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GUY DE MAUPASSANT
UNE VIE
A Piece of String
And Other Stories
Translated by
Albert M. C. McMaster, B.A.
A. E. Henderson, B.A.
Mme. Quesada and Others
* * * * *
VOLUME I.
* * * * *
[Illustration: "JEANNE"]
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY POL. NEVEUX
UNE VIE (The History of a Heart)
I. The Home by the Sea
II. Happy Days
III. M. de Lamare
IV. Marriage and Disillusion
V. Corsica and a New Life
VI. Disenchantment
VII. Jeanne's Discovery
VIII. Maternity
IX. Death of La Baronne
X. Retribution
XI. The Development of Paul
XII. A New Home
XIII. Jeanne in Paris
XIV. Light at Eventide
A VAGABOND
THE FISHING HOLE
THE SPASM
IN THE WOOD
MARTINE
ALL OVER
THE PARROT
A PIECE OF STRING
[Illustration: Guy de Maupassant]
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A Study by Pol. Neveux
"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a
thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to José Maria de Heredia on
the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid
solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which,
for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the
fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and
travels, only to sink prematurely into the abyss of madness and
death....
In the month of April, 1880, an article appeared in the "Le Gaulois"
announcing the publication of the Soirées de Médan. It was signed by a
name as yet unknown: Guy de Maupassant. After a juvenile diatribe
against romanticism and a passionate attack on languorous literature,
the writer extolled the study of real life, and announced the
publication of the new work. It was picturesque and charming. In the
quiet of evening, on an island in the Seine, beneath poplars instead
of the Neapolitan cypresses dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the
continuous murmur of the valley, and no longer to the sound of the
Pyrennean streams that murmured a faint accompaniment to the tales of
Marguerite's cavaliers, the master and his disciples took turns in
narrating some striking or pathetic episode of the war. And the issue,
in collaboration, of these tales in one volume, in which the master
jostled elbows with his pupils, took on the appearance of a manifesto,
the tone of a challenge, or the utterance of a creed.
In fact, however, the beginnings had been much more simple, and they
had confined themselves, beneath the trees of Médan, to deciding on a
general title for the work. Zola had contributed the manuscript of the
"Attaque du Moulin," and it was at Maupassant's house that the five
young men gave in their contributions. Each one read his story,
Maupassant being the last. When he had finished Boule de Suif, with a
spontaneous impulse, with an emotion they never forgot, filled with
enthusiasm at this revelation, they all rose and, without superfluous
words, acclaimed him as a master.
He undertook to write the article for the Gaulois and, in coöperation
with his friends, he worded it in the terms with which we are
familiar, amplifying and embellishing it, yielding to an inborn taste
for mystification which his youth rendered excusable. The essential
point, he said, is to "unmoor" criticism.
It was unmoored. The following day Wolff wrote a polemical
dissertation in the Figaro and carried away his colleagues. The volume
was a brilliant success, thanks to Boule de Suif. Despite the novelty,
the honesty of effort, on the part of all, no mention was made of the
other stories. Relegated to the second rank, they passed without
notice. From his first battle, Maupassant was master of the field in
literature.
At once the entire press took him up and said what was appropriate
regarding the budding celebrity. Biographers and reporters sought
information concerning his life. As it was very simple and perfectly
straightforward, they resorted to invention. And thus it is that at
the present day Maupassant appears to us like one of those ancient
heroes whose origin and death are veiled in mystery.
I will not dwell on Guy de Maupassant's younger days. His relatives,
his old friends, he himself, here and there in his works, have
furnished us in their letters enough valuable revelations and touching
remembrances of the years preceding his literary début. His worthy
biographer, H. Édouard Maynial, after collecting intelligently all the
writings, condensing and comparing them, has been able to give us some
definite information regarding that early period.
I will simply recall that he was born on the 5th of August, 1850, near
Dieppe, in the castle of Miromesnil which he describes in Une Vie....
Maupassant, like Flaubert, was a Norman, through his mother, and
through his place of birth he belonged to that strange and adventurous
race, whose heroic and long voyages on tramp trading ships he liked to
recall. And just as the author of "Éducation sentimentale" seems to
have inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne,
so de Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors
their indestructible discipline and cold lucidity.
His childhood was passed at Étretat, his beautiful childhood; it was
there that his instincts were awakened in the unfoldment of his
prehistoric soul. Years went by in an ecstasy of physical happiness.
The delight of running at full speed through fields of gorse, the
charm of voyages of discovery in hollows and ravines, games beneath
the dark hedges, a passion for going to sea with the fishermen and, on
nights when there was no moon, for dreaming on their boats of
imaginary voyages.
Mme. de Maupassant, who had guided her son's early reading, and had
gazed with him at the sublime spectacle of nature, put off as long as
possible the hour of separation. One day, however, she had to take the
child to the little seminary at Yvetot. Later, he became a student at
the college at Rouen, and became a literary correspondent of Louis
Bouilhet. It was at the latter's house on those Sundays in winter when
the Norman rain drowned the sound of the bells and dashed against the
window panes that the school boy learned to write poetry.
Vacation took the rhetorician back to the north of Normandy. Now it
was shooting at Saint Julien-l'Hospitalier, across fields, bogs, and
through the woods. From that time on he sealed his pact with the
earth, and those "deep and delicate roots" which attached him to his
native soil began to grow. It was of Normandy, broad, fresh and
virile, that he would presently demand his inspiration, fervent and
eager as a boy's love; it was in her that he would take refuge when,
weary of life, he would implore a truce, or when he simply wished to
work and revive his energies in old-time joys. It was at this time
that was born in him that voluptuous love of the sea, which in later
days could alone withdraw him from the world, calm him, console him.
In 1870 he lived in the country, then he came to Paris to live; for,
the family fortunes having dwindled, he had to look for a position.
For several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he
turned over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of the clerks
of the admiralty.
Then he went into the department of Public Instruction, where
bureaucratic servility is less intolerable. The daily duties are
certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues,
Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and René Billotte, but his
office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane
trees around which black circles of crows gathered in winter.
