A Life (7 page)

Alone, one or two melancholy toads sounded their short, monotonous croak at the moon.

Jeanne felt as though her heart were swelling, filled like this  clear night with silent susurrations and all at once teeming with a thousand roving desires like these nocturnal creatures whose rustling was all around her. By some affinity she felt at one with this living poetry; and in the soft, pale brilliance of the night she sensed a preternatural stirring, the tremor of impossible hopes, as though bliss were on the breeze.

And she began to dream of love.

Love! For the past two years it had filled her with growing anxiety at its approach. She was now free to love; all that remained was for her to meet him. Him!

What would he be like? She did not quite know, did not even speculate in the matter. Quite simply, he would be him.

All she knew was that she would adore him with her heart and soul and that he would cherish her with all his might. They would walk together on evenings such as this, beneath the ashen gleam of the stars. On they would go, hand in hand, cleaving tightly to one another, listening to each other's heart beat, feeling the warmth of the other's shoulder, mingling their love with the balm of a limpid summer's night, so completely at one that by the simple, power of their tender devotion they would be able to penetrate each other's innermost thoughts.

And things would always be thus, in the serenity of an indestructible affection.

And all at once it seemed to her that she could feel him there now, beside her; and a sudden quivering of indeterminate sensual longing ran through her from head to toe. She hugged herself, unconsciously, as though to embrace her dream; and as her lips reached out towards the unknown, there passed over them something to make her almost faint, as if the breath of spring had kissed her with a lover's kiss.

Suddenly, over there behind the house, coming from the road, she could hear footsteps in the night. And as her startled soul thrilled in a transport of belief in the impossible, in providential accidents, in divine presentiments and romantic combinations of circumstance, she thought: 'And if that were he!' She listened nervously to the rhythmic footfall of the walker, convinced that he was about to stop at the front gate and ask for shelter.

When he had passed by, she felt the sadness of a disappointment. But she realized how she had been carried away by her hopes, and she smiled at her folly.

Then, feeling a little calmer, she allowed her mind to wander along more sensible paths, trying to peer into the future, arranging her life in advance.

She would live here with him, in this peaceful chateau overlooking the sea. She would doubtless have two children, a son for him, a daughter for her. And she could see them running across the grass between the plane-tree and the lime, while father and mother looked on with delight, exchanging loving glances over their heads.

And she remained there for a long, long time, dreaming in this fashion, while the moon completed its passage across the sky and vanished beneath the sea. The air was turning cooler. In the east the horizon was brightening. A cock crowed in the farm on the right; others answered from the farm on the left. Through the walls of the hen-houses their raucous voices seemed to come from very far away; while up in the immense vault of the sky, now imperceptibly turning whiter and whiter, the stars vanished from view.

Somewhere a bird awoke and gave a tiny cry. Twittering began, timid at first, coming from amidst the foliage; then it grew bolder, turning vibrant and joyful, and was taken up from branch to branch and from tree to tree.

Suddenly Jeanne could feel brightness upon her; and raising her head which she had buried in her hands she closed her eyes, dazzled by the radiance of the dawn.

A mountainous bank of crimson clouds, partly hidden behind the great avenue of poplars, cast glimmers of blood-red light upon the wakened earth.

And slowly, piercing the brilliance of the mists, darting fire upon the trees, and the plain, and the ocean, and across the whole horizon, the huge, blazing globe shone forth.

And Jeanne began to feel a wild happiness. A sense of delirious joy, an infinite tenderness at the splendour of things, filled her heart to bursting. This was her sun! her dawn! the beginning of  her life! the daybreak of her aspirations! She stretched out her arms towards the radiant space, desirous of embracing the sun itself; she wanted to speak out, to proclaim a message as holy as the birth of this day; but she remained dumbstruck in her impotent enthusiasm. Then, placing her forehead in her hands, she felt her eyes fill with tears; and she wept, deliciously.

