Allier, where his father was a maker of wooden shoes. A pupil of the
board school, his rare abilities promised a prosperous future, and,
gifted for mathematics, he studied for the school of engineering--for
‘Polytechnique.’ But his frail health and tiny size rendered him inapt
for that profession, and his livelihood seemed a problem too difficult
to solve when Maurice Barrès, a Deputy for Paris, recommended him for
a small post in the pay of the town council at the Hôtel-de-Ville.
Philippe was thenceforth an inspector of stalls and shop-fronts--and
his kind protector chose for him the VII. arrondissement of Paris,
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where stalls are few. In return for his
nine guineas a month (230 francs) Philippe had but to stroll about
the quiet, almost provincial streets of the old-fashioned courtly
quarter and reap the harvest of a quiet eye. But Philippe’s vision was
chiefly interior. In the noble Rue de Varenne and the historical Rue
Saint-Dominique he contemplated that abyss of misery, that slippery
Avernus of women’s lazy wiles and young men’s dangerous desire, which
he has revealed to us in _Bubu de Montparnasse_ and _Marie Donadieu_:
tragic idylls of the distant Latin quarter.
Here we seem as far as may be from the pastoral novel! But Philippe, in
Paris, saw rise upon his inner eye the Cérilly of his childhood; the
one-storied house, opposite his father’s shop, where the Père Perdrix
lived with his old wife; and the lonely cottage, capped with thatch,
where little Charles Blanchard lived alone with his mother, the widowed
charwoman, and where the poor, dull, dreamy, ill-nourished lad died at
nine years old--of ‘old age.’ And he saw his own house and his childish
self, and his adorable clever mother, and all the poem of their love.
And he wrote _Le Père Perdrix_, and _La Mère et l’Enfant_, and he began
_Charles Blanchard_. And then, at five-and-thirty years of age, he died.
He cannot be said to have lived in vain, for the young inspector of
stalls left behind him, not only a great name to a little clan--a clan
which included Barrès, André Gide, Daniel Halévy, Valéry Larbaud,
André Beaunier; that is to say, whatever is most delicately critical
in France--but also a school. The chief names in that school are Émile
Guillaumin and Marguerite Audoux, both of them, like Philippe, natives
of the Bourbonnais.
There are, in the literary world of Paris, those who do not scruple
to assert that Madame Audoux’s great pastoral novel, _Marie-Claire_,
was in reality written by Charles-Louis Philippe. I wonder if those
inconsiderate critics can have read either author! It is as though
one should accuse Baudelaire of having written the country novels
of George Sand; as though one should say that Thomas Hardy really
wrote Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_. The incomparable simplicity
and serenity of _Marie-Claire_ are as different as may be from the
difficult harmony, the obscure, subtle, poignant intuitions of
Philippe. It is true that Philippe was gaining in simplicity (perhaps
from his contact with Madame Audoux?) when he died. And no doubt he
was prodigal of counsel, aid, and precept to the little dressmaker who
was his pupil in letters: he showed her, perhaps, in a novel, how to
‘cut out.’ But their genius, their experience, their character, and
even their view of life is quite distinct: the one infinitely minute,
tormented, tragic; the other large, quiet, and serene; either equally
sincere.
It was Madame Audoux who called the friends--the ardent, devoted
friends--of Philippe to the nursing home in the Rue de la Chaise, where
he lay dying of typhoid fever; it was she, with his mother, summoned
from Cérilly, who received his dying breath; and he had often spoken in
his circle of the noble imagination, the just and luminous elegance of
mind which distinguish _Marie-Claire_. So that when the book appeared
there were friends to greet it--the friends of poor Philippe, dead in
his grave.
But the book did not need these protectors, for its success was
immediate, popular, immense, and by no means purely literary; readers,
who had barely heard of Philippe himself, of André Gide, of any of
Madame Audoux’s literary clan, opened her volume in their thousands.
The story has been translated into several languages--into English,
I think. No doubt it owed something to Mirbeau’s eloquent preface,
revealing the author’s personality. The public is sentimental; it was
touched by the picture of the poor little dressmaker--not a princess of
tape and scissors, but one of those little snips who go out to ladies’
houses, working for half a crown a day. The account of this poor woman,
no longer quite young, suddenly threatened with blindness if she pursue
her trade; turning then, for a consolation, as much as for a means
of livelihood, to literature, and with her first venture discovering
herself a great artist; this poignant history seemed to the public a
novel before the novel began.
