A Life (8 page)

'Let's sit down, my dear. I am a little tired.'

And with each rest she would leave an article of clothing behind on the bench, first the scarf from round her head, then a shawl, and then the other shawl, the bonnet, and finally the cloak. This resulted in two large piles of clothing at each end of the avenue, which Rosalie would carry back on her free arm when they went in for lunch.

And in the afternoon the Baroness would begin again at a more leisurely pace, taking longer rests and sometimes dozing off for as much as an hour on a chaise-longue which had been wheeled outside for her.

She called this taking 'her' exercise, just as she used to refer to 'my' hypertrophy.

A doctor she had consulted ten years earlier about her shortness of breath had talked of hypertrophy. Since then this word, the meaning of which she barely understood, had remained fixed in her mind. She would insist on the Baron, and Jeanne, and Rosalie each feeling her heart, though they no longer could, buried as it now was beneath the bloated mass of her chest. But she energetically refused to allow herself to be examined by any new doctor in case further ailments were discovered; and she  would talk of 'her' hypertrophy at every opportunity and with such frequency that it appeared as though this condition were peculiar to her, as if it belonged to her as something unique over which other people had no rights.

The Baron would talk of 'my wife's hypertrophy' and Jeanne of 'Mummy's hypertrophy' the way one referred to her dress, or her hat, or her umbrella.

She had been very pretty in her youth and pencil thin. Having waltzed in the arms of every man in uniform under the Empire, she had read
Corinne
,
*
which made her cry; and this novel had, as it were, left its mark on her ever since.

As her figure had grown stouter, so her soul had taken wing on more poetic flights of fancy; and when corpulence at length confined her to an armchair, her thoughts began to rove through a series of amorous fantasies of which she imagined herself the heroine. Among these she had her favourites, which she would actively recall to mind in the course of her dreaming, like a music box being constantly rewound and playing the same tune over and over again. All those langorous romances about swallows and captive maidens
*
never failed to bring a tear to her eye; and she was even quite fond of some bawdy songs by Béranger
*
on account of their wistful sentiments.

Often she would sit motionless, for hours on end, lost in her dream world; and living at Les Peuples gave her enormous pleasure because it provided the scenery for her soul's imaginings. The surrounding woods, the deserted heath, the vicinity of the sea, all of it reminded her of the novels by Walter Scott
*
which she had been reading for the past few months.

On rainy days she would remain closeted in her bedroom, going through what she called her 'relics'. These were all the old letters she had kept, from her father and mother, from the Baron during their engagement, and from others besides.

She kept them locked away in a mahogany writing-desk surmounted at each corner by brass sphinxes; and in a special voice she would say: 'Rosalie, my dear, bring me my memory drawer.'

The maid would open the desk, take out the drawer, and place it on a chair beside her mistress, who then slowly began to read  the letters, one by one, occasionally shedding a tear over them.

From time to time Jeanne would take Rosalie's place and accompany Mama on her walk, listening as she reminisced about her childhood. The young girl could see herself in these stories of former days, and was startled by the similarity of their thoughts, by the kinship of their desires; for every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth.

Their slow progress matched the slow pace of the narrative, which was sometimes interrupted for a few moments by bouts of breathlessness; and then Jeanne's thoughts would race ahead of the stories newly begun, towards a future filled with joyful events, and she would revel in her happy expectations.

One afternoon, as they were resting on the far bench, she suddenly caught sight of a fat priest coming towards them from the other end of the avenue.

He greeted them from a distance, assumed a smiling expression, and then greeted them again when he was three paces away, enquiring loudly:

'Well now, your ladyship,' and how are we today?'

It was the local priest.

Having been born in the days of the Enlightenment thinkers
*
and then brought up during the Revolutionary period by a father who was a non-believer, Mama seldom went to church, although some manner of female religious instinct made her fond of clerics.

