them all. He has been twice married; that was his daughter by his first
wife he was touching up like that. He married only the other day Madame
Tier, a rich woman, a neighbor, their lands join. It was a great match
for him, and she, the wife, and his daughter don't hit it off, it
appears. There was some talk of a marriage for the girl lately; a good
match presented itself, but the girl will have none of it; perhaps that
accounts for the beating."
A rose, overblown with its fulness of splendor, dropped in a shower at
Fouchet's feet just then.
"_Tiens, elle est finie, celle-là_" he cried, with an accent of regret,
and he stooped over the fallen petals as if they had been the remains
of a friend. Then he sighed as he swept the mass into his broad palm.
"Come, let us leave him to the funeral of his roses; he hasn't the
sensibilities of an insect;" and Charm grasped my arm to lead me over
the turf, across the gravel paths, toward the tea-house.
This tottering structure had become one of our favorite retreats; in
the poetic _mise-en-scène_ of the garden it played the part of Ruin. It
was absurdly, ridiculously out of repair; its gaping beams and the
sunken, dejected floor could only be due to intentional neglect.
Fouchet evidently had grasped the secrets of the laws of contrast; the
deflected angle of the tumbling roof made the clean-cut garden beds
doubly true. Nature had had compassion on the aged little building,
however; the clustering, fragrant vines, in their hatred of nudity, had
invested the prose of a wreck with the poetry of drapery. The
tip-tilted settee beneath the odorous roof became, in time, our chosen
seat; from that perch we could overlook the garden-walls, the beach,
the curve of the shore, the grasses and hollyhocks in our neighbor's
garden, the latter startlingly distinct against the great arch of the
sky.
It was here Renard found us an hour later. To him, likewise, did Charm
narrate our extraordinary experience of yesterday, with much adjunct of
fiery comment, embellishment of gesture, and imitative pose.
"Ye gods, what a scene to paint! You were in luck--in luck; why wasn't
I there?" was Renard's tribute to human pity.
"Oh, you are all alike, all--nothing moves you--you haven't common
human sympathies--you haven't the rudiments of a heart! You are
terrible--all of you--terrible!" A moment after she had left us, as if
the narrowness of the little house stifled her. With long, swinging
steps she passed out, to air her indignation, apparently, beneath the
wall of the espaliers.
"Splendid creature, isn't she?" commented Renard, following the long
lines of the girl's fluttering muslin gown, as he plucked at his
mustache. "She should always wear white and gold--what is that
stuff?--and be lit up like that with a kind of goddess-like anger. She
is wrong, however," he went on, a moment later; "those of us who live
here aren't really barbarians, only we get used to things. It's the
peasants themselves that force us; they wouldn't stand interference. A
peasant is a kind of king on his own domain; he does anything he likes,
short of murder, and he doesn't always stop at that."
"But surely the Government--at least their Church, ought to teach
them--"
"Oh, their Church! they laugh at their curés--till they come to die.
He's a heathen, that's what the French peasant is--there's lots of the
middle ages abroad up there in the country. Along here, in the coast
villages, the nineteenth century has crept in a bit, humanizing them,
but the _fonds_ is always the same; they're by nature avaricious,
sordid, cruel; they'll do anything for money; there isn't anything
sacred for them except their pocket."
A few days later, in our friend the cobbler we found a more sympathetic
listener. "Dame! I also used to beat my wife," he said,
contemplatively, as he scratched his herculean head, "but that was when
I was a Christian, when I went to confession; for the confessional was
made for that, _c'est pour laver le linge sale des consciences, çà_"
(interjecting his epigram). "But now--now that I am a free-thinker, I
have ceased all that; I don't beat her," pointing to his old wife, "and
neither do I drink or swear."
"It's true, he's good--he is, now," the old wife nodded, with her slit
of a smile; "but," she added, quickly, as if even in her husband's
religious past there had been some days of glory, "he was always
just--even then--when he beat me."
"_C'est très femme, çà--hein, mademoiselle?_" And the cobbler cocked
his head in critical pose, with a philosopher's smile.
The result of the interview, however, although not entirely
satisfactory, was illuminating, besides this light which had been
thrown on the cobbler's reformation. For the cobbler was a cousin,
distant in point of kinship, but still a cousin, of the brutal farmer
and father. He knew all the points of the situation, the chief of which
was, as Fouchet had hinted, that the girl had refused to wed the _bon
parti_, who was a connection of the step-mother. As for the
step-mother's murderous outcry, "Kill her! kill her!" the cobbler
refused to take a dramatic view of this outburst.
"In such moments, you understand, one loses one's head; brutality
always intoxicates; she was a little drunk, you see."
When we proposed our modest little scheme, that of sending for the girl
and taking her, for a time at least, into our service, merely as a
change of scene, the cobbler had found nothing but admiration for the
project. "It will be perfect, mesdames. They, the parents, will ask
nothing better. To have the girl out at service, away, and yet not
disgracing them by taking a place with any other farmer; yes, they will
like that, for they are rich, you see, and wealth always respects
itself. Ah, yes, it's perfect; I'll arrange all that--all the details."
Two days later the result of the arrangement stood before us. She was
standing with her arms crossed, her fingers clasping her elbows--with
her very best peasant manner. She was neatly, and, for a peasant,
almost fashionably attired in her holiday dress--a short, black skirt,
white stockings, a flowery kerchief crossed over her broad bosom, and
on her pretty hair a richly tinted blue _foulard_. She was very well
dressed for a peasant, and, from the point of view of two travellers,
of about as much use as a plough.
"It's a beautiful scheme, and it's as dramatic as the fifth act of a
play; but what shall we do with her?"
"Oh." replied Charm, carelessly, "there isn't anything in particular
for her to do. I mean to buy her a lot of clothes, like those she has
on, and she can walk about in the garden or in the fields."
"Ah, I see; she's to be a kind of a perambulating figure-piece."
"Yes, that's about it. I dare say she will be very useful at sunset, in
a dim street; so few peasants wear anything approaching to costume
nowadays."
Ernestine herself, however, as we soon discovered, had an entirely
different conception of her vocation. She was a vigorous, active young
woman, with the sap of twenty summers in her lusty young veins. Her
energies soon found vent in a continuous round of domestic excitements.
There were windows and floors that cried aloud to Heaven to be
scrubbed; there were holes in the sheets to make mam'zelle's lying
between them _une honte, une vraie honte_. As for Madame Fouchet's
little weekly bill, _Dieu de Dieu_, it was filled with such extortions
as to make the very angels weep. Madame and Ernestine did valiant
battle over those bills thereafter. Ernestine was possessed of the
courage of a true martyr; she could suffer and submit to the scourge,
in the matter of personal persecution, for the religion of her own
convictions; but in the service of her rescuer, she could fight with
the fierceness of a common soldier.
"When Norman meets Norman--" Charm began one day, the sound of voices,
in a high treble of anger, coming in to us through the windows.
But Ernestine was knocking at the door, with a note in her hand.
"An answer is asked, mesdames," she said, in a voice of honey, as she
dropped her low courtesy.
This was the missive:
ALONG AN OLD POST-ROAD.
TO HONFLEUR AND TROUVILLE.