Will Marguerite Audoux, intimidated by this rare success, remain
the woman of one book? I hope not! If she dare not again attack the
pastoral novel, let her write the touching life of her friend and
master, Philippe. Or let her turn from the fields of France to the
moving story of a woman alone in Paris, earning the right to live as
she draws an interminable thread.
_Marie-Claire_ is the history of an orphan girl, brought up in an
orphanage, placed out at thirteen years of age as little shepherdess on
a farm; some five years later--after the merest sketch of a love-story
with her mistress’s brother--dismissed; again received at the orphanage
as cook or kitchen-maid, until, on the last page of all--not yet twenty
years of age, she takes the train for Paris. Can one imagine anything
flatter, staler, more unprofitable? Such stories must be written by the
thousand in the simple annals of the poor. And yet _Marie-Claire_ is a
sequence of images of unforgettable loveliness.
The story is divided into three parts; and if the beginning and the
end--the convent and the love-story--have their rare merits, the middle
section, the life of the little shepherdess on the farm, seems to me
in all sincerity equal to the loveliest pastoral novels of George
Sand--to _François le Champi_ or _Le petite Fadette_. The shepherdess
and her flock lost in the mist, and that winter scene, when a ‘great
yellow dog’ pounces on a sheep and drags it away while the collie howls
plaintively, crouching at the shepherdess’s feet:--
‘Aussitôt je devinai que c’était un loup. Il emportait le mouton à
pleine gueule, par le milieu du corps. Il grimpa sans effort sur
le talus et quand il sauta le large fossé qui le séparait du bois,
ses pattes de derrière me firent penser à des ailes. À ce moment je
n’aurais pas trouvé extraordinaire qu’il se fut envolé pardessus
les arbres.’
And the personages of the farm: Maître Sylvain, the kind Pauline, the
friendly delicate-minded Eugène, are drawn not only with an artist’s
sense of beauty, but with a marvellous and mysterious sense of life.
In France to-day there are many women writers of great talent and
success: Madame Marcelle Tinayre, with her _Maison du Péché_; Madame de
Noailles, with her wonderful poems; Mlle Marie Lenéru, with her plays;
I admire them all with my heart, but I think I would as soon have
written _Marie-Claire_!
Madame Audoux is not the only pupil of Charles-Louis Philippe: Émile
Guillaumin is also of his following, or at least he resembles him in
his birthplace and his profession. Guillaumin is a farmer who lives
on his farm, about ten miles from Cérilly; he works the land with his
brother; and, in the intervals of seedtime and harvest he, too, writes
pastoral novels about the pleasant country round the Allier river.
But seek not there for the keen, anxious psychology of Philippe,
nor for the large poetry of Madame Audoux; nothing could be more
matter-of-fact, more _terre-à-terre_ (as we say in France), than _La
Vie d’un Simple_ or _Rose et sa Parisienne_. For that very reason these
books, and others from the same pen, are valuable to the inquirer who
desires to know, without any alloy of poetry, the real conditions of
the farmer’s and field-labourer’s life in France; but they are not
admirable to the artist like the novels of Jules Renard or Marguerite
Audoux. Obstinate, precise, Guillaumin delves his style as a peasant
tills his land--not (like Philippe or Madame Audoux, who are equally
fastidious and minute) in order to produce a certain effect of beauty
or impression of sensibility, but in the effort to render a just, exact
account of what he has seen.
His best book is _La Vie d’un Simple_. Regarded as art it is dull,
monotonous, and bare; and yet, considered as life, it is singularly
touching and ample, like one of those vast plains of France, traversed
by interminable, poplar-bordered roads, whose great sweeping lines
melt, far off, into long, low horizons.
_La Vie d’un Simple_ is the life of a peasant from the time when, a
child of seven years old, he pastures his sheep among the stubble
and the heather until, an old, bent man, too feeble to work on the
land, he again minds the herds at pasture, as they use in France.
Tiennou has lived all his life in front of the same horizon; he has no
book-learning; he knows nothing but the land; but he knows it well.
Like his father before him, he has been a _métayer_, that is to say,
a tenant-farmer who combines with the landlord to stock a farm, tills
it, and manages the live-stock, and pays his rent on a system of
half-profits.
The system is very common in France, and in theory is admirable. It
appears a means of uniting capital and labour in the cultivation of the
soil. But, if the tenant has no capital behind him, in bad seasons he
has to borrow at usurious interest. And then, if the cart-horse break
his neck, or the cow die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, his
plight is poor indeed; for the landlord has a right to exact that stock
and tools shall always correspond to the inventory drawn up when the
tenant entered into possession. And too often, if he improves his farm,
the owner makes that an occasion for increasing his own pretensions.