Maupassant made two divisions of his spare hours, one for boating, and
the other for literature. Every evening in spring, every free day, he
ran down to the river whose mysterious current veiled in fog or
sparkling in the sun called to him and bewitched him. In the islands
in the Seine between Chatou and Port-Marly, on the banks of
Sartrouville and Triel he was long noted among the population of
boatmen, who have now vanished, for his unwearying biceps, his cynical
gaiety of goodfellowship, his unfailing practical jokes, his broad
witticisms. Sometimes he would row with frantic speed, free and
joyous, through the glowing sunlight on the stream; sometimes, he
would wander along the coast, questioning the sailors, chatting with
the ravageurs, or junk gatherers, or stretched at full length amid the
irises and tansy he would lie for hours watching the frail insects
that play on the surface of the stream, water spiders, or white
butterflies, dragon flies, chasing each other amid the willow leaves,
or frogs asleep on the lily-pads.
The rest of his life was taken up by his work. Without ever becoming
despondent, silent and persistent, he accumulated manuscripts, poetry,
criticisms, plays, romances and novels. Every week he docilely
submitted his work to the great Flaubert, the childhood friend of his
mother and his uncle Alfred Le Poittevin. The master had consented to
assist the young man, to reveal to him the secrets that make
chefs-d'oeuvre immortal. It was he who compelled him to make copious
research and to use direct observation and who inculcated in him a
horror of vulgarity and a contempt for facility.
Maupassant himself tells us of those severe initiations in the Rue
Murillo, or in the tent at Croisset; he has recalled the implacable
didactics of his old master, his tender brutality, the paternal advice
of his generous and candid heart. For seven years Flaubert slashed,
pulverized, the awkward attempts of his pupil whose success remained
uncertain.
Suddenly, in a flight of spontaneous perfection, he wrote Boule de
Suif. His master's joy was great and overwhelming. He died two months
later.
Until the end Maupassant remained illuminated by the reflection of the
good, vanished giant, by that touching reflection that comes from the
dead to those souls they have so profoundly stirred. The worship of
Flaubert was a religion from which nothing could distract him, neither
work, nor glory, nor slow moving waves, nor balmy nights.
At the end of his short life, while his mind was still clear, he wrote
to a friend: "I am always thinking of my poor Flaubert, and I say to
myself that I should like to die if I were sure that anyone would
think of me in the same manner."
During these long years of his novitiate Maupassant had entered the
social literary circles. He would remain silent, preoccupied; and if
anyone, astonished at his silence, asked him about his plans he
answered simply: "I am learning my trade." However, under the
pseudonym of Guy de Valmont, he had sent some articles to the
newspapers, and, later, with the approval and by the advice of
Flaubert, he published, in the "République des Lettres," poems signed
by his name.
These poems, overflowing with sensuality, where the hymn to the Earth
describes the transports of physical possession, where the impatience
of love expresses itself in loud melancholy appeals like the calls of
animals in the spring nights, are valuable chiefly inasmuch as they
reveal the creature of instinct, the fawn escaped from his native
forests, that Maupassant was in his early youth. But they add nothing
to his glory. They are the "rhymes of a prose writer" as Jules
Lemaitre said. To mould the expression of his thought according to the
strictest laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his
aim. Following the example of one of his comrades of Médan, being
readily carried away by precision of style and the rhythm of
sentences, by the imperious rule of the ballad, of the pantoum or the
chant royal, Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines.
However, he never liked this collection that he often regretted having
published. His encounters with prosody had left him with that
monotonous weariness that the horseman and the fencer feel after a
period in the riding school, or a bout with the foils.
Such, in very broad lines, is the story of Maupassant's literary
apprenticeship.
The day following the publication of "Boule de Suif," his reputation
began to grow rapidly. The quality of his story was unrivalled, but at
the same time it must be acknowledged that there were some who, for
the sake of discussion, desired to place a young reputation in
opposition to the triumphant brutality of Zola.
From this time on, Maupassant, at the solicitation of the entire
press, set to work and wrote story after story. His talent, free from
all influences, his individuality, are not disputed for a moment. With
a quick step, steady and alert, he advanced to fame, a fame of which
he himself was not aware, but which was so universal, that no
contemporary author during his life ever experienced the same. The
"meteor" sent out its light and its rays were prolonged without limit,
in article after article, volume on volume.
He was now rich and famous.... He is esteemed all the more as they
believe him to be rich and happy. But they do not know that this young
fellow with the sunburnt face, thick neck and salient muscles whom
they invariably compare to a young bull at liberty, and whose love
affairs they whisper, is ill, very ill. At the very moment that
success came to him, the malady that never afterwards left him came
also, and, seated motionless at his side, gazed at him with its
threatening countenance. He suffered from terrible headaches, followed
by nights of insomnia. He had nervous attacks, which he soothed with
narcotics and anesthetics, which he used freely. His sight, which had
troubled him at intervals, became affected, and a celebrated oculist
spoke of abnormality, asymetry of the pupils. The famous young man
trembled in secret and was haunted by all kinds of terrors.
The reader is charmed at the saneness of this revived art and yet,
here and there, he is surprised to discover, amid descriptions of
nature that are full of humanity, disquieting flights towards the
supernatural, distressing conjurations, veiled at first, of the most
commonplace, the most vertiginous shuddering fits of fear, as old as
the world and as eternal as the unknown. But, instead of being
alarmed, he thinks that the author must be gifted with infallible
intuition to follow out thus the taints in his characters, even
through their most dangerous mazes. The reader does not know that
these hallucinations which he describes so minutely were experienced
by Maupassant himself; he does not know that the fear is in himself,
the anguish of fear "which is not caused by the presence of danger, or
of inevitable death, but by certain abnormal conditions, by certain
mysterious influences in presence of vague dangers," the "fear of
fear, the dread of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible
terror."
How can one explain these physical sufferings and this morbid distress
that were known for some time to his intimates alone? Alas! the
explanation is only too simple. All his life, consciously or
unconsciously, Maupassant fought this malady, hidden as yet, which was
latent in him.
Those who first saw Maupassant when the Contes de la Bécasse and Bel
Ami were published were somewhat astonished at his appearance. He was
solidly built, rather short and had a resolute, determined air, rather
unpolished and without those distinguishing marks of intellect and
social position. But his hands were delicate and supple, and beautiful
shadows encircled his eyes.
He received visitors with the graciousness of the courteous head of a
department, who resigns himself to listen to demands, allowing them to
talk as he smiled faintly, and nonplussing them by his calmness.
How chilling was this first interview to young enthusiasts who had
listened to Zola unfolding in lyric formula audacious methods, or to
the soothing words of Daudet, who scattered with prodigality striking,
thrilling ideas, picturesque outlines and brilliant synopses.
Maupassant's remarks, in têtes-à-têtes, as in general conversation,
were usually current commonplaces and on ordinary time-worn topics.