She had quite forgotten about the Abbé Picot, her priest, and blushed on seeing him. She apologized, for not having spared him the obligation of paying a call on them. But the fellow did not seem to have taken umbrage; he looked at Jeanne and complimented her on her healthy appearance, then sat down, placed his priest's three-cornered hat on his knees, and mopped his brow. He was extremely fat and extremely red in the face, and he was sweating profusely. He kept removing from his pocket an enormous check handkerchief which was drenched in perspiration, and wiping it across his face and neck; but hardly had this damp  piece of cloth been returned to the black depths of his clerical habit than new beads of sweat formed on his skin and dripped onto the bulge of his cassock-clad stomach, fixing the errant particles of road dust into little round stains.

He was a cheerful sort, the typical country priest, tolerant, garrulous, and altogether a good fellow. He told them stories, talked about the local people, and seemed not to have noticed that his two female parishioners had not yet been to church, the Baroness having been as remiss in this respect as she was uncertain in her faith, and Jeanne having been only too happy to be released from the convent where she had tasted her fill of religious ceremonies.

The Baron appeared. His pantheistic beliefs made him indifferent to all dogma. He was amiably civil towards the Abbé, whom he knew slightly, and invited him to stay for dinner.

The priest knew how to make himself welcome thanks to that intuitive skill which the cure of souls gives to even the most ordinary of men who are called by the chance of events to exercise power over their fellows.

The Baroness made a fuss of him, perhaps drawn to him by the kind of affinity which brings people of a similar nature together, since the ruddy face and breathlessness of this portly man appealed to her in her wheezing obesity.

By the time they had reached dessert, his good spirits were quite those of the feasting curate, that relaxed familiarity which comes with the end of a convivial meal.

And all at once, as though struck by a sudden, happy thought, he exclaimed:

'But wait, I have a new parishioner I must introduce to you, Monsieur le Vicomte de Lamare!'

The Baroness, who had the entire armorial of the province at her fingertips, enquired:

'Is he one of the Lamares de l'Eure?'

The priest bowed:

'Yes, Madame, he is the son of the Vicomte Jean de Lamare, who died last year.'

Then Madame Adélaïde, who treasured the nobility above all  else, asked a whole series of questions and learnt that the young man, having paid his father's debts and sold the family mansion, had found himself a small hunting-lodge on one of the three farms which he owned in the commune of Étouvent. These estates brought in some five to six thousand a year in total; but the Vicomte, being of a thrifty and sober disposition, intended to spend the next two or three years living simply in this modest
pied-à-terre
in order to accumulate sufficient funds to cut a figure in the world and marry well without incurring debts or mortgaging his farms.

The priest added:

'He's such a charming fellow, so sensible and mild-mannered. But he doesn't find much to amuse him round here.'

The Baron answered:

'Then bring him to see us, Monsieur l'Abbé. Perhaps that may offer him some distraction from time to time.'

And they began to talk of other things.

When they went into the drawing-room after coffee, the priest asked if he might take a turn round the garden, being accustomed to a little exercise after his meals. The Baron accompanied him. Slowly they walked the length of the white-fronted chateau before retracing their steps. Their shadows, the one thin, the other round and wearing a mushroom on its head, came and went, now before them, now behind, depending on whether they were walking towards the moon or away from it. The priest was chewing a kind of cigarette which he had taken out of his pocket. He explained its use with a countryman's frankness:

'It helps me belch. My digestion's not very good.'

Then, promptly looking up at the bright moon riding in the sky, he declared:

'Ah, there's a sight one never tires of.'

And he went in to take his leave of the ladies.

III

On the following Sunday the Baroness and Jeanne went to Mass, out of tactful deference towards their priest.

They waited for him after the service in order to invite him to lunch on Thursday. He came out of the vestry arm-in-arm with a tall, elegant young man. On catching sight of the two ladies, he gestured in delighted surprise and exclaimed:

'How opportune! Allow me, your ladyship, Mademoiselle Jeanne, to introduce to you your neighbour, Monsieur le Vicomte de Lamare'.

