THE ROMANCISTS
GEORGE SAND
THE DEVIL'S POOL
[Illustration: Chapter V
_He saw my little Marie watching her three sheep on the common land_. ]
BIBLIOTHÈQUE DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
DU ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN
_THE DEVIL'S POOL_
GEORGE SAND
PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, Philadelphia
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON
THIS EDITION OF
THE DEVIL'S POOL
HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED
BY
GEORGE B. IVES
THE ETCHINGS AND DRAWINGS ARE BY
EDMOND RUDAUX
NOTICE
When I began, with _The Devil's Pool_, a series of rustic pictures which
I proposed to collect under the title of _The Hemp-Beater's Tales_, I
had no theory, no purpose to effect a revolution in literature. No one
can bring about a revolution by himself alone, and there are
revolutions, especially in matters of art, which mankind accomplishes
without any very clear idea how it is done, because everybody takes a
hand in them. But this is not applicable to the romance of rustic
manners: it has existed in all ages and under all forms, sometimes
pompous, sometimes affected, sometimes artless. I have said, and I say
again here: the dream of a country-life has always been the ideal of
cities, aye, and of courts. I have done nothing new in following the
incline that leads civilized man back to the charms of primitive life. I
have not intended to invent a new language or to create a new style. I
have been assured of the contrary in a large number of _feuilletons_,
but I know better than any one what to think about my own plans, and I
am always astonished that the critics dig so deep for them, when the
simplest ideas, the most commonplace incidents, are the only
inspirations to which the products of art owe their being. As for _The
Devil's Pool_ in particular, the incident that I have related in the
preface, an engraving of Holbein's that had made an impression upon me,
and a scene from real life that came under my eyes at the same moment,
in sowing time,--those were what impelled me to write this modest tale,
the scene of which is laid amid humble localities that I used to visit
every day. If any one asks me my purpose in writing it, I shall reply
that I desired to do a very simple and very touching thing, and that I
have not succeeded as I hoped. I have seen, I have felt the beautiful in
the simple, but to see and to depict are two different things! The most
that the artist can hope to do is to induce those who have eyes to look
with him. Therefore, my friends, look at simple things, look at the sky
and the fields and the trees and the peasants, especially at what is
good and true in them: you will see them to a slight extent in my book,
you will see them much better in nature.
GEORGE SAND.
NOHANT, _April 12, 1851_.
THE DEVIL'S POOL
I
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
A la sueur de ton visaige
Tu gagnerois ta pauvre vie,
Après long travail et usaige,
Voicy la _mort_ qui te convie.[1]
The quatrain in old French written below one of Holbein's pictures is
profoundly sad in its simplicity. The engraving represents a ploughman
driving his plough through a field. A vast expanse of country stretches
away in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is
setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The
peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four
horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is
buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in
that scene of _sweat and toil_. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton
armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses
and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This
spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of
philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque,
entitled the _Dance of Death_, is Death itself.
In that collection, or rather in that great book, in which Death,
playing his part on every page, is the connecting link and the dominant
thought, Holbein has marshalled sovereigns, pontiffs, lovers, gamblers,
drunkards, nuns, courtesans, brigands, paupers, soldiers, monks, Jews,
travellers, the whole world of his day and of ours; and everywhere the
spectre of Death mocks and threatens and triumphs. From a single picture
only, is it absent. It is that one in which Lazarus, the poor man, lying
on a dunghill at the rich man's door, declares that he does not fear
Death, doubtless because he has nothing to lose and his life is
premature death.
Is that stoicist idea of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance
very comforting, and do devout souls find consolation therein? The
ambitious man, the rascal, the tyrant, the rake, all those haughty
sinners who abuse life, and whom Death holds by the hair, are destined
to be punished, without doubt; but are the blind man, the beggar, the
madman, the poor peasant, recompensed for their long life of misery by
the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! An
implacable melancholy, a ghastly fatality, overshadows the artist's
work. It resembles a bitter imprecation upon the fate of mankind.
There truly do we find the grievous satire, the truthful picture of the
society Holbein had under his eyes. Crime and misfortune, those are what
impressed him; but what shall we depict, we artists of another age?
Shall we seek in the thought of death the reward of mankind in the
present day? Shall we invoke it as the punishment of injustice and the
guerdon of suffering?
No, we have no longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer
believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased
by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it
to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no
longer rejoice at the death of the rich. All must be happy, so that the
happiness of some may not be a crime and accursed of God. The husbandman
as he sows his grain must know that he is working at the work of life,
and not rejoice because Death is walking beside him. In a word, death
must no longer be the punishment of prosperity or the consolation of
adversity. God did not destine death as a punishment or a compensation
for life; for he blessed life, and the grave should not be a refuge to
which it is permitted to send those who cannot be made happy.