Convinced of the superfluousness of words, perhaps he confounded them
all in the same category, placing the same estimate on a thought nobly
expressed as on a sally of coarse wit. One would have thought so, to
see the indifference with which he treated alike the chatter of the
most decided mediocrities and the conversation of the noblest minds of
the day. Not an avowal, not a confidence, that shed light on his life
work. Parsimonious of all he observed, he never related a typical
anecdote, or offered a suggestive remark. Praise, even, did not move
him, and if by chance he became animated it was to tell some practical
joke, some atelier hoaxes, as if he had given himself up to the
pleasure of hoaxing and mystifying people.
He appeared besides to look upon art as a pastime, literature as an
occupation useless at best, while he willingly relegated love to the
performance of a function, and suspected the motives of the most
meritorious actions.
Some say that this was the inborn basis of his personal psychology. I
do not believe it. That he may have had a low estimate of humanity,
that he may have mistrusted its disinterestedness, contested the
quality of its virtue, is possible, even certain. But that he was not
personally superior to his heroes I am unwilling to admit. And if I
see in his attitude, as in his language, an evidence of his inveterate
pessimism, I see in it also a method of protecting his secret thoughts
from the curiosity of the vulgar.
Perhaps he overshot the mark. By dint of hearing morality, art and
literature depreciated, and seeing him preoccupied with boating, and
listening to his own accounts of love affairs which he did not always
carry on in the highest class, many ended by seeing in him one of
those terrible Normans who, all through his novels and stories,
carouse and commit social crimes with such commanding assurance and
such calm unmorality.
He was undoubtedly a Norman, and, according to those who knew him
best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not always
an idle word....
To identify Maupassant with his characters is a gross error, but is
not without precedent. We always like to trace the author in the hero
of a romance, and to seek the actor beneath the disguise. No doubt, as
Taine has said, "the works of an intelligence have not the
intelligence alone for father and mother, but the whole personality of
the man helps to produce them...."
That is why Maupassant himself says to us, "No, I have not the soul of
a decadent, I cannot look within myself, and the effort I make to
understand unknown souls is incessant, involuntary and dominant. It is
not an effort; I experience a sort of overpowering sense of insight
into all that surrounds me. I am impregnated with it, I yield to it, I
submerge myself in these surrounding influences."
That is, properly speaking, the peculiarity of all great novelists.
Who experiences this insight, this influence more than Balzac, or
Flaubert, in Madame Bovary? And so with Maupassant, who, pen in hand,
is the character he describes, with his passions, his hatreds, his
vices and his virtues. He so incorporates himself in him that the
author disappears, and we ask ourselves in vain what his own opinion
is of what he has just told us. He has none possibly, or if he has he
does not tell it.
This agrees admirably with the theory of impassivity in literature, so
much in vogue when Maupassant became known. But despite that theory he
is, if one understands him, quite other than
"A being without pity who contemplated suffering."
He has the deepest sympathy for the weak, for the victims of the
deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the
successful adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects
of his veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though
somewhat disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying
clerk of the Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and
whose colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived him, _sans
espoir d'"heritage."_
Why did Maupassant at the start win universal favor? It is because he
had direct genius, the clear vision of a "primitive" (an artist of the
pre-Renaissance). His materials were just those of a graduate who,
having left college, has satisfied his curiosity. Grasping the simple
and ingenious, but strong and appropriate tools that he himself has
forged, he starts out in the forest of romance, and instead of being
overcome by the enchantment of its mystery, he walks through it
unfalteringly with a joyful step....
He was a minstrel. Offspring of a race, and not the inheritor of a
formula, he narrated to his contemporaries, bewildered by the lyrical
deformities of romanticism, stories of human beings, simple and
logical, like those which formerly delighted our parents.
The French reader who wished to be amused was at once at home, on the
same footing with him.... More spontaneous than the first troubadours,
he banished from his writings abstract and general types,
"romanticized" life itself, and not myths, those eternal legends that
stray through the highways of the world.
Study closely these minstrels in recent works; read M. Joseph Bédier's
beautiful work, Les Fabliaux, and you will see how, in Maupassant's
prose, ancestors, whom he doubtless never knew, are brought to life.
The Minstrel feels neither anger nor sympathy; he neither censures,
nor moralizes; for the self-satisfied Middle Ages cannot conceive the
possibility of a different world. Brief, quick, he despises aims and
methods, his only object is to entertain his auditors. Amusing and
witty, he cares only for laughter and ridicule....
But Maupassant's stories are singularly different in character. In the
nineteenth century the Gallic intellect had long since foundered amid
vileness and debauchery. In the provinces the ancient humor had
disappeared; one chattered still about nothing, but without point,
without wit; "trifling" was over, as they call it in Champagne. The
nauseating pabulum of the newspapers and low political intrigue had
withered the French intellect, that delicate, rare intellect, the last
traces of which fade away in the Alsatian stories of Erckman-Chatrian,
in the Provençal tales of Alphonse Daudet, in the novels of Emile
Pouvillon. Maupassant is not one of them. He knows nothing about
humor, for he never found it in Life....
His ambition was not to make one laugh; he writes for the pleasure of
recalling, without bias, what, to him, seems a halfway and dangerous
truth.... In his pessimism, Maupassant despises the race, society,
civilization and the world....
If Maupassant draws from anyone it is Schopenhauer and Herbert
Spencer, of whom he often speaks, although one does not know if he
studied them very deeply. In all his books, excepting, of course, in
the case of lines from the great tragic poets, one finds only one
credited reference, which in to Sir John Lubbock's work on ants, an
extract from which is introduced into Yvette.
No one was less bookish than himself. He was a designer, and one of
the greatest in literature. His heroes, little folk, artisans or
rustics, bureaucrats or shopkeepers, prostitutes or rakes, he places
them in faintly colored, but well-defined surroundings. And,
immediately, the simplified landscape gives the keynote of the story.
In his descriptions he resists the temptation of asserting his
personal view. He will not allow himself to see more of his landscape
than his characters themselves see. He is also careful to avoid all
refined terms and expressions, to introduce no element superior to the
characters of his heroes.
He never makes inanimate nature intervene directly in human
tribulations; she laughs at our joys and our sorrows.... Once, only,
in one of his works, the trees join in the universal mourning--the
great, sad beeches weep in autumn for the soul, the little soul, of la
petite Roque.