Such is the fate of Tiennou, who, having spent the better part of his
life on bettering his land, in the end receives notice to quit.
Unless he be (as he so often is) a peasant-proprietor, the lot of the
French husbandman is austere. In a little pamphlet, _En Bourbonnais_,
M. Guillaumin has added up the yearly receipts of a day-labourer in
good work, turn by turn haymaker, harvester, thresher, wood-cutter,
and so on. His annual earnings amount, in English coin, to £21 12_s._
Though he be fed abundantly at the farms where he works all summer
long, still his family must live; and he must feed himself all
winter-time. And bread is dear in France; out of his twenty guineas a
year, the day-labourer must reckon fifteen or sixteen for bread alone.
The rent of the cottage will cost another £4; and there remains about
30_s._ for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel, doctoring, wine,
tobacco--all the pleasures and luxuries of life. No doubt he sells his
pig, and his kids and his poultry, and anything he can, to increase his
slender revenues; for, in the valley of the Allier, the peasant is too
poor to put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or enjoy a rasher of his own
bacon by his own fireside.
Farther south, among the hills and high valleys of the Cantal, another
peasant-farmer, Antonin Dusserre, offers us, in his _Jean et Louise_,
another image of pastoral France: the rich yeomanry, the _Couarrous_
and _Couarros_, who compose the notable society of those isolated
villages, where the château is empty four-fifths of the year or more.
The _Couarros_ (rich grazing-farmers, intelligent, tenacious, positive,
active, and money-loving) compose a rustic middle-class far wealthier
than their simple lives would lead us to suppose, proud of their flocks
and herds, and their balance at the bankers. M. Dusserre, I believe, is
blind; but before that misfortune fell upon him, he has looked long and
lovingly at the high-lying heather, the cliffs capped with basalt, the
gentian-starred mountain-pastures, and the green glens and _trobers_ of
his native land. The landscapes and the types of the Cantal live on in
his inner eye.
Much farther west, on the borders of Anjou and Vendée, a village
schoolmaster, M. Pérochon, has recently given us a picture of
peasant life in the style of Guillaumin and Dusserre, in _Les
Creux-de-Maisons_. A _creux-de-maison_ is not, as one might expect,
one of those cave-dwellings hewn out of the chalky banks of the Indre
or the Loire, which look so primitive but which are said to be dry and
cosy, possessing the local reputation of keeping off rheumatism; no, a
_creux-de-maison_ is a sort of cabin about seven feet high, built of
mud or of rough stone cemented with clay, single-roomed, thatch-roofed,
with a pane for a window and an earthen floor.
‘C’était une cabane bossue et lépreuse, à peine plus haute qu’un
homme; on descendait à l’intérieur par deux marches de granit; il
y faisait très sombre, car le jour n’entrait que par une lucarne
à deux petits carreaux; l’hiver il y avait de l’eau partout, et
cela faisait de la boue qui ne finissait de sécher, sous les lits
surtout; il y avait des trous qui empêchaient les tabourets de
tenir debout; on les bouchait de temps en temps avec de la terre
apportée du jardin.’
Such are the _creux-de-maisons_, still not infrequent round Bressuire
in Vendée, though happily rarer every year, as the spread of creameries
and co-operatives brings the sense and the means of comfort into the
Ireland of France. M. Pérochon is perhaps a little unfair in taking no
notice of this clearing of the horizon: he will not allow us a gleam
of consolation; Zola himself was never more resolutely lugubrious. His
book is conceived in a low tone, a minor key, by a deliberate purpose,
and we must accept the artist’s postulate.
His theme is the life of a day-labourer from the day he leaves the
regiment till the time when, at forty-eight years of age, having buried
wife and child, he owns that life has been too much for him. He has had
his romance, has married the miller’s lovely daughter, and has seen
her die of want in the horrible _creux-de-maison_. He has watched the
children grow thinner month by month.
‘Depuis le Mardi-Gras, mes pauvres petits n’ont mangé ni lard, ni
œufs, ni lait ... quatre livres de beurre en tout depuis quatre
mois.... Je suis fatiguée de n’avoir rien à faire manger aux
petits; des haricots et des pommes de terre, des pommes de terre et
des haricots! Pas moyen seulement d’élever des poules!’