Certain artists of our time, casting a serious glance upon their
surroundings, strive to depict grief, the abjectness of poverty,
Lazarus's dunghill. That may be within the domain of art and philosophy;
but, by representing poverty as so ugly, so base, and at times so
vicious and criminal a thing, do they attain their end, and is the
effect as salutary as they could wish? We do not dare to say. We may be
told that by pointing out the abyss that yawns beneath the fragile crust
of opulence, they terrify the wicked rich man, as, in the time of the
_Danse Macabre_, they showed him its yawning ditch, and Death ready to
wind its unclean arms about him. To-day, they show him the thief picking
his lock, the assassin watching until he sleeps. We confess that we do
not clearly understand how they will reconcile him with the humanity he
despises, how they will move his pity for the sufferings of the poor man
whom he fears, by showing him that same poor man in the guise of the
escaped felon and the burglar. Ghastly Death, gnashing his teeth and
playing the violin in the productions of Holbein and his predecessors,
found it impossible in that guise to convert the perverse and to comfort
their victims. Is it not a fact that the literature of our day is in
this respect following to some extent in the footsteps of the artists of
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance?
Holbein's drunkards fill their glasses in a sort of frenzied desire to
put aside the thought of Death, who, unseen by them, acts as their
cup-bearer. The wicked rich men of to-day demand fortifications and
cannon to put aside the thought of a rising of the Jacquerie, whom art
shows them at work in the shadow, separately awaiting the moment to
swoop down upon society. The Church of the Middle Ages answered the
terrors of the powerful ones of the earth by selling indulgences. The
government of to-day allays the anxiety of the rich by making them pay
for many gendarmes and jailers, bayonets and prisons.
Albert Dürer, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Callot, Goya, produced powerful
satires upon the evils of their age and their country. They are immortal
works, historical pages of unquestionable value; we do not undertake,
therefore, to deny artists the right to probe the wounds of society and
lay them bare before our eyes; but is there nothing better to be done
to-day than to depict the terrifying and the threatening? In this
literature of mysteries of iniquity, which talent and imagination have
made fashionable, we prefer the mild, attractive figures to the villains
for dramatic effect. The former may undertake and effect conversions,
the others cause fear, and fear does not cure egoism, but increases it.
We believe that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love,
that the novel of to-day ought to replace the parable and the fable of
simpler times, and that the artist has a broader and more poetic task
than that of suggesting a few prudential and conciliatory measures to
lessen the alarm his pictures arouse. His object should be to make the
objects of his solicitude lovable, and I would not reproach him for
flattering them a little, in case of need. Art is not a study of
positive reality, it is a quest for ideal truth, and the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ was a more useful and healthy book for the mind than the
_Paysan Perverti_ or the _Liaisons Dangereuses._
Reader, pardon these reflections, and deign to accept them by way of
preface. There will be no other to the little tale I propose to tell
you, and it will be so short and so simple that I felt that I must
apologize beforehand by telling you what I think of terrifying tales.
I allowed myself to be drawn into this digression apropos of a
ploughman. It is the story of a ploughman that I set out to tell you,
and will tell you forthwith.
II
THE PLOUGHING
I had been gazing for a long time and with profound sadness at Holbein's
ploughman, and I was walking in the fields, musing upon country-life and
the destiny of the husbandman. Doubtless it is a depressing thing to
consume one's strength and one's life driving the plough through the
bosom of the jealous earth, which yields the treasures of its fecundity
only under duress, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread at the
end of the day is the only reward and the only profit of such laborious
toil. The wealth that covers the ground, the crops, the fruit, the proud
cattle fattening on the long grass, are the property of a few, and the
instruments of fatigue and slavery of the majority. As a general rule,
the man of leisure does not love, for themselves, the fields, or the
meadows, or the spectacle of nature, or the superb beasts that are to be
converted into gold pieces for his use. The man of leisure comes to the
country in search of a little air and health, then returns to the city
to spend the fruit of his vassal's toil.
The man of toil, for his part, is too crushed, too wretched, and too
frightened concerning the future, to enjoy the beauties of the landscape
and the charms of rustic life. To him also the golden fields, the lovely
meadows, the noble animals, represent bags of crowns, of which he will
have only a paltry share, insufficient for his needs, and yet those
cursed bags must be filled every year to satisfy the master and pay for
the privilege of living sparingly and wretchedly on his domain.
And still nature is always young and beautiful and generous. She sheds
poetry and beauty upon all living things, upon all the plants that are
left to develop in their own way. Nature possesses the secret of
happiness, and no one has ever succeeded in wresting it from her. He
would be the most fortunate of men who, possessing the science of his
craft and working with his hands, deriving happiness and liberty from
the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live in
the heart and the brain, to understand his work, and to love the work of
God. The artist has enjoyment of that sort in contemplating and
reproducing the beauties of Nature; but, when he sees the suffering of
the men who people this paradise called the earth, the just,
kind-hearted artist is grieved in the midst of his enjoyment. Where the
mind, heart, and arms work in concert under the eye of Providence, true
happiness would be found, and a holy harmony would exist between the
munificence of God and the delights of the human soul. Then, instead of
piteous, ghastly Death walking in his furrow, whip in hand, the painter
of allegories could place beside the ploughman a radiant angel, sowing
the blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand.