And yet Maupassant adores this nature, the one thing that moves
him.... But, in spite of this, he can control himself; the artist is
aware of the danger to his narration should he indulge in the
transports of a lover.
With an inborn perception, Maupassant at once seizes on the principal
detail, the essential peculiarity that distinguishes a character and
builds round it. He also, in the presentation of his character,
assumes an authority that no writer, not even Balzac, ever
equalled....
He traces what he sees with rapid strokes. His work is a vast
collection of powerful sketches, synthetic draftings. Like all great
artists, he was a simplifier; he knew how to "sacrifice" like the
Egyptians and Greeks....
Thanks to his rapid methods the master "cinematographed," if I may use
the word, inexhaustible stories. Among them, each person may find
himself represented, the artist, the clerk, the thinker, and the
non-commissioned officer.
Maupassant was always impatient to "realize" his observations. He
might forget, and above all, the flower of the sensation might lose
its perfume. In Une Vie he hastens to sum up his childhood's
recollections. As for Bel Ami, he wrote it from day to day as he
haunted the offices of Editors.
As for his style, it is limpid, accurate, easy and strongly marked,
with a sound framework and having the suppleness of a living organism.
Very industrious and very careful at first, Maupassant, in the fever
of production, became less careful. He early accustomed himself to
composing in his mind. "Composition amuses me," he said, "when I am
thinking it out, and not when I am writing it." ... Once he had
thought out his novels or romances, he transcribed them hurriedly,
almost mechanically. In his manuscripts, long pages follow each other
without an erasure.
His language appears natural, easy, and at first sight seems
spontaneous. But at the price of what effort was it not acquired! ...
In reality, in the writer, his sense of sight and smell were
perfected, to the detriment of the sense of hearing which is not very
musical. Repetitions, assonances, do not always shock Maupassant, who
is sometimes insensible to quantity as he is to harmony. He does not
"orchestrate," he has not inherited the "organ pipes" of Flaubert.
In his vocabulary there is no research; he never even requires a rare
word....
Those whom Flaubert's great organ tones delighted, those whom
Theophile Gautier's frescoes enchanted, were not satisfied, and
accused Maupassant, somewhat harshly, of not being a "writer" in the
highest sense of the term. The reproach is unmerited, for there is but
one style.
But, on the other hand, it is difficult to admit, with an eminent
academician that Maupassant must be a great writer, a classical
writer, in fact, simply because he "had no style," a condition of
perfection "in that form of literary art in which the personality of
the author should not appear, in the romance, the story, and the
drama."
A classic, Maupassant undoubtedly is, as the critic to whom I alluded
has said, "through the simple aptness of his terms and his contempt
for frivolous ornamentation."
He remains a great writer because, like Molière, La Bruyère, and La
Fontaine, he is always close to nature, disdaining all studied
rhetorical effect and all literary verbosity.
For applause and fame Maupassant cared nothing, and his proud contempt
for Orders and Academies is well known.
In a letter to Marie Bashkirtseff he writes as follows:
"Everything in life is almost alike to me, men, women, events. This is
my true confession of faith, and I may add what you may not believe,
which is that I do not care any more for myself than I do for the
rest. All is divided into ennui, comedy and misery. I am indifferent
to everything. I pass two-thirds of my time in being terribly bored. I
pass the third portion in writing sentences which I sell as dear as I
can, regretting that I have to ply this abominable trade."
And in a later letter:
"I have no taste that I cannot get rid of at my pleasure, not a desire
that I do not scoff at, not a hope that does not make me smile or
laugh. I ask myself why I stir, why I go hither or thither, why I give
myself the odious trouble of earning money, since it does not amuse me
to spend it."
And again:
"As for me, I am incapable of really loving my art. I am too critical,
I analyze it too much. I feel strongly how relative is the value of
ideas, words, and even of the loftiest intelligences. I cannot help
despising thought, it is so weak; and form, it is so imperfect. I
really have, in an acute, incurable form, the sense of human
impotence, and of effort which results in wretched approximations."
For nature, Maupassant had an ardent passion.... His whole being
quivered when she bathed his forehead with her light ocean breeze.
She, alone, knew how to rock and soothe him with her waves.
Never satisfied, he wished to see her under all aspects, and travelled
incessantly, first in his native province, amid the meadows and waters
of Normandy, then on the banks of the Seine along which he coasted,
bending to the oar. Then Brittany with its beaches, where high waves
rolled in beneath low and dreary skies, then Auvergne, with its
scattered huts amid the sour grass, beneath rocks of basalt; and,
finally, Corsica, Italy, Sicily, not with artistic enthusiasm, but
simply to enjoy the delight of grand, pure outlines. Africa, the
country of Salammbô, the desert, finally call him, and he breathes
those distant odors borne on the slow winds; the sunlight inundates
his body, "laves the dark corners of his soul." And he retains a
troubled memory of the evenings in those warm climes, where the
fragrance of plants and trees seems to take the place of air.
Maupassant's philosophy is as little complicated as his vision of
humanity. His pessimism exceeds in its simplicity and depth that of
all other realistic writers.
Still there are contradictions and not unimportant ones in him. The
most striking is certainly his fear of Death. He sees it everywhere,
it haunts him. He sees it on the horizon of landscapes, and it crosses
his path on lonely roads. When it is not hovering over his head, it is
circling round him as around Gustave Moreau's pale youth.... Can he,
the determined materialist, really fear the stupor of eternal sleep,
or the dispersion of the transient individuality? ...
Another contradiction. He who says that contact with the crowd
"tortures his nerves," and who professes such contempt for mankind,
yet considers solitude as one of the bitterest torments of existence.
And he bewails the fact that he cannot live just for himself, "keep
within himself that secret place of the ego, where none can enter."
"Alas!" said his master, "we are all in a desert." Nobody understands
anyone else and "whatever we attempt, whatever be the impulse of our
heart and the appeal of our lips, we shall always be alone!"
In this gehenna of death, in these nostalgias of the past, in these
trances of eternal isolation, may we not find some relinquishing of
his philosophy? Certainly not, for these contradictions accentuate all
the more the pain of existence and become a new source of suffering.
In any case, Maupassant's pessimism becomes logical in terminating in
pity, like that of Schopenhauer. I know that I am running foul of
certain admirers of the author who do not see any pity in his work,
and it is understood that he is pitiless. But examine his stories more
closely and you will find it revealed in every page, provided you go
to the very bottom of the subject. That is where it exists naturally,
almost against the desire of the writer, who does not arouse pity, nor
teach it.