And indeed in the poorer parts of frugal France, so royally fertile,
there are many districts where the married labourer in winter used to
have little more in his larder; where a sack of potatoes, a sack of
chestnuts, and a sack of buckwheat supplied the chief of his diet, or
at least of his children’s diet if he be fed at the farm. I speak in
the past tense, but I fear it is so to-day in many a village of Lozère
or Brittany, where the food of the agricultural poor is as much worse
than it is in England, as it is better and more varied in Normandy or
Anjou or Touraine. And this constant strife between hunger and love,
between natures naturally tender, gay, and brave, and circumstances
continually depressing--has resulted in a stampede towards the towns,
a rural exodus, which is the great problem of the day in the poorer
provinces of France.
The war has singularly respected the writers of Pastoral novels. It
has even added to their ranks a new name, that of M. Henri Bachelin,
whose village tales, _Le Serviteur_, in 1918, _Le Village_, in 1919,
are direct and living sketches of rural France in the minute and
finely-stippled taste of Émile Guillaumin.
THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD
EDMOND JALOUX, ANDRÉ LAFON, G. DES VOISINS, MARCEL PROUST, ETC.
Two of the pastoral novels we have just considered, _Charles Blanchard_
and _Marie-Claire_, are novels of childhood; and the first two volumes
(the most beautiful) of _Jean-Christophe_ come into the same category;
when we examined the works of René Boylesve, we found that the hero
of two of his most touching stories is a little boy; Anatole France
is even now writing the history of ‘Petit Pierre’; Francis Jammes has
consecrated a whole volume to the observation of his baby daughter; and
there is Mæterlinck’s exquisite _Oiseau Bleu_. And here are several
other writers who, in the last half-dozen years, have written novels of
conspicuous beauty and reputation concerned with little children.
When I came to live in France, some thirty years ago, the novel
of childhood was supposed to be a product of English manufacture,
almost exclusively. It was much admired, for the French are a nation
of child-lovers and a people of psychologists; but it was generally
supposed that Anglo-Saxon blood was needed to relate the youth of
a Maggie Tulliver or a David Copperfield. In those days the French
yellowback, in six cases out of ten, was a love story; in the other
four it was a social novel.
Is it the philosophy of Bergson, his glorification of instinct,
sensibility, intuition, that has changed all that? The novel of
childhood is now one of the most frequent, the most admired of French
romances. Not the mere observation of childhood; not the sole charm of
reminiscence, always popular because it aureoles our faded foreheads
with the light of other days: ‘Ah! so I used to think! Even so was
I!’ It is rather a careful reconstruction of the point of view of a
young boy--except Marie-Claire, I remember no girls in the novel of
childhood!--and his first impressions of the mysteries of life: love,
sin, pain, madness, death. These novels of childhood are, in fact,
studies in psychology.
Dickens perhaps began it--Dickens always so beloved in France. Yet
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, if they suffer from the
world’s oppression, suffer rather than reflect or observe. The theme
was really inaugurated, I think, by Mr Henry James, some fifteen years
ago, in _What Maisie Knew_, the impression made on a child by the
mysterious iniquity of its elders.
M. René Boylesve was the first: _L’Enfant à la Balustrade_ appeared,
if I remember right, in 1903. We have considered in another chapter
the provincial studies of this exquisite author; here I will only
draw attention to his childish hero. Riquet Nadaud, the narrator of
_La Becquée_ and _L’Enfant à la Balustrade_,[3] is a little boy who
has been sent, on the death of his mother, to live with his maternal
grandparents in their old-fashioned house in the country near La
Haye-Descartes. How charming his descriptions of the child’s walks in
the fields with brusque and capable Tante Félicie I have had occasion
to declare elsewhere. For the moment my concern is with little Nadaud
when, after his father’s re-marriage, he goes back to live with his
parents at Loches.
The stepmother is a gentle, languid, gracious creature, born in America
though French by race, a beautiful Creole from Louisiana. Needless to
say, she is bored to death at Loches--not quite at first, when her
young loveliness, her position as bride, her gift for music, ensure
her a certain social importance and consideration. But her husband,
the notary, cribbed and confined in his narrow house--mindful, too,
that his first wife’s death had been in some degree attributed to that
house’s sunlessness--secures the reversion of the handsomest building
in the town, after the actual owner’s death. Unfortunately, M. Nadaud
was not the only man who had set his heart on that comely residence!