And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence
for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be
relegated to a place among chimeras. The gentle, melancholy words of
Virgil: "O how happy the life of the husbandman, if he but knew his
happiness!" is an expression of regret; but, like all regrets, it is
also a prediction. A day will come when the ploughman may be an artist,
if not to express,--which will then matter but little, perhaps,--at all
events, to feel, the beautiful. Do you believe that this mysterious
intuition of poesy does not already exist within him in the state of
instinct and vague revery? In those who have a little hoard for their
protection to-day, and in whom excess of misery does not stifle all
moral and intellectual development, pure happiness, felt and
appreciated, is at the elementary stage; and, furthermore, if poets'
voices have already arisen from the bosom of sorrow and fatigue, why
should it be said that the work of the hands excludes the exercise of
the functions of the mind? That exclusion is probably the general result
of excessive toil and profound misery; but let it not be said that when
man shall work only moderately and profitably, then there will be none
but bad workmen and bad poets. He who derives noble enjoyment from the
inward sentiment of poesy is a true poet, though he has never written a
line in his life.
My thoughts had taken this course, and I did not notice that this
confidence in man's capacity for education was strengthened in my mind
by external influences. I was walking along the edge of a field which
the peasants were preparing for the approaching sowing. The field was an
extensive one, like that in Holbein's picture. The landscape, too, was
of great extent and framed in broad lines of verdure, slightly reddened
by the approach of autumn, the lusty brown earth, where recent rains had
left in some of the furrows lines of water which sparkled in the sun
like slender silver threads. It was a blight, warm day, and the ground,
freshly opened by the sharp ploughshares, exhaled a slight vapor. At
the upper end of the field, an old man, whose broad back and stern face
recalled the man in Holbein's picture, but whose clothing did not
indicate poverty, gravely drove his old-fashioned _areau_, drawn by two
placid oxen, with pale yellow hides, veritable patriarchs of the fields,
tall, rather thin, with long, blunt horns, hard-working old beasts whom
long companionship has made _brothers_, as they are called in our
country districts, and who, when they are separated, refuse to work with
new mates and die of grief. People who know nothing of the country call
this alleged friendship of the ox for his yoke-fellow fabulous. Let them
go to the stable and look at a poor, thin, emaciated animal, lashing his
sunken sides with his restless tail, sniffing with terror and contempt
at the fodder that is put before him, his eyes always turned toward the
door, pawing the empty place beside him, smelling the yoke and chains
his companion wore, and calling him incessantly with a pitiful bellow.
The driver will say: "There's a yoke of oxen lost; his brother's dead,
and he won't work. We ought to fatten him for killing; but he won't eat,
and he'll soon starve to death."
The old ploughman was working slowly, in silence, without useless
expenditure of strength. His docile team seemed in no greater hurry
than he; but as he kept constantly at work, never turning aside, and
exerting always just the requisite amount of sustained power, his furrow
was as quickly cut as his son's, who was driving four less powerful oxen
on some harder and more stony land a short distance away.
But the spectacle that next attracted my attention was a fine one
indeed, a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the arable
tract, a young man of attractive appearance was driving a superb team:
four yoke of young beasts, black-coated with tawny spots that gleamed
like fire, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the
great, wild eyes, the abrupt movements, the nervous, jerky way of doing
their work, which shows that the yoke and goad still irritate them and
that they shiver with wrath as they yield to the domination newly
imposed upon them. They were what are called oxen _freshly yoked_. The
man who was guiding them had to clear a field until recently used for
pasturage, and filled with venerable stumps--an athlete's task which his
energy, his youth, and his eight almost untamed beasts were hardly
sufficient to accomplish.
A child of six or seven years, as beautiful as an angel, with a lamb's
fleece covering his shoulders, over his blouse, so that he resembled
the little Saint John the Baptist of the painters of the Renaissance,
was trudging along in the furrow beside the plough and pricking the
sides of the oxen with a long, light stick, the end of which was armed
with a dull goad. The proud beasts quivered under the child's small
hand, and made the yokes and the straps about their foreheads groan,
jerking the plough violently forward. When the ploughshare struck a
root, the driver shouted in a resonant voice, calling each beast by his
name, but rather to soothe than to excite them; for the oxen, annoyed by
the sudden resistance, started forward, digging their broad forked feet
into the ground, and would have turned aside and dragged the plough
across the field, had not the young man held the four leaders in check
with voice and goad, while the child handled the other four. He, too,
shouted, poor little fellow, in a voice which he tried to render
terrible, but which remained as sweet as his angelic face. The whole
picture was beautiful in strength and in grace: the landscape, the man,
the child, the oxen under the yoke; and, despite the mighty struggle in
which the earth was conquered, there was a feeling of peace and profound
tranquillity hovering over everything. When the obstacle was surmounted
and the team resumed its even, solemn progress, the ploughman, whose
pretended violence was only to give his muscles a little practice and
his vitality an outlet, suddenly resumed the serenity of simple souls
and cast a contented glance upon his child, who turned to smile at him.