And, again, if it remains concealed from so many readers, it is
because it has nothing to do with the humanitarian pity retailed by
rhetoricians. It is philosophical and haughty, detached from any
"anthropocentric" characteristics. It is universal suffering that it
covers. And to tell the truth, it is man, the hypocritical and cunning
biped who has the least share in it. Maupassant is helpful to all
those of his fellows who are tortured by physical suffering, social
cruelty and the criminal dangers of life, but he pities them without
caring for them, and his kindness makes distinctions.
On the other hand, the pessimist has all the tenderness of a Buddhist
for animals, whom the gospels despise. When he pities the animals, who
are worth more than ourselves, their executioners, when he pities the
elementary existences, the plants and trees, those exquisite
creations, he unbends and pours out his heart. The humbler the victim,
the more generously does he espouse its suffering. His compassion is
unbounded for all that lives in misery, that is buffeted about without
understanding why, that "suffers and dies without a word." And if he
mourned Miss Harriet, in this unaccustomed outburst of enthusiasm, it
is because, like himself, the poor outcast cherished a similar love
for "all things, all living beings."
Such appears to me to be Maupassant, the novelist, a story-teller, a
writer, and a philosopher by turns. I will add one more trait; he was
devoid of all spirit of criticism. When he essays to demolish a
theory, one is amazed to find in this great, clear writer such lack of
precision of thought, and such weak argument. He wrote the least
eloquent and the most diffuse study of Flaubert, of "that old, dead
master who had won his heart in a manner he could not explain." And,
later, he shows the same weakness in setting forth, as in proving his
theory, in his essay on the "Evolution of the Novel," in the
introduction to Pierre et Jean.
On the other hand, he possesses, above many others, a power of
creating, hidden and inborn, which he exercises almost unconsciously.
Living, spontaneous and yet impassive he is the glorious agent of a
mysterious function, through which he dominated literature and will
continue to dominate it until the day when he desires to become
literary.
He is as big as a tree. The author of "Contemporains" has written that
Maupassant produced novels as an apple-tree yields apples. Never was a
criticism more irrefutable.
On various occasions he was pleased with himself at the fertility that
had developed in him amid those rich soils where a frenzy mounts to
your brain through the senses of smell and sight. He even feels the
influence of the seasons, and writes from Provence: "The sap is rising
in me, it is true. The spring that I find just awakening here stirs
all my plant nature, and causes me to produce those literary fruits
that ripen in me, I know not how."
The "meteor" is at its apogee. All admire and glorify him. It is the
period when Alexandre Dumas, fils, wrote to him thrice: "You are the
only author whose books I await with impatience."
The day came, however, when this dominant impassivity became stirred,
when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering. And
the work of the romancer, begun by the novelist, became warm with a
tenderness that is found for the first time in Mont Oriol....
But this sentimental outburst that astonished his admirers quickly
dies down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et
Jean, that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with
"human leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or
romantic combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid
integrity the master of yore.
But his heart has been touched, nevertheless. In the books that
follow, his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly
undermined. With an ever-growing emotion he relates under slight
disguises all his physical distress, all the terrors of his mind and
heart.
What is the secret of this evolution? The perusal of his works gives
us a sufficient insight into it.
The Minstrel has been received in country houses; has been admitted to
"the ladies' apartments." He has given up composing those hurried
tales which made his fame, in order to construct beautiful romances of
love and death.... The story teller has forsaken rustics and peasants,
the comrades of the "Repues franches," for the nobility and the
wealthy. He who formerly frequented Mme. Tellier's establishment now
praises Michèle de Burne.
Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant
cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table:
Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing
love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of
brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte de la Dame."
Everywhere he was sought after, fêted, petted.... But Maupassant never
let himself be carried away by the tinsel of his prestige, nor the
puerility of his enchantment. He despised at heart the puppets that
moved about him as he had formerly despised his short stories and his
petit bourgeois. "Ah," he cries, "I see them, their heads, their
types, their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of
books! The disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me
regret still more that I could not become what I should most have
preferred--an Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world
makes failures of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that
it monopolizes. It aborts all sincere sentiment by its manner of
scattering our taste, our curiosity, our desire, the little spark of
genius that burns in us."
Maupassant had to bend to the conditions of his new life. Being well
bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and
conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he had
entered....
If Maupassant never became the slave of worldly ideas, the creature of
instinct that was part of his being acquired the refined tastes of the
salons, and the manners of the highest civilization.
The novelist lived for some time in these enchanted and artificial
surroundings, when, suddenly, his malady became aggravated. He was
tortured by neuralgia, and by new mysterious darting pains. His
suffering was so great that he longed to scream. At the same time, his
unhappy heart became softened and he became singularly emotional. His
early faculties were intensified and refined, and in the overtension
of his nerves through suffering his perceptions broadened, and he
gained new ideas of things. This nobler personality Maupassant owes to
those sufferings dear to great souls of whom Daudet speaks. This is
what he says:
"If I could ever tell all, I should utter all the unexplored,
repressed and sad thoughts that I feel in the depths of my being. I
feel them swelling and poisoning me as bile does some people. But if I
could one day give them utterance they would perhaps evaporate, and I
might no longer have anything but a light, joyful heart. Who can say?
Thinking becomes an abominable torture when the brain is an open
wound. I have so many wounds in my head that my ideas cannot stir
without making me long to cry out. Why is it? Why is it? Dumas would
say that my stomach is out of order. I believe, rather, that I have a
poor, proud, shameful heart, that old human heart that people laugh
at, but which is touched, and causes me suffering, and in my head as
well; I have the mind of the Latin race, which is very worn out. And,
again, there are days when I do not think thus, but when I suffer just
the same; for I belong to the family of the thin-skinned. But then I
do not tell it, I do not show it; I conceal it very well, I think.
Without any doubt, I am thought to be one of the most indifferent men
in the world. I am sceptical, which is not the same thing, sceptical
because I am clear-sighted. And my eyes say to my heart, Hide
yourself, old fellow, you are grotesque, and it hides itself."
This describes, in spite of reservation, the struggle between two
conflicting minds, that of yesterday, and that of to-day. But this
sensitiveness that Maupassant seeks to hide, is plain to all
clear-seeing people.
He soon begins to be filled with regrets and forebodings. He has a
desire to look into the unknown, and to search for the inexplicable.
He feels in himself that something is undergoing destruction; he is at
times haunted by the idea of a double. He divines that his malady is
on guard, ready to pounce on him. He seeks to escape it, but on the
mountains, as beside the sea, nature, formerly his refuge, now
terrifies him.
Then his heart expands. All the sentiments that he once reviled, he
now desires to experience. He now exalts in his books the passion of
love, the passion of sacrifice, the passion of suffering; he extols
self-sacrifice, devotion, the irresistible joy of ever giving oneself
up more and more. The hour is late, the night is at hand; weary of
suffering any longer, he hurriedly begs for tenderness and
remembrance.
Occasionally, the Maupassant of former days protests against the
bondage of his new personality; he complains that he no longer feels
absolutely as formerly that he has no contact with anything in the
world, that sweet, strong sensation that gives one strength. "How
sensible I was," he says, "to wall myself round with indifference! If
one did not feel, but only understand, without giving fragments of
oneself to other beings! ... It is strange to suffer from the
emptiness, the nothingness, of this life, when one is resigned, as I
am, to nothingness. But, there, I cannot live without recollections,
and recollections sadden me. I can have no hope, I know, but I feel
obscurely and unceasingly the harm of this statement, and the regret
that it should be so. And the attachments that I have in life act on
my sensibility, which is too human, and not literary enough."
Maupassant's pity now takes a pathetic turn. He no longer despises,
but holds out his hand to those unfortunates who, like himself, are
tormented on the pathway without hope. The tears that he sees flow
make him sad, and his heart bleeds at all the wounds he discovers. He
does not inquire into the quality or origin of the misfortune. He
sympathizes with all suffering; physical suffering, moral suffering,
the suffering caused by treachery, the bitter twilight of wasted
lives....
His mind has also become active. He desires to dabble in science. One
day he studies the Arab mystics, Oriental legends, and the next, he
studies the marine fauna, etc. His perceptions have never been so
clear. His brain is in continual activity. "It is strange," he
acknowledges, "what a different man I am becoming mentally from what I
was formerly. I can see it as I watch myself thinking, discovering,
and developing stories, weighing and analyzing the imaginary beings
that float through my imagination. I take the same enjoyment in
certain dreams, certain exaltations of mind, as I formerly took in
rowing like mad in the sunlight."
For the first time, his assurance as a writer wavers. As his last
volumes show, he is endeavoring to transform, to renew himself. He
acquires a desire to learn the secrets of obscure and precious hearts,
to visit unknown races. He has lost his magnificent serenity....
* * * * *
As his malady began to take a more definite form, he turned his steps
towards the south, only visiting Paris to see his physicians and
publishers. In the old port of Antibes beyond the causeway of Cannes,
his yacht, Bel Ami, which he cherished as a brother, lay at anchor and
awaited him. He took it to the white cities of the Genoese Gulf,
towards the palm trees of Hyères, or the red bay trees of Anthéor.
It was during one of these idle cruises on the open sea, outside of
Agay and Saint-Raphael that he wrote "Sur l'Eau."
It was on the sacred sea of the old poets and philosophers, on the sea
whose voice has rocked the thought of the world, that he cast into the
shadow that long lament, so heartrending and sublime, that posterity
will long shudder at the remembrance of it. The bitter strophes of
this lament seem to be cadenced by the Mediterranean itself and to be
in rhythm, like its melopoeia.
"Sur l'Eau" is the last Will and Testament, the general confession of
Maupassant. To those who come after him he leaves the legacy of his
highest thought; then he says farewell to all that he loved, to
dreams, to starlit nights, and to the breath of roses. "Sur l'Eau" is
the book of modern disenchantment, the faithful mirror of the latest
pessimism. The journal written on board ship, disconnected and hasty,
but so noble in its disorder, has taken a place forever beside Werther
and René, Manfred and Oberman.
He had for a long time, to his sorrow, seen his health failing under
the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the
diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect.
Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic
disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and
shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the
inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have
recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as I live, his face
wasted by suffering, his large eyes with a distressed expression,
which emitted dying gleams of protest against a cruel fate....
Maupassant retired to Cannes not far from his mother. He read medical
books and, in spite of what they taught, persisted in attributing his
sufferings to "rheumatism localized in the brain," contracted amid the
fogs on the Seine....
Vainly he endeavored to work, he became gloomy and the idea of suicide
impressed him more and more....
The months passed, however, and in June he was able to go to Divonne
to take a cure. After a very characteristic attack of optimism, he
suddenly appeared at Champel and astonished everyone by his frightful
eccentricities. One evening, however, he felt better, and read to the
poet Dorchain the beginning of his novel "The Angelus," which he
declared would be his masterpiece. When he had finished, he wept. "And
we wept also," writes Dorchain, "at seeing all that now remained of
genius, of tenderness and pity in this soul that would never again be
capable of expressing itself so as to impress other minds.... In his
accent, in his language, in his tears, Maupassant had, I know not
what, of a religious character, which exceeded his horror of life, and
his sombre terror of annihilation."
At the end of September he again visited Cannes, but the fatal day
predicted by the physician was at hand.
After several tragic weeks in which, from instinct, he made a
desperate fight, on the 1st of January, 1892, he felt he was
hopelessly vanquished, and in a moment of supreme clearness of
intellect, like Gerard de Nerval, he attempted suicide. Less fortunate
than the author of Sylvia, he was unsuccessful. But his mind,
henceforth "indifferent to all unhappiness," had entered into eternal
darkness.
He was taken back to Paris and placed in Dr. Meuriot's sanatorium,
where, after eighteen months of mechanical existence, the "meteor"
quietly passed away.
* * * * *
UNE VIE
OR, THE HISTORY OF A HEART
CHAPTER I
THE HOME BY THE SEA
The weather was most distressing. It had rained all night. The roaring
of the overflowing gutters filled the deserted streets, in which the
houses, like sponges, absorbed the humidity, which penetrating to the
interior, made the walls sweat from cellar to garret. Jeanne had left
the convent the day before, free for all time, ready to seize all the
joys of life, of which she had dreamed so long. She was afraid her
father would not set out for the new home in bad weather, and for the
hundredth time since daybreak she examined the horizon. Then she
noticed that she had omitted to put her calendar in her travelling
bag. She took from the wall the little card which bore in golden
figures the date of the current year, 1819. Then she marked with a
pencil the first four columns, drawing a line through the name of each
saint up to the 2d of May, the day that she left the convent. A voice
outside the door called "Jeannette." Jeanne replied, "Come in, papa."
