Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (59 page)

They entered the forest of Franchard. The carriage glided over the grass like a sleigh; pigeons which they could not see began cooing. Suddenly, the waiter of a café made his appearance, and they got down in front of the gate of a garden full of round tables. Then, passing the walls of a ruined abbey, they made their way over some big boulders, and soon reached the lower part of the gorge.

It is covered on one side with sandstones and juniper-trees tangled together, while on the other side the ground, almost quite bare, slopes towards the hollow of the valley, where a path makes a pale line through the purple heather; and far above could be traced a flat cone-shaped summit with a telegraph-tower behind it.

Half-an-hour later they stepped out of the vehicle once more, in order to climb the heights of Aspremont.

The roads form zigzags between the thick-set pine-trees under rocks with angular outlines. All this corner of the forest has a sort of muffled, wild and solitary look. It brings up thoughts of hermits—companions of huge stags with fiery crosses between their horns, who welcomed with paternal smiles the good kings of France when they knelt before their grottoes. The warm air was filled with a resinous odour, and roots of trees crossed one another like veins close to the soil. Rosanette stumbled over them, grew dejected, and wanted to cry.

But, at the very top, she became joyous once more on finding, under a roof made of branches, a sort of tavern where carved wood was sold. She drank a bottle of lemonade, and bought a holly-stick; and, without one glance towards the landscape which disclosed itself from the plateau, she entered the Brigands’ Cave, with a waiter carrying a torch in front of her. Their carriage was awaiting them in the Bas Breau.

A painter in a blue smock was working at the foot of an oak-tree with his box of colours on his knees. He raised his head and watched them as they passed.

In the middle of the hill of Chailly, the sudden breaking of a cloud caused them to pull up the hoods of their cloaks. Almost immediately the rain stopped, and the paving-stones of the street glistened under the sun when they were re-entering the town.

Some travellers, who had recently arrived, informed them that a terrible battle had stained Paris with blood.
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Rosanette and her lover were not surprised. Then everybody left; the hotel became quiet, the gas was put out, and they were lulled to sleep by the murmur of the fountain in the courtyard.

On the following day they went to see the Wolf’s Gorge, the Fairies’ Pool, the Long Rock, and the
Marlotte.
Two days later, they began again at random, just as their coachman thought fit to drive them, without asking where they were, and often even neglecting the famous sites.

They felt so comfortable in their old landau, low as a sofa, and covered with a rug made of a striped material which was quite faded. The ditches, filled with brushwood, stretched out under their eyes with a gentle, continuous movement. White rays passed like arrows through the tall ferns. Sometimes a road that was no longer used appeared straight in front of them, and here and there was a feeble growth of weeds. In the centre between four cross-roads, a crucifix extended its four arms. In other places, stakes were bending down like dead trees, and little curved paths, which were lost under the leaves, made them feel a longing to pursue them. At the same moment the horse turned round; they entered there; they plunged into the mud. Further down moss had sprouted out at the edges of the deep ruts.

They believed that they were far away from all other people, quite alone. But suddenly a game-keeper with his gun, or a band of women in rags with big bundles of sticks on their backs, would hurry past them.

When the carriage stopped, there was a universal silence. The only sounds that reached them were the breathing of the horse in the shafts with the faint, repeated cry of a bird.

The light at certain points illuminating the outskirts of the wood, left the interior in deep shadow, or else, dimmed in the foreground by a sort of dusk, it exhibited in the background a violet mist, a white radiance. The midday sun, falling directly on wide tracts of greenery, made splashes of light over them, hung gleaming drops of silver from the ends of the branches, streaked the grass with long lines of emeralds, and flung gold spots on the beds of dead leaves. When they let their heads fall back, they could distinguish the sky through the tops of the trees. Some of them, which were enormously high, looked like patriarchs or emperors, or, touching one another at their extremities formed with their long shafts, as it were, triumphal arches; others, growing obliquely from their base, looked like falling columns. Occasionally this array of vertical lines would open out. Then, enormous green waves rolling away in unequal curves to the bottom of the valleys, towards which advanced the crests of other hills looking down on blond plains, which ended by losing themselves in a misty paleness.

Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of their souls, with an abundance of energy and joy which they could not explain.

The variety of trees furnished a diversified spectacle. The beeches with their smooth white bark twisted their tops together. Ash trees softly curved their bluish branches. In the tufts of the hornbeams rose up holly stiff as bronze. Then came a row of thin birches, bent into elegiac attitudes; and the pine-trees, symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to be singing a song as they swayed to and fro. There were gigantic guarled oaks which writhed as they strained upward from the ground pressed close against each other, and with firm torso-like trunks launched forth to heaven desperate appeals with their bare arms like a group of Titans struck motionless in their rage. An atmosphere of gloom, a feverish languor, brooded over the pools, whose sheets of water were overshadowed by thorn-trees. The lichens on their banks, where the wolves come to drink, are of the colour of sulphur, burnt, as it were, by the footprints of witches, and the incessant croaking of the frogs responds to the cawing of the crows as they wheel through the air. After this they passed through the monotonous glades, planted here and there with saplings. The sound of iron falling with a succession of rapid blows could be heard. On the side of the hill a group of quarrymen were breaking the rocks. These rocks became more and more numerous and finally filled up the entire landscape, cube-shaped like houses, flat like flag-stones, propping up, overhanging, and became intermingled with each other, as if they were the ruins, unrecognisable and monstrous, of some vanished city. But the wild chaos they exhibited made one rather dream of volcanoes, of deluges, of great unknown cataclysms. Frédéric said they had been there since the beginning of the world, and would remain so till the end. Rosanette turned aside her head, declaring that this would drive her out of her mind, and went off to collect sweet heather. The little violet blossoms, packed close together grew in patches, and the soil, which came away from their roots, made a soft dark fringe on the sand spangled with quartz.

One day they reached a point half-way up a hill, where the soil was full of sand. Its surface, untrodden till now, was streaked resembling symmetrical waves. Here and there, like promontories on the dry bed of an ocean, rose rocks with the vague outlines of animals, tortoises thrusting forward their heads, crawling seals, hippopotami, and bears. Not a soul around them. Not a single sound. The sand glowed under the dazzling rays of the sun, and all at once in this vibration of light the animals seemed to move. They hurried away quickly, flying from the dizziness that had seized hold of them, almost frightened.

The solemnity of the forest exercised an influence over them, and hours passed in silence, during which, allowing themselves to yield to the lulling effects of springs, they remained as it were sunk in a calm intoxication. With his arm around her waist, he listened to her talking while the birds were warbling, noticed with the same glance the black grapes on her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the folds of her veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another, as a curiosity, cobwebs hanging from bushes, holes in the middle of stones full of water, a squirrel on the branches, the way in which two butterflies kept flying after them; or else, twenty yards from them, under the trees, a doe strode on peacefully, with an air of nobility and gentleness, its fawn walking by its side.

Rosanette would have liked to run after it to embrace it.

She got very much alarmed once, when a man suddenly appeared and showed her three vipers in a box. She wildly flung herself into Frédéric’s arms. He felt happy at the thought that she was weak and that he was strong enough to defend her.

That evening they dined at an inn on the banks of the Seine. The table was near the window, Rosanette sitting opposite him, and he contemplated her little fine white nose, her upturned lips, her bright eyes, the cascading tresses of her chestnut hair, and her pretty oval face. Her dress of raw silk clung to her slightly sloping shoulders, and her two hands, emerging from their cuffs—cut up her food, poured out wine, moved over the table-cloth. The waiters placed before them a chicken with its four limbs stretched out, a stew of eels in a clay dish, bad wine, bread that was too hard, and knives with notches in them. All these things increased their pleasure, added to the illusion. It was as if they were travelling in Italy on their honeymoon. Before starting again they went for a walk along the bank of the river.

The soft blue sky, rounded like a dome, leaned on the horizon over the jagged outline of the woods. On the opposite side, at the end of the meadow, there was a village steeple; and further away, to the left, the roof of a house made a red spot on the river, which wound its way without any apparent motion. Some rushes bent over it, however, and the water lightly shook some poles with nets fixed at its edge. A wicker trap and two or three old fishing-boats there. Near the inn a girl in a straw hat was drawing buckets of water out of a well. Every time they came up again, Frédéric heard the grating sound of the chain with a feeling of inexpressible delight.

He had no doubt that he would be happy till the end of his days, so natural did his contentment feel to him, so much a part of his life, and so intimately associated with this woman’s being. He was irresistibly impelled to address her with endearments. She answered with affectionate words, light taps on the shoulder, displays of tenderness that charmed him by their unexpectedness. He discovered in her quite a new sort of beauty, in fact, which was perhaps only the reflection of surrounding things, unless it happened to blossom from their hidden potential.

When they were resting in the open country, he would stretch himself out with his head on her lap, under the shelter of her parasol; or else they’d lie flat on their stomachs in the grass, face to face, gazing at each other so that their pupils seemed to intermingle, thirsting for one another and ever satiating their thirst, and then with half-closed eyelids they lay side by side without uttering a single word.

Now and then the distant rolling of a drum reached their ears. It was the signal-drum which was being beaten in the different villages calling on people to go and defend Paris.

“Oh! yes! ’tis the riots!” said Frédéric, with a disdainful pity, all this agitation seemed like misery to him compared to their love and eternal nature.

And they talked about whatever happened to come into their heads, things that were perfectly familiar to them, persons in whom they took no interest, a thousand trivialities. She chatted with him about her chambermaid and her hairdresser. One day she forgot herself to the point that she told him her age-twenty-nine years. She was becoming quite an old woman.

Several times, without intending it, she gave him some particulars with reference to her own life. She had been a “shop girl,” had taken a trip to England, and had begun studying for the stage; all this she told without any explanation of how these changes had come about; and he found it impossible to reconstruct her entire history.

She related to him more about herself one day when they were seated side by side under a plane-tree at the back of a meadow. At the road-side, further down, a little barefooted girl, standing amid a heap of dust, was leading a cow to pasture. As soon as she caught sight of them she came up to beg, and while with one hand she held up her tattered petticoat, she kept scratching with the other her black hair, which, like a wig of Louis XIV’s time, curled round her dark face, lighted by a magnificent pair of eyes.

“She will be very pretty one day,” said Frédéric.

“How lucky she is, if she has no mother!” remarked Rosanette.

“Eh? How is that?”

“Certainly. I, if it were not for mine—”

She sighed, and began to speak about her childhood. Her parents were weavers in the Croix-Rousse.
^ce
She acted as an apprentice to her father. In vain did the poor man wear himself out with hard work; his wife was continually abusing him, and sold everything for drink. Rosanette could see, as if it were yesterday, the room they occupied with the looms arranged lengthwise against the windows, the pot boiling on the stove, the bed painted like fake mahogany, a cupboard facing it, and the obscure loft where she used to sleep up to the time when she was fifteen years old. At last a gentleman made his appearance on the scene—a fat man with a face of the colour of boxwood, a pious look, and a suit of black clothes. Her mother and this man had a conversation together, with the result that three days later—Rosanette stopped, and with a look in which there was as much bitterness as shamelessness:

“It was done!”

Then, in response to a gesture of Frédéric:

“As he was married (he would have been afraid of compromising himself in his own house), I was brought to a private room in a restaurant, and told that I would be happy, that I would get a handsome present.