Then the manly voice of the young _paterfamilias_ would strike up the
solemn, melancholy tune which the ancient tradition of the province
transmits, not to all ploughmen without distinction, but to those most
expert in the art of arousing and sustaining the spirit of
working-cattle. That song, whose origin was perhaps held sacred, and to
which mysterious influences seem to have been attributed formerly, is
reputed even to the present day to possess the virtue of keeping up the
courage of those animals, of soothing their discontent, and of whiling
away the tedium of their long task. It is not enough to have the art of
driving them so as to cut the furrow in an absolutely straight line, to
lighten their labor by raising the share or burying it deeper in the
ground: a man is not a perfect ploughman if he cannot sing to his
cattle, and that is a special science which requires special taste and
powers.
To speak accurately, this song is only a sort of recitative, broken off
and taken up again at pleasure. Its irregular form and its intonations,
false according to the rules of musical art, make it impossible to
reproduce. But it is a fine song none the less, and so entirely
appropriate to the nature of the work it accompanies, to the gait of the
ox, to the tranquillity of rural scenes, to the simple manners of the
men who sing it, that no genius unfamiliar with work in the fields could
have invented it, and no singer other than a _cunning ploughman_ of that
region would know how to render it. At the time of year when there is no
other work and no other sign of activity in the country than the
ploughing, that sweet and powerful chant rises like the voice of the
breeze, which it resembles somewhat in its peculiar pitch. The final
word of each phrase, sustained at incredible length, and with marvellous
power of breath, ascends a fourth of a tone, purposely making a discord.
That is barbarous, perhaps, but the charm of it is indescribable, and
when one is accustomed to hear it, one cannot conceive of any other song
at that time and in those localities that would not disturb the harmony.
It happened, therefore, that I had before my eyes a picture in striking
contrast with Holbein's, although it might be a similar scene. Instead
of a sad old man, a cheerful young man; instead of a team of thin, sorry
horses, two yoke of four sturdy, spirited cattle; instead of Death, a
lovely child; instead of an image of despair and a suggestion of
destruction, a spectacle of energetic action and a thought of happiness.
Then it was that the French quatrain:
"A la sueur de ton visaige," etc.,
and the _O fortunatos_----_agricolas_ of Virgil, came to my mind
simultaneously, and when I saw that handsome pair, the man and the
child, performing a grand and solemn task under such poetic conditions,
and with so much grace combined with so much strength, I had a feeling
of profound compassion mingled with involuntary respect. Happy the
husbandman. Yes, so I should be in his place, if my arm should suddenly
become strong and my chest powerful, so that they could thus fertilize
nature and sing to her, without my eyes losing the power to see and my
brain to understand the harmony of colors and sounds, the delicacy of
tones, and the gracefulness of contours,--in a word, the mysterious
beauty of things, and, above all, without my heart ceasing to be in
relation with the divine sentiment that presided at the immortal and
sublime creation.
But, alas! that man has never understood the mystery of the beautiful,
that child will never understand it! God preserve me from the thought
that they are not superior to the animals they guide, and that they have
not at times a sort of ecstatic revelation that charms away their
weariness and puts their cares to sleep! I see upon their noble brows
the seal of the Lord God, for they are born kings of the earth much more
truly than they who possess it, because they have paid for it. And the
proof that they feel that it is so is found in the fact that you cannot
expatriate them with impunity, and that they love the ground watered by
the sweat of their brow, that the true peasant dies of homesickness in
the uniform of the soldier, far from the fields where he was born. But
that man lacks a part of the enjoyments I possess, immaterial enjoyments
to which he is abundantly entitled, he the workman in the vast temple
which the heavens are vast enough to embrace. He lacks knowledge of his
own sentiments. They who condemned him to servitude from his mother's
womb, being unable to take from him the power of reverie, have taken the
power of reflection.
Ah! well, such as he is, incomplete and doomed to never-ending
childhood, he is nobler even so than he in whom knowledge has stifled
sentiment. Do not place yourselves above him, you who consider
yourselves endowed with the lawful and inalienable right to command him,
for that terrible error proves that in you the mind has killed the heart
and that you are the most incomplete and the blindest of men!--I prefer
the simplicity of his mind to the false enlightenment of yours; and if I
had to tell his life, it would be more pleasant for me to bring out its
attractive and affecting aspects than it is creditable to you to depict
the abject condition to which the scornful rigor of your social precepts
may debase him.
I knew that young man and that beautiful child; I knew their story, for
they had a story, everybody has his story, and everybody might arouse
interest in the romance of his own life if he but understood it.