When she looked up again, the magnificent display of the new dawn had already vanished. She, too, felt spent and a little weary, as through her fires had cooled. Leaving the window open she went and lay on the bed, turning things over in her mind for a few minutes longer before falling into such a deep sleep that at eight o'clock she failed to hear her father calling her and woke only when he came into her room.

He wanted to show her all the things that had been done to the house, to
her
house.

The front of the house faced inland and was separated from the road by a vast courtyard planted with apple-trees. This roada so-called parish wayran between the peasants' small-holdings and joined the main highway from Le Havre to Fécamp some half a league hence.

A straight avenue led from the wooden entrance-gate to the front steps. The outhouseslow buildings rendered with shingle and topped with thatchextended on either side of the courtyard, along the length of the ditches separating it from the two farms.

The roofing on the old manor-house had been replaced; all the woodwork had been restored, the walls repaired, the rooms repapered, and the whole of the interior repainted. And against its weathered exterior the new shutters, painted a silvery white, looked like stains, as did the patches of fresh plaster against the broad, grey surface of the front façade.

The other side of the house, in which one of Jeanne's bedroom windows was situated, afforded a distant view of the sea, over the copse and the screen of elms gnawed away the wind.

Arm in arm, Jeanne and the Baron inspected everything, each little nook and cranny; and then they strolled along the long avenues of poplars which formed the boundary of what was called  the park. The grass had grown long beneath the trees, spreading out in a carpet of green. The copse, at the far end, was an enchanting spot with its muddle of tiny, twisting paths separated by leafy partitions. A hare started up suddenly, alarming Jeanne, and then leapt over the bank and made off through the gorse towards the cliff

After lunch Madame Adélaïde, who was still exhausted, announced that she was retiring to rest, and the Baron suggested that they went down to Yport.

Off they went, passing first through the hamlet of Étouvent, in which Les Peuples was located.
*
Three farmhands greeted them as if they had know them all their lives.

They entered the woodland that slopes down a twisting valley towards the sea.

Presently the village of Yport came into sight. Women, sitting on their front steps mending clothes, watched them as they passed by. The main street ran downhill, with a gutter in the middle and piles of rubbish standing by the doorways, and it gave off a strong smell of pickling brine. Brown fishing-nets, with gleaming scales sticking to them here and there like tiny silver coins, were hanging out to dry against the cottage-doors, while from inside came the various aromas generated by these large families, each one crowded together into a single room.

One or two pigeons were walking along the edge of the gutter in search of sustenance.

Jeanne took in the scene, which for her had the interest and novelty of a stage set.

But suddenly, rounding the end of a wall, she caught sight of the sea, a smooth, dark expanse of blue stretching away as far as the eye could see.

They stopped, opposite the beach, and gazed. Out at sea sails were passing, white as bird's wings. To right and left loomed the towering cliff. A headland of sorts interrupted the view in one direction, while in the other the coastline extended indefinitely until it was no more than a faint smudge.

A harbour and some houses could be seen in one of its nearer  indentations; and tiny little waves, edging the sea with a frill of foam, plashed gently onto the shingle.

The local fishing-boats had been hauled up the sloping beach over the smooth pebbles and lay on their sides, proffering their shiny, plumb, pitch-coated cheeks to the sun. A few fishermen were getting them ready for the evening tide.

A sailor came up selling fish, and Jeanne bought a brill, which she insisted on carrying back to Les Peuples herself.

Then the man offered his services for boat-trips, repeating his name in emphatic sequence to impress it on the memory: 'Lastique, Joséphin Lastique.'

The Baron promised not to forget it.

They turned and headed back towards the chateau.

As Jeanne found the fish tiring to carry, she poked her father's walking-stick through its gills, and each took one end; and merrily they climbed back up the hill again, chatting away like two children, faces to the wind and eyes shining, while the brill, which felt heavier and heavier, swept the grass with its oily tail.