The Vicomte bowed, said how he had long wished to make the ladies' acquaintance, and began to converse with the easy, well-bred assurance of a man who has lived. He had one of those fortunate faces which women dream about and all men find disagreeable. His black, curly hair cast a shadow over his smooth, tanned forehead; and two large eyebrows, as regular in shape as though they had been artificially drawn, lent depth and tenderness to his dark eyes, the whites of which seemed faintly tinged with blue.

His long, thick eyelashes lent his expression the passionate eloquence that unnerves the grand lady in her drawing-room and makes the young lass in a bonnet turn to look as she carries her basket through the streets.

The languid charm of this look suggested a profundity of thought and made his slightest remark seem important.

The beard, thick, glossy, and finely combed, concealed a slightly too prominent jaw.

They parted after many civilities.

Two days later Monsieur de Lamare paid his first visit.

He arrived as they were trying out a garden bench which had just been installed that very morning beneath the tall plane-tree opposite the drawing-room windows. The Baron wanted another placed beneath the lime-tree to balance it: Mama, an enemy of symmetry, did not. The Vicomte, on being  consulted, was of the same view as the Baroness.

Then he spoke of the region, which he declared to be very 'pictureseque', having chanced in the course of his solitary walks upon many ravishing 'beauty spots'. From time to time his eyes would, as though by chance, encounter Jeanne's; and she was left with a singular sensation by this sudden, rapidly averted gaze in which there appeared appreciative admiration and the beginnings of an instinctive compatibility.

As it turned out, Monsieur de Lamare senior, who had died the previous year, had known an intimate friend of Monsieur des Cultaux, Mama's father; and the discovery of this acquaintanceship occasioned an endless conversation about marriages, dates, and relations. The Baroness performed progidious feats of memory as she traced the ascendants and descendants of other family trees, never losing track as she circulated in the complex labyrinth of genealogies.

'Tell me, Vicomte, have you heard mention of the Saunoys de Varfleur? The eldest son, Gontran, married a Coursil girl, one of the Coursil-Courvilles, and the youngest married one of my cousins, Mademoiselle de la Roche-Aubert, who was related by marriage to the Crisange family. Well, Monsieur de Crisange was a close friend of my father's and must have known your father also.'

'Yes, Madame. Wasn't that the Monsieur de Crisange who emigrated and whose son lost all his money?'

'The very same. He asked for my aunt's hand in marriage, after the death of her husband, the Comte d'Éretry; but she wouldn't have him on account of the fact that he took snuff. By the way, do you know what became of the Viloises? They left the Touraine around 1813, after a number of reverses, and went to live in the Auvergne, and I've not heard of them since.'

'I think, Madame, that the old Marquis died after falling off his horse, and left one daughter married to an Englishman and the other to somebody called Basolle, a tradesman, and a rich one by all accounts, who had seduced her.'

Names heard and recalled since childhood from the conversations of elderly relatives now came back to them. And the  marriages which had taken place within these families of equivalent rank assumed the importance of major public events in their eyes. They spoke of people they had never met as though they knew them well; while these same people, in other parts of the country, spoke of them in the same manner; and across the distances they felt intimately connected, almost by friendship, by marriage even, in virtue of this simple fact of belonging to the same class, the same caste, of being of equal blood.

The Baron, by nature somewhat antisocial and by education out of sympathy with the beliefs and prejudices of the people of his own set, hardly knew the local families at all, and so questioned the Vicomte about them.

Monsieur de Lamare replied: 'Oh, there's not much in the way of nobility round here,' rather in the tone of one declaring that there were very few rabbits along this part of the coast. And he gave details. Only three families were to be found within a relatively short distance: the Marquis de Coutulier, who was, in a manner of speaking, the head of the Norman nobility; the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Briseville, persons of excellent breeding but who lived rather cut off from the world; and finally the Comte de Fourville, a sort of monstrous bogeyman who was said to make life mortally wretched for his wife and who lived the life of a huntsman in his manor-house at La Vrillette, which had been built in the middle of a lake.