Although a peasant and a simple ploughman, Germain had taken account of
his duties and his affections. He had detailed them to me ingenuously
one day, and I had listened to him with interest. When I had watched him
at work for a considerable time, I asked myself why his story should not
be written, although it was as simple, as straightforward, and as devoid
of ornament as the furrow he made with his plough.
Next year that furrow will be filled up and covered by a new furrow.
Thus the majority of men make their mark and disappear in the field of
humanity. A little earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made
succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of
the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name, however,
a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or some absurd
exploit, he makes a little noise in the world?
So let us, if we can, rescue from oblivion the furrow of Germain, the
_cunning ploughman_. He will know nothing about it, and will not be
disturbed; but I shall have had a little pleasure in making the attempt.
III
PÈRE MAURICE
"Germain," his father-in-law said to him one day, "you must make up your
mind to marry again. It's almost two years since you lost my daughter,
and your oldest boy is seven years old. You're getting on toward thirty,
my boy, and when a man passes that age, you know, in our province, he's
considered too old to begin housekeeping again. You have three fine
children, and thus far they haven't been a trouble to us. My wife and
daughter-in-law have looked after them as well as they could, and loved
them as they ought. There's Petit-Pierre, he's what you might call
educated; he can drive oxen very handily already; he knows enough to
keep the cattle in the meadow, and he's strong enough to drive the
horses to water. So he isn't the one to be a burden to us; but the other
two--we love them, God knows! poor innocent creatures!--cause us much
anxiety this year. My daughter-in-law is about lying-in, and she still
has a little one in her arms. When the one we expect has come, she won't
be able to look after your little Solange, and especially your little
Sylvain, who isn't four years old and hardly keeps still a minute day or
night. His blood is hot, like yours: he'll make a good workman, but he's
a terrible child, and my old woman can't run fast enough now to catch
him when he runs off toward the ditch or in among the feet of the
cattle. And then, when my daughter-in-law brings this other one into the
world, her last but one will be thrown on my wife's hands for a month,
at least. So your children worry us and overburden us. We don't like to
see children neglected; and when you think of the accidents that may
happen to them for lack of watching, your mind's never at rest. So you
must have another wife, and I another daughter-in-law. Think it over, my
boy. I've already warned you more than once; time flies, and the years
won't wait for you. You owe it to your children and to us, who want to
have everything go right in the house, to marry as soon as possible."
"Well, father," the son-in-law replied, "if you really want me to do it,
I must gratify you. But I don't propose to conceal from you that it will
cause me a great deal of annoyance, and that I'd about as lief drown
myself. You know what you've lost, and you don't know what you may
find. I had an excellent wife, a good-looking wife, sweet and brave,
good to her father and mother, good to her husband, good to her
children, a good worker, in the fields or in the house, clever about her
work, good at everything, in fact; and when you gave her to me, when I
took her, it wasn't one of the conditions that I should forget her if I
had the bad luck to lose her."
"What you say shows a good heart, Germain," rejoined Père Maurice; "I
know you loved my daughter, that you made her happy, and that if you
could have satisfied Death by going in her place, Catherine would be
alive at this moment and you in the cemetery. She well deserved to have
you love her like that, and if you don't get over her loss, no more do
we. But I'm not talking about forgetting her. The good God willed that
she should leave us, and we don't let a day pass without showing Him, by
our prayers, our thoughts, our words, our acts, that we respect her
memory and are grieved at her departure. But if she could speak to you
from the other world and tell you her will, she would bid you seek a
mother for her little orphans. The question, then, is to find a woman
worthy to take her place. It won't be very easy; but it isn't
impossible; and when we have found her for you, you will love her as you
loved my daughter, because you are an honest man and because you will be
grateful to her for doing us a service and loving your children."
"Very good, Père Maurice," said Germain, "I will do what you wish, as I
always have done."
"I must do you the justice to say, my son, that you have always listened
to the friendship and sound arguments of the head of your family. So let
us talk over the matter of your choice of a new wife. In the first
place, I don't advise you to take a young woman. That isn't what you
need. Youth is fickle; and as it's a burden to bring up three children,
especially when they're the children of another marriage, what you must
have is a kind-hearted soul, wise and gentle, and used to hard work. If
your wife isn't about as old as yourself, she won't have sense enough to
accept such a duty. She will think you too old and your children too
young. She will complain, and your children will suffer."
"That is just what disturbs me," said Germain. "Suppose she should hate
the poor little ones, and they should be maltreated and beaten?"
"God forbid!" said the old man. "But evil-minded women are rarer in
these parts than good ones, and a man must be a fool not to be able to
put his hand on the one that suits him."
"True, father: there are some good girls in our village. There's Louise
and Sylvaine and Claudie and Marguerite--any one you please, in fact."
"Softly, softly, my boy, all those girls are too young or too poor--or
too pretty; for we must think of that, too, my son. A pretty woman isn't
always as steady as a plainer one."
"Do you want me to take an ugly one, pray?" said Germain, a little
disturbed.