II

For Jeanne a charming life of freedom now began. She read, she daydreamed, she wandered about by herself in the surrounding countryside. She ambled aimlessly along the roads, her thoughts far away; or else she scampered down the little winding valleys where, like golden copes, a shock of flowering gorse topped the ridges on either side. Its sweet, pungent smell, intensified by the heat, turned her head like fragrant wine; and the distant sound of waves breaking on a beach bore her spirits up on a swell of peace.

Sometimes she would have to lie down on a bank of thick grass, overcome by lassitude; while at other moments she would suddenly, at a bend in the valley or through a gap in the grass, catch sight of a corner of blue sea sparkling in the sunshine, with a sail visible in the distance, and she would be filled with unruly joy as though at the mysterious approach of imminent felicities.

In the fresh and gentle air of this place and amid the calm serenity of its smoothly curved horizons, she grew to love the solitude; and she would remain sitting on the hilltops for so long that little wild rabbits would come bounding past her feet.

Often she would start running along the clifftop, exhilarated by the lightness of the air and tremulous with the exquisite delight of being able to move about as effortlessly as the fishes in the water or the swallows in the sky.

She made memories wherever she went, like a sower casting seed upon the soil, memories of the kind so deep-rooted that they remain unto death. She felt as though she were strewing her heart amidst all the clefts and folds of these valleys.

She developed a passion for bathing. She would swim off into the distance, strong and bold, oblivious to the danger. It felt good to be in this cold, clear, blue water that lifted her up and rocked her to and fro. When she was far from the shore, she would lie on her back, her arms folded across her chest, and gaze into the deep blue of the sky broken only by the sudden flight of a swallow or the white silhouette of a seabird. From here nothing could be  heard but the distant murmur of the waves breaking on the shingle and faint, indeterminate sounds coming off the land, which barely carried to her across the undulations of the waves. Then Jeanne would sit up in the water, let out piercing shrieks of sudden, frantic joy, and slap the surface of the sea with the palms of her hands.

Sometimes, when she ventured out too far, a fishing-boat would come and fetch her.

She would return to the house, pale from hunger but with a spring in her step, invigorated, a smile playing on her lips and eyes brimming with happiness.

The Baron, meanwhile, was planning great agricultural schemes. He wanted to experiment, to introduce reforms, to try out new equipment and acclimatize new breeds; and he spent part of his day in conversation with the farmers, who would shake their heads in sceptical distrust at his initiatives.

Frequently he would accompany the fishermen of Yport out to sea. Once he had visited all the caves and springs and rock pinnacles in the area, he wanted to fish as though he were just a simple fisherman like them.

On the days when there was a good breeze, when the plump hull rides the crest of the waves under a filling sail and from each side of the boat the long fishing-line stretches away down into the sea, pursued by shoals of mackerel, he would be there, his hand trembling with anxiety, holding the thin string that quivers as soon as a fish is hooked and begins to struggle.

He would go out by moonlight to lift the nets which had been laid the night before. He loved to hear the creaking of the mast and to breathe in the sharp gusts of cool night air; and having tacked about in search of his buoys, taking his bearings from the jagged outline of a rock, the roof of a churchtower, or the light-house at Fécamp, he loved just to drift quietly in the first rays of the rising sun, which glistened on the slimy backs of the large, fan-shaped skate and on the fat bellies of the turbot lying on the boat-deck

At each mealtime he would regale them with enthusiastic accounts of his excursions; and in turn Mama would tell him how  many times she had walked up and down the great avenue of poplars, the one on the right by the Couillards' farm, the other being insufficiently in the sun.

Ever since she had been advised to 'exercise', she had become a determined walker. As soon as the dampness of early morning was gone, she would come downstairs on Rosalie's arm, wrapped in a cloak and two shawls, with a black hooded bonnet pulled down over her head, itself further covered by a red knitted scarf.

Then, dragging her left foot, which was slightly heavier and which had already traced two dusty furrows all the way up and down the path where the grass had been worn away, she set off once more on the endless journey which brought her in a straight line from the corner of the house to the first shrubs on the edge of the copse. She had had a bench placed at each end of this itinerary; and every five minutes she would stop and say to the poor, long-suffering maid supporting her: