Jeanne did not go out any more. She hardly bestirred herself. She got
up every morning at the same time; looked out of the window at the
weather, and then went down-stairs, and sat before the fire in the
hall. Here she would think of the happy years of Paul's childhood,
when he had worked in the salad-bed, kneeling side by side in the soft
ground with Aunt Lison, the two women rivals in their effort to amuse
the child, and seeing who could root up the young plants most
skilfully.
[Footnote 12: From the last chapter of "A Life." Translated for this
collection by Eric Arthur Bell.]
So musing, her lips would murmur, "Poulet, Poulet! my little
Poulet"--as if she were speaking to him; and, her reverie broken as
she spoke, she would try during whole hours to write in the air the
letters which formed the boy's name. She would trace them slowly
before the fire, imagining that she really saw them; then believing
that her eyes had deceived her, she would rewrite the capital P
again, her arm trembling with fatigue, forcing herself to trace the
name to the end; then when she had finished it she would begin over
again. At last she could not write it any more. She would muddle
everything--form other words, and exhaust herself almost to idiocy.
Ever since her childhood just one habit had clung to her--that of
jumping up out of bed the moment she had drunk her morning coffee. She
was inordinately fond of that way of breakfasting, and the privation
would have been felt more than anything else. Each morning she would
await Rosalie's arrival with extraordinary impatience; and as soon as
the cup was put upon the table at her side, she would sit up and empty
it almost greedily, and then, throwing off her robe, she would begin
to dress herself at once.
She thought she was directly pursued by obstinate misfortune against
which she became as fatalistic as an Oriental: the habit of seeing her
dreams fade away and destroy her hopes made her afraid to undertake
anything; and she waited whole days to accomplish the most simple
affair, convinced that she would always take the wrong way to do it,
and that it would turn out badly. She repeated continually, "I have
never had any luck in my life." Then Rosalie would cry, "Supposing you
had had to work for your bread--and were obliged to get up every
morning at six o'clock and prepare for your day's doings? There are
lots of people who are obliged to do that; and when such people become
too old, they die of poverty."
She had checked certain memorable days in her life, and now and then
she was able to remember episodes of an entire month, bringing them
up one by one, grouping them together, and connecting together all
those little matters which had preceded or followed some important
event. She succeeded by sheer force of attention, by force of memory
and of concentrated will power in bringing back to mind almost
completely her two first years at Peuples. Distant memories of her
life came back to her with a singular facility, bringing a kind of
relief; but the later years seemed to lose themselves in a mist--to
become mixt one with another: and sometimes she would stay for an
indefinite time, her head bowed on one of the calendars, her mind full
of the past, and yet not being able to remember whether it was in this
or that calendar that such or such a remembrance ought to be
tabulated. She placed them around the room like the pictures of the
Way of the Cross--those tableaux of days that were no more. Then she
would abruptly set down her chair before one of them; and there she
would sit until night came, staring at it, immobile, buried in her
dreams of remembrance.
One morning Rosalie came earlier than usual into her room, and said,
setting down upon the table the bowl of coffee: "Come now, drink this
up quickly. Denis is down-stairs waiting for us at the door. We are
going over to Peuples to-day: I've got some business over there."
Jeanne thought that she was going to faint, so deep was her emotion.
She drest herself, frightened and tremulous at the mere idea of seeing
again that dear house.
A radiant sky spread out above over all the world, and the horse, in
fits and starts of liveliness, sometimes broke into a gallop. When
they entered into the commune of Etouvent, Jeanne's heart beat so fast
that she could hardly breathe, and when she saw from a distance the
brick pillars of the boundary-line of her old home, she exclaimed in a
low voice two or three times, "Oh!--oh!--oh!--" as if something had
happened to change her whole heart.
They left the wagon with the Couillards: then, while Rosalie and her
son went off to attend to their business, the caretakers offered to
take Jeanne over the château, the present owners of it being away; so
they gave her the keys.
She set out alone, and when she was fairly before the old manor-house
by the seaside, she stopt to look at it once again. It had changed in
nothing outside. The large, grayish building that day showed upon its
old walls the smile of the brilliant sunshine. All the shutters were
closed.
A bit of a dead branch fell on her dress. She raised her eyes. It came
from the plane-tree. She drew near the big tree with its smooth, pale
bark; she stroked it with her hand as if it had been an animal. Her
foot struck something in the grass--a fragment of rotten wood; it was
the last fragment of the very bench on which she had sat so often with
those of her own family about her; the very bench which had been seen
set in place on the very day that Julien had made his first visit.
She reached the double doors of the vestibule of the house, and she
had great trouble to open them; for the heavy, rusty key refused to
turn in the lock. At length the lock yielded with a heavy grinding of
its springs; and the door, a little obstinate itself, burst open with
a cloud of dust.
At once, and almost running, she went upstairs to her own room. She
could recognize it, hung as it was with a light new paper: but
throwing open a window, she looked out and stood motionless, stirred
even to the depth of her being at the sight of all that landscape, so
much beloved; the shrubs, the elm-trees, the flat reaches, and the sea
dotted with brown sails, motionless in the distance.
Then she began prowling about the great empty dwelling. She even stopt
to look at the discolorations on the walls; spots familiar to her
eyes. Once she stood before a little hole crusht in the plaster by the
baron; who had often amused himself, when he was young, with making
passages at arms, cane in hand, against the partition wall, when he
happened to be passing this spot.
She went down-stairs to the drawing-room. It was somber behind the
closed shutters: for some time she could not distinguish anything;
then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Little by little she
recognized the wide tapestries with their patterns of birds flitting
about. Two settees were set before the chimney as if people had just
quitted them; and the very odor of the room, an odor which it had
always kept--that old, vague, sweet odor belonging to some old
houses--entered Jeanne's very being, enwrapt her in souvenirs,
intoxicated her memory. She remained gasping, breathing in that breath
of the past, her eyes fixt upon those two chairs; for suddenly she
saw--as she had so often seen them--her father and her mother, sitting
there warming their feet by the fire. She started back terrified,
struck her back against the edge of the door, caught at it to keep
herself from falling, but kept her eyes still fixt upon the chairs.
The vision disappeared. For some moments she remained forgetful of
everything; then slowly she recovered her self-possession, and would
have fled from the room, fearful of losing her self-control. Her
glance fell by chance on the door-post on which she was leaning; and
there before her eyes were the marks that had been made to keep track
of Poulet's height as he was growing up!
The little marks climbed the painted wood at irregular intervals;
figures traced with the penknife noted down the different ages with
the month of the boy's life. Sometimes the jottings were in the
handwriting of the baron, a large hand; sometimes they were in her own
smaller hand; sometimes in that of Aunt Lison, a little shaky. It
seemed to her that the child of other days was actually there, before
her, with his blond hair, pressing his little forehead against the
wall so that his height could be measured. The baron was crying,
"Jeanne! he has grown a whole centimeter in the last six weeks!" She
began to kiss the piece of wood in a frenzy of love.
But some one was calling her from outside. It was Rosalie's voice:
"Madame Jeanne, Madame Jeanne, we are waiting for you, to have
luncheon." She went out in a trance. She hardly understood anything
that the other said to her. She ate the things that they put on her
plate; she listened without knowing what she heard, talking
mechanically with the farming-women, who inquired about her health;
she let them embrace her, and herself kissed the cheeks offered to
her; and then got into the wagon again.
When she caught her last glimpse of the high roof of the château
across the trees, she felt a terrible sinking in her heart. It seemed
to her in her innermost being that she had said farewell forever to
her old home!