"No, not ugly, for you will have other children by her, and there's
nothing so sad as to have ugly, puny, unhealthy children. But a woman
still in her prime, in good health and neither ugly nor pretty, would do
your business nicely."
"It is easy to see," said Germain, smiling rather sadly, "that to get
such a one as you want we must have her made to order; especially as you
don't want her to be poor, and rich wives aren't easy to get, especially
for a widower."
"Suppose she was a widow herself, Germain? what do you say to a widow
without children, and a snug little property?"
"I don't know of any just now in our parish."
"Nor do I, but there are other places."
"You have some one in view, father; so tell me at once who it is."
IV
GERMAIN, THE CUNNING PLOUGHMAN
"Yes, I have some one in view," replied Père Maurice. "It's one Léonard,
widow of one Guérin, who lives at Fourche."
"I don't know the woman or the place," replied Germain, resigned, but
becoming more and more depressed.
"Her name is Catherine, like your deceased wife's."
"Catherine? Yes, I shall enjoy having to say that name: Catherine! And
yet, if I can't love her as well as I loved the other, it will cause me
more pain than pleasure, for it will remind me of her too often."
"I tell you that you will love her: she's a good creature, a woman with
a big heart; I haven't seen her for a long time, she wasn't a
bad-looking girl then; but she is no longer young, she is thirty-two.
She belongs to a good family, all fine people, and she has eight or ten
thousand francs in land which she would be glad to sell, and buy other
land where she goes to live; for she, too, is thinking of marrying
again, and I know that, if her disposition should suit you, she wouldn't
think you a bad match."
"So you have arranged it all?"
"Yes, subject to the judgment of you two; and that is what you must ask
each other after you are acquainted. The woman's father is a distant
relation of mine and has been a very close friend. You know him, don't
you--Père Léonard?"
"Yes, I have seen him talking with you at the fairs, and at the last one
you breakfasted together: is this what you were talking about at such
length?"
"To be sure; he watched you selling your cattle and thought you did the
business very well, that you were a fine-appearing fellow, that you
seemed active and shrewd; and when I told him all that you are and how
well you have behaved to us during the eight years we've lived and
worked together, without ever an angry or discontented word, he took it
into his head that you must marry his daughter; and the plan suits me,
too, I confess, considering the good reputation she has, the integrity
of her family, and what I know about their circumstances."
"I see, Père Maurice, that you think a little about worldly goods."
"Of course I think about them. Don't you?"
"I will think about them, if you choose, to please you; but you know
that, for my part, I never trouble myself about what is or is not coming
to me in our profits. I don't understand about making a division, and my
head isn't good for such things. I know about the land and cattle and
horses and seed and fodder and threshing. As for sheep and vines and
gardening, the niceties of farming, and small profits, all that, you
know, is your son's business, and I don't interfere much in it. As for
money, my memory is short, and I prefer to yield everything rather than
dispute about thine and mine. I should be afraid of making a mistake and
claiming what is not due me, and if matters were not simple and clear, I
should never find my way through them."
"So much the worse, my son, and that's why I would like you to have a
wife with brains to take my place when I am no longer here. You have
never been willing to look into our accounts, and that might make
trouble between you and my son, when you don't have me to keep the peace
between you and tell you what is coming to each of you."
"May you live many years, Père Maurice! But don't you worry about what
will happen when you are gone; I shall never dispute with your son. I
trust Jacques as I trust myself, and as I have no property of my own, as
everything that can possibly come to me, comes to me as your daughter's
husband and belongs to our children, I can be easy in my mind and so can
you; Jacques would never try to defraud his sister's children for his
own, as he loves them almost equally."
"You are right in that, Germain. Jacques is a good son, a good brother,
and a man who loves the truth. But Jacques may die before you, before
your children are grown up, and one must always have a care not to leave
minors without a head to give them good advice and arrange their
differences. Otherwise the lawyers interfere, set them at odds with each
other, and make them eat everything up in lawsuits. So we ought not to
think of bringing another person into our house, man or woman, without
saying to ourselves that that person may some day have to direct the
conduct and manage the business of thirty or more children,
grandchildren, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law. No one knows how much
a family may grow, and when the hive is too full and the time has come
to swarm, every one thinks about carrying off his honey. When I took
you for my son-in-law, although my daughter was rich and you poor, I
never reproached her for choosing you. I saw you were a good worker, and
I knew well that the best sort of riches for country people like us is a
good pair of arms and a heart like yours. When a man brings those things
into a family, he brings enough. But it's different with a woman: her
work in the house is to keep, not to get. Besides, now that you are a
father and are looking for a wife, you must remember that your new
children, having no sort of claim on the inheritance of your first
wife's children, would be left in want if you should die, unless your
wife had some property of her own. And then, it would cost something to
feed the children you are going to add to our little colony. If that
should fall on us alone, we would take care of them, never fear, and
without complaining; but everybody's comfort would be diminished, and
the first children would have to take their share of the privations.