And her father entered. Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was
a gentleman of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic
disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover
for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of
aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a
philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated
tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength
and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms
enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that
gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia
that became almost a vice. A man of theory, he thought out a plan of
education for his daughter, to the end that she might become happy,
good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home until the age of
twelve, when, despite the tears of her mother, she was placed in the
Convent of the Sacred Heart. He had kept her severely secluded,
cloistered, in ignorance of the secrets of life. He wished the Sisters
to restore her to him pure at seventeen years of age, so that he might
imbue her mind with a sort of rational poetry, and by means of the
fields, in the midst of the fruitful earth, unfold her soul, enlighten
her ignorance through the aspect of love in nature, through the simple
tenderness of the animals, through the placid laws of existence. She
was leaving the convent radiant, full of the joy of life, ready for
all the happiness, all the charming incidents which her mind had
pictured in her idle hours and in the long, quiet nights. She was like
a portrait by Veronese with her fair, glossy hair, which seemed to
cast a radiance on her skin, a skin with the faintest tinge of pink,
softened by a light velvety down which could be perceived when the sun
kissed her cheek. Her eyes were an opaque blue, like those of Dutch
porcelain figures. She had a tiny mole on her left nostril and another
on the right of her chin. She was tall, well developed, with willowy
figure. Her clear voice sounded at times a little too sharp, but her
frank, sincere laugh spread joy around her. Often, with a familiar
gesture, she would raise her hands to her temples as if to arrange her
hair.
She ran to her father and embraced him warmly. "Well, are we going to
start?" she said. He smiled, shook his head and said, pointing toward
the window, "How can we travel in such weather?" But she implored in a
cajoling and tender manner, "Oh, papa, do let us start. It will clear
up in the afternoon." "But your mother will never consent to it."
"Yes, I promise you that she will, I will arrange that." "If you
succeed in persuading your mother, I am perfectly willing." In a few
moments she returned from her mother's room, shouting in a voice that
could be heard all through the house, "Papa, papa, mamma is willing.
Have the horses harnessed." The rain was not abating; one might almost
have said that it was raining harder when the carriage drove up to the
door. Jeanne was ready to step in when the baroness came downstairs,
supported on one side by her husband and on the other by a tall
housemaid, strong and strapping as a boy. She was a Norman woman of
the country of Caux, who looked at least twenty, although she was but
eighteen at the most. She was treated by the family as a second
daughter, for she was Jeanne's foster sister. Her name was Rosalie,
and her chief duty lay in guiding the steps of her mistress, who had
grown enormous in the last few years and also had an affection of the
heart, which kept her complaining continually. The baroness, gasping
from over-exertion, finally reached the doorstep of the old residence,
looked at the court where the water was streaming and remarked: "It
really is not wise." Her husband, always pleasant, replied: "It was
you who desired it, Madame Adelaide." He always preceded her pompous
name of Adelaide with the title madame with an air of half respectful
mockery. Madame mounted with difficulty into the carriage, causing all
the springs to bend. The baron sat beside her, while Jeanne and
Rosalie were seated opposite, with their backs to the horses.
Ludivine, the cook, brought a heap of wraps to put over their knees
and two baskets, which were placed under the seats; then she climbed
on the box beside Father Simon, wrapping herself in a great rug which
covered her completely. The porter and his wife came to bid them
good-by as they closed the carriage door, taking the last orders about
the trunks, which were to follow in a wagon. So they started. Father
Simon, the coachman, with head bowed and back bent in the pouring
rain, was completely covered by his box coat with its triple cape. The
howling storm beat upon the carriage windows and inundated the
highway.
They drove rapidly to the wharf and continued alongside the line of
tall-masted vessels until they reached the boulevard of Mont Riboudet.
Then they crossed the meadows, where from time to time a drowned
willow, its branches drooping limply, could be faintly distinguished
through the mist of rain. No one spoke. Their minds themselves seemed
to be saturated with moisture like the earth.
The baroness leaned her head against the cushions and closed her eyes.
The baron looked out with mournful eyes at the monotonous and drenched
landscape. Rosalie, with a parcel on her knee, was dreaming in the
dull reverie of a peasant. But Jeanne, under this downpour, felt
herself revive like a plant that has been shut up and has just been
restored to the air, and so great was her joy that, like foliage, it
sheltered her heart from sadness. Although she did not speak, she
longed to burst out singing, to reach out her hands to catch the rain
that she might drink it. She enjoyed to the full being carried along
rapidly by the horses, enjoyed gazing at the desolate landscape and
feeling herself under shelter amid this general inundation. Beneath
the pelting rain the gleaming backs of the two horses emitted a warm
steam.
Little by little the baroness fell asleep, and presently began to
snore sonorously. Her husband leaned over and placed in her hands a
little leather pocketbook.
This awakened her, and she looked at the pocket-book with the stupid,
sleepy look of one suddenly aroused. It fell off her lap and sprang
open and gold and bank bills were scattered on the floor of the
carriage. This roused her completely, and Jeanne gave vent to her
mirth in a merry peal of girlish laughter.
The baron picked up the money and placed it on her knees. "This, my
dear," he said, "is all that is left of my farm at Eletot. I have sold
it--so as to be able to repair the 'Poplars,' where we shall often
live in the future."
She counted six thousand four hundred francs and quietly put them in
her pocket. This was the ninth of thirty-one farms that they had
inherited which they had sold in this way. Nevertheless they still
possessed about twenty thousand livres income annually in land
rentals, which, with proper care, would have yielded about thirty
thousand francs a year.
Living simply as they did, this income would have sufficed had there
not been a bottomless hole always open in their house--kind-hearted
generosity. It dried up the money in their hands as the sun dries the
water in marshes. It flowed, fled, disappeared. How? No one knew.
Frequently one would say to the other, "I don't know how it happens,
but I have spent one hundred francs to-day, and I have bought nothing
of any consequence." This faculty of giving was, however, one of the
greatest pleasures of their life, and they all agreed on this point in
a superb and touching manner.
Jeanne asked her father, "Is it beautiful now, my castle?" The baron
replied, "You shall see, my little girl."
The storm began to abate. The vault of clouds seemed to rise and
heighten and suddenly, through a rift, a long ray of sunshine fell
upon the fields, and presently the clouds separated, showing the blue
firmament, and then, like the tearing of a veil, the opening grew
larger and the beautiful azure sky, clear and fathomless, spread over
the world. A fresh and gentle breeze passed over the earth like a
happy sigh, and as they passed beside gardens or woods they heard
occasionally the bright chirp of a bird as he dried his wings.