Soon the town is up in arms against the lawyer for stealing his march
on others, and poor Tantine, the foreign wife, is left alone in her
dull parlour with Riquet for her sole society.
Riquet--and young Dr Troufleau, faithful to his friends. Excellent
Troufleau, awkwardest, honestest of men! Charming Tantine, without
an evil thought in her feather-head! Alas, opportunity, thy guilt is
great! Out of sheer boredom on her part and simple pity on his, they
are drawn quite close to the edge of the abyss--close enough to feel
its attraction, its dizzy, strange, reluctant fascination--under the
sensitive eyes of the child who knows nothing of passion or of sin.
Doubtless that innocent presence it is that saves them; they recoil in
time.
M. Nadaud at last realises that his wife is being enervated by
solitude, demoralised by idleness, deprived of energy to resist the
simplest temptations. She needs social intercourse. A few visitors, a
little appreciation of her music and her beauty, and Troufleau would
soon occupy his proper place in her regard--that of a kind, friendly
young man, smothered in an absurd frock-coat and honestly in love with
another woman.
So the husband puts his pride in his pocket, and reconciles himself
with his neighbours; and things soon right themselves. Only a child has
apprehended that which does not belong to the world of a child, only a
boy’s lofty pure-minded ideal has been injured by contact with the hard
realities of life.
Madame Tinayre, in a volume of stories, _L’Amour Pleure_ (1908),
took up the tale a few years later. Robert Marie is a lad of fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen, regarded as a ward by the notary of Beaugency and
his wife, Uncle Bon and Aunt Belle. He has no relations, only his
godfather and godmother, M. and Mme Cheverny, who live in Paris, and
who from time to time come down to see him. Robert can remember a
time, long distant, when there was no uncle Bon, no Aunt Belle, but,
so far back as his mind can carry, there have always been a M. and Mme
Cheverny, and always they have come to see him together.
He knows there is a mystery about his real parents; and the different
suppositions he makes concerning them, the gradual growth of his desire
to know who he really is, are the substance of this haunting story;
but not for a moment does he suppose that M. and Mme Cheverny (who
seem the sole links between him, poor waif, and those other boys who
have a place in the world, parents, a name) are not really M. and Mme
Cheverny, are not married: they whom he has not ever seen apart!--are
each of them married to another. And he is their son, brought up by
stealth, visited in mystery. The contrast between the passion of
these unhappy, charming parents and the robust indignant innocence of
their unconscious son is told with a sincerity and a romantic realism
peculiar, I think, to the work of Madame Tinayre.
About the same time--a year later, I think--in 1909, a young writer
from Marseilles, M. Edmond Jaloux, published his _Le Reste est
Silence_, which obtained the Prix Vie Heureuse for that year. There
are many points of contact between this novel and _L’Enfant à la
Balustrade_; but M. Jaloux has not the more than feminine delicacy,
the subtle moral tenderness of M. Boylesve. He, too, tells the story
of a small boy, the surprised, half-unconscious involuntary witness of
the growth of an unlawful love. Madame Meisserel is a less innocent,
less charming Tantine, and here, too, there is a dull, awkward, not
unpathetic husband.
The delicate sky, the gracious landscape of Touraine are replaced by
the busy brilliance of Marseilles; the key is higher, the sonority is
louder; and it is well that this is so; we need a dose of southern
brutality--or at least callousness--to enable us to digest the
supposition that it is the son of Madame Meisserel (now grown up)
who revives in reminiscence the history of his dead mother’s guilty
passion, as he witnessed it in his seventh year. How wise was M.
Boylesve to make his little boy a stepson, and the charming stepmother
almost innocent--a little frivolous at worst. We suspect Madame
Meisserel of having gone to greater lengths and yet we scarce forgive
her son his tone of superiority.
The same theme, in 1912, furnished M. Gilbert des Voisins with the
matter of _L’Enfant qui prit Peur_. Here the plot is pushed to a
tragedy; the child, aghast to find the serpent rampant in his little
Eden, and his father’s friend his mother’s lover, commits suicide. We
are still further here from M. Boylesve’s exquisite moral delicacy.
We neighbour it again in _L’Élève Gilles_, the first novel of a young
schoolmaster which, in 1912, obtained the new great prize of the
French Academy--the prize of £400, as yet only twice bestowed: once on
_Jean-Christophe_ and once on the too-slender but charming book before
us. (I mention all these prizes to show the undoubted popularity of the
theme, and may add that M. des Voisins’ book very nearly obtained a
Prix Vie Heureuse.)