When families increase beyond measure, and their means do not increase
in proportion, then want comes, however bravely we may struggle against
it. This is all I have to say, Germain; think it over, and try to make
yourself agreeable to Widow Guérin; for her good management and her
crowns will bring us aid for the present and peace of mind for the
future."
"Very good, father. I will try to like her and make her like me."
"To do that you must go to see her."
"At her home? At Fourche? That's a long way, isn't it? and we don't have
much time to run about at this season."
"When a marriage for love is on the carpet, you must expect to waste
time; but when it's a marriage of convenience between two people who
have no whims and who know what they want, it's soon arranged. Tomorrow
will be Saturday; you can shorten your day's ploughing a bit and start
about two o'clock, after dinner; you will be at Fourche by night;
there's a good moon just now, the roads are excellent, and it isn't more
than three leagues. Fourche is near Magnier. Besides, you can take the
mare."
"I should rather go afoot in this cool weather."
"True, but the mare's a fine beast, and a suitor makes a better
appearance if he comes well mounted. You must wear your new clothes and
carry a nice present of game to Père Léonard. You will say that you come
with a message from me, you will talk with him, you will pass the
Sunday with his daughter, and you will return with a _yes_ or a _no_ on
Monday morning."
"Very good," replied Germain calmly, and yet he was not altogether calm.
Germain had always lived a virtuous life, as hard-working peasants do.
Married at twenty, he had loved but one woman in his life, and since he
had become a widower, although he was naturally impulsive and vivacious,
he had never laughed and dallied with any other. He had faithfully
cherished a genuine regret in his heart, and he did not yield to his
father-in-law without a feeling of dread and melancholy; but the
father-in-law had always managed his family judiciously, and Germain,
who had devoted himself unreservedly to the common work, and
consequently to him who personified it, the father of the
family,--Germain did not understand the possibility of rebelling against
sound arguments, against the common interest of all.
Nevertheless, he was sad. Few days passed that he did not weep for his
wife in secret, and, although solitude was beginning to weigh upon him,
he was more terrified at the thought of forming a new union, than
desirous to escape from his grief. He said to himself vaguely that love
might have consoled him if it had taken him by surprise, for love does
not console otherwise. One cannot find it by seeking it; it comes to us
when we do not expect it. This project of marriage, conceived in cold
blood, which Père Maurice laid before him, the unknown fiancée, and,
perhaps, even all the good things that were said of her common-sense and
her virtue, gave him food for thought. And he went his way, musing as a
man muses who has not enough ideas to fight among themselves; that is to
say, not formulating in his mind convincing reasons for selfish
resistance, but conscious of a dull pain, and not struggling against an
evil which it was necessary to accept.
Meanwhile, Père Maurice had returned to the farm-house, while Germain
employed the last hour of daylight, between sunset and darkness, in
mending the breaches made by the sheep in the hedge surrounding a
vineyard near the farm buildings. He raised the stalks of the bushes,
and supported them with clods of earth, while the thrushes chattered in
the neighboring thicket, and seemed to call to him to make haste, they
were so curious to come to examine his work as soon as he had gone.
V
LA GUILLETTE
Père Maurice found in the house an elderly neighbor, who had come to
have a chat with his wife, and borrow some embers to light her fire.
Mère Guillette lived in a wretched hovel within two gunshots of the
farm. But she was a decent woman and a woman of strong will. Her poor
house was neat and clean, and her carefully patched clothes denoted
proper self-respect with all her poverty.
"You came to get some fire for the night, eh, Mère Guillette?" said the
old man. "Is there anything else you would like?"
"No, Père Maurice," she replied; "nothing just now. I'm no beggar, you
know, and I don't abuse my friends' kindness."
"That's the truth; and so your friends are always ready to do you a
service."
"I was just talking with your wife, and I was asking her if Germain had
at last made up his mind to marry again."
"You're no gossip," replied Père Maurice, "and one can speak before you
without fear of people talking; so I will tell my wife and you that
Germain has really made up his mind; he starts to-morrow for Fourche."
"Bless me!" exclaimed Mère Maurice; "the poor fellow! God grant that he
may find a wife as good and honest as himself!"
"Ah! he is going to Fourche?" observed La Guillette. "Just see how
things turn out! that helps me very much, and as you asked me just now,
Père Maurice, if there was anything I wanted, I'll tell you what you can
do to oblige me."
"Tell us, tell us, we shall be glad to oblige."
"I would like to have Germain take the trouble to take my daughter with
him."
"Where? to Fourche?"
"Not to Fourche, but to Ormeaux, where she is going to stay the rest of
the year."
"What!" said Mère Maurice, "are you going to part from your daughter?"