Evening was approaching. Everyone in the carriage was asleep except
Jeanne. They stopped to rest and feed the horses. The sun had set. In
the distance bells were heard. They passed a little village as the
inhabitants were lighting their lamps, and the sky became also
illuminated by myriads of stars. Suddenly they saw behind a hill,
through the branches of the fir trees, the moon rising, red and full
as if it were torpid with sleep.
The air was so soft that the windows were not closed. Jeanne,
exhausted with dreams and happy visions, was now asleep. Finally they
stopped. Some men and women were standing before the carriage door
with lanterns in their hands. They had arrived. Jeanne, suddenly
awakened, was the first to jump out. Her father and Rosalie had
practically to carry the baroness, who was groaning and continually
repeating in a weak little voice, "Oh, my God, my poor children!" She
refused all offers of refreshment, but went to bed and immediately
fell asleep.
Jeanne and her father, the baron, took supper together. They were in
perfect sympathy with each other. Later, seized with a childish joy,
they started on a tour of inspection through the restored manor. It
was one of those high and vast Norman residences that comprise both
farmhouse and castle, built of white stone which had turned gray,
large enough to contain a whole race of people.
An immense hall divided the house from front to rear and a staircase
went up at either side of the entrance, meeting in a bridge on the
first floor. The huge drawing-room was on the ground floor to the
right and was hung with tapestries representing birds and foliage. All
the furniture was covered with fine needlework tapestry illustrating
La Fontaine's fables, and Jeanne was delighted at finding a chair she
had loved as a child, which pictured the story of "The Fox and the
Stork."
Beside the drawing-room were the library, full of old books, and two
unused rooms; at the left was the dining-room, the laundry, the
kitchen, etc.
A corridor divided the whole first floor, the doors of ten rooms
opening into it. At the end, on the right, was Jeanne's room. She and
her father went in. He had had it all newly done over, using the
furniture and draperies that had been in the storeroom.
There were some very old Flemish tapestries, with their peculiar
looking figures. At sight of her bed, the young girl uttered a scream
of joy. Four large birds carved in oak, black from age and highly
polished, bore up the bed and seemed to be its protectors. On the
sides were carved two wide garlands of flowers and fruit, and four
finely fluted columns, terminating in Corinthian capitals, supported a
cornice of cupids with roses intertwined. The tester and the coverlet
were of antique blue silk, embroidered in gold fleur de lys. When
Jeanne had sufficiently admired it, she lifted up the candle to
examine the tapestries and the allegories they represented. They were
mostly conventional subjects, but the last hanging represented a
drama. Near a rabbit, which was still nibbling, a young man lay
stretched out, apparently dead. A young girl, gazing at him, was
plunging a sword into her bosom, and the fruit of the tree had turned
black. Jeanne gave up trying to divine the meaning underlying this
picture, when she saw in the corner a tiny little animal which the
rabbit, had he lived, could have swallowed like a blade of grass; and
yet it was a lion. Then she recognized the story of "Pyramus and
Thisbe," and though she smiled at the simplicity of the design, she
felt happy to have in her room this love adventure which would
continually speak to her of her cherished hopes, and every night this
legendary love would hover about her dreams.
It struck eleven and the baron kissed Jeanne goodnight and retired to
his room. Before retiring, Jeanne cast a last glance round her room
and then regretfully extinguished the candle. Through her window she
could see the bright moonlight bathing the trees and the wonderful
landscape. Presently she arose, opened a window and looked out. The
night was so clear that one could see as plainly as by daylight. She
looked across the park with its two long avenues of very tall poplars
that gave its name to the château and separated it from the two farms
that belonged to it, one occupied by the Couillard family, the other
by the Martins. Beyond the enclosure stretched a long, uncultivated
plain, thickly overgrown with rushes, where the breeze whistled day
and night. The land ended abruptly in a steep white cliff three
hundred feet high, with its base in the ocean waves.
Jeanne looked out over the long, undulating surface that seemed to
slumber beneath the heavens. All the fragrance of the earth was in the
night air. The odor of jasmine rose from the lower windows, and light
whiffs of briny air and of seaweed were wafted from the ocean.
Merely to breathe was enough for Jeanne, and the restful calm of the
country was like a soothing bath. She felt as though her heart was
expanding and she began dreaming of love. What was it? She did not
know. She only knew that she would adore _him_ with all her soul
and that he would cherish her with all his strength. They would walk
hand in hand on nights like this, hearing the beating of their hearts,
mingling their love with the sweet simplicity of the summer nights in
such close communion of thought that by the sole power of their
tenderness they would easily penetrate each other's most secret
thoughts. This would continue forever in the calm of an enduring
affection. It seemed to her that she felt _him_ there beside her.
And an unusual sensation came over her. She remained long musing thus,
when suddenly she thought she heard a footstep behind the house. "If
it were _he_." But it passed on and she felt as if she had been
deceived. The air became cooler. The day broke. Slowly bursting aside
the gleaming clouds, touching with fire the trees, the plains, the
ocean, all the horizon, the great flaming orb of the sun appeared.
Jeanne felt herself becoming mad with happiness. A delirious joy,
an infinite tenderness at the splendor of nature overcame her
fluttering heart. It was _her_ sun, _her_ dawn! The beginning
of _her_ life! Thoroughly fatigued at last, she flung herself down
and slept till her father called her at eight o'clock. He walked into
the room and proposed to show her the improvements of the castle, of
_her_ castle. The road, called the parish road, connecting the
farms, joined the high road between Havre and Fécamp, a mile and a
half further on.
Jeanne and the baron inspected everything and returned home for
breakfast. When the meal was over, as the baroness had decided that
she would rest, the baron proposed to Jeanne that they should go down
to Yport. They started, and passing through the hamlet of Etouvent,
where the poplars were, and going through the wooded slope by a
winding valley leading down to the sea, they presently perceived the
village of Yport. Women sat in their doorways mending linen; brown
fish-nets were hanging against the doors of the huts, where an entire
family lived in one room. It was a typical little French fishing
village, with all its concomitant odors. To Jeanne it was all like a
scene in a play. On turning a corner they saw before them the
limitless blue ocean. They bought a brill from a fisherman and another
sailor offered to take them out sailing, repeating his name,
"Lastique, Joséphin Lastique," several times, that they might not
forget it, and the baron promised to remember. They walked home,
chattering like two children, carrying the big fish between them,
Jeanne having pushed her father's walking cane through its gills.
* * * * *