"She has got to go out to service and earn something. It comes hard
enough to me and to her, too, poor soul! We couldn't make up our minds
to part at midsummer; but now Martinmas is coming, and she has found a
good place as shepherdess on the farms at Ormeaux. The farmer passed
through here the other day on his way back from the fair. He saw my
little Marie watching her three sheep on the common land.--'You don't
seem very busy, my little maid,' he said; 'and three sheep are hardly
enough for a shepherd. Would you like to keep a hundred? I'll take you
with me. The shepherdess at our place has been taken sick and she's
going back to her people, and if you'll come to us within a week, you
shall have fifty francs for the rest of the year, up to midsummer.'--The
child refused, but she couldn't help thinking about it and telling me
when she came home at night and found me sad and perplexed about getting
through the winter, which is sure to be hard and long, for we saw the
cranes and wild geese fly south this year a full month earlier than
usual. We both cried; but at last we took courage. We said to each other
that we couldn't stay together, because there's hardly enough to keep
one person alive on our little handful of land; and then Marie's getting
old--here she is nearly sixteen--and she must do as others do, earn her
bread and help her poor mother."
"Mère Guillette," said the old ploughman, "if fifty francs was all that
was needed to put an end to your troubles and make it unnecessary for
you to send your daughter away, why, I would help you to find them,
although fifty francs begins to mean something to people like us. But we
must consult good sense as well as friendship in everything. If you were
saved from want for this winter, you wouldn't be safe from future want,
and the longer your daughter postpones taking the step, the harder it
will be for you and for her to part. Little Marie is getting to be tall
and strong, and she has nothing to do at home. She might fall into lazy
habits--"
"Oh! as far as that goes, I'm not afraid," said Mère Guillette. "Marie's
as brave as a rich girl at the head of a big establishment could be. She
doesn't sit still a minute with her arms folded, and when we haven't any
work, she cleans and rubs our poor furniture and makes every piece shine
like a looking-glass. She's a child that's worth her weight in gold, and
I'd have liked it much better to have her come to you as a shepherdess
instead of going so far away among people I don't know. You'd have
taken her at midsummer if we could have made up our minds; but now
you've hired all your help, and we can't think of it again until
midsummer next year."
"Oh! I agree with all my heart, Guillette! I shall be very glad to do
it. But, meanwhile, she will do well to learn a trade and get used to
working for others."
"Yes, of course; the die is cast. The farmer at Ormeaux sent for her
this morning; we said yes, and she must go. But the poor child doesn't
know the way, and I shouldn't like to send her so far all alone. As your
son-in-law is going to Fourche to-morrow, he can just as well take her.
It seems that it's very near the farm she's going to, according to what
they tell me; for I have never been there myself."
"They're right side by side, and my son-in-law will take her. That's as
it should be; indeed, he can take her behind him on the mare, and that
will save her shoes. Here he is, coming in to supper. I say, Germain,
Mère Guillette's little Marie is going to Ormeaux as shepherdess. You'll
take her on your horse, won't you?"
"Very well," said Germain, who was preoccupied, but always ready to do
his neighbor a service.
In our world, it would never occur to a mother to entrust a daughter of
sixteen to a man of twenty-eight! for Germain was really only
twenty-eight, and although, according to the ideas of his province, he
was considered an old man so far as marriage was concerned, he was still
the handsomest man in the neighborhood. Work had not furrowed and
wrinkled his face, as is the case with most peasants who have ten years
of ploughing behind them. He was strong enough to plough ten more years
without looking old, and the prejudice of age must have been very strong
in a young girl's mind to prevent her remarking that Germain had a fresh
complexion, a bright eye, blue as the heavens in May, ruddy lips, superb
teeth, and a body as graceful and supple as that of a colt that has
never left the pasture.
But chastity is a sacred tradition in certain country districts, far
removed from the corrupt animation of large cities, and Maurice's family
was noted among all the families of Belair for uprightness, and fidelity
to the truth. Germain was going in search of a wife; Marie was too young
and too pure for him to think of her in that light, and, unless he was a
heartless, bad man, it was impossible that he should have a guilty
thought in connection with her. Père Maurice was in no way disturbed,
therefore, to see him take the pretty girl _en croupe_; La Guillette
would have considered that she was insulting him if she had requested
him to respect her as his sister. Marie mounted the mare, weeping
bitterly, after she had kissed her mother and her young friends twenty
times over. Germain, who was also in a melancholy mood, had the more
sympathy with her grief, and rode away with a grave face, while the
neighbors waved their hands in farewell to poor Marie, with no thought
of evil to come.
VI
PETIT-PIERRE
_Grise_ was young and strong and handsome. She carried her double load
easily, putting back her ears and champing her bit like the proud,
high-spirited mare she was. As they rode by the long pasture, she spied
her mother--who was called Old Grise, as she was called Young Grise--and
neighed an adieu. Old Grise approached the fence, making her hopples
ring, tried to leap over into the road to follow her daughter; then,
seeing that she started off at a fast trot, she neighed in her turn, and
stood looking after her, pensive and disturbed in mind, with her nose in
the air, and her mouth filled with grass which she forgot to eat.