SECOND PART

i

We arrived at La Morinière in the first days of July, having stayed in Paris only just long enough to do our shopping and pay a very few visits.

La Morinière is situated, as I have told you, between Lisieux and Pont-L’Evêque in the shadiest, wettest country I know. Innumerable narrow coombes and gently rounded hills terminate near the wide ‘Vallée d’Auge,’ which then stretches in an uninterrupted plain as far as the sea. There is no horizon; some few copse-woods, filled with mysterious shade, some few fields of corn, but chiefly meadow land—softly sloping pastures, where the lush grass is mown twice a year, where the apple-trees, when the sun is low, join shadow to shadow, where flocks and herds graze untended; in every hollow there is water—pond or pool or river; from every side comes the continual murmur of streams.

Oh, how well I remembered the house! its blue roofs, its walls of stone and brick, its moat, the reflections in the still waters.... It was an old house which would easily have lodged a dozen persons; Marceline, three servants, and myself, who occasionally lent a helping hand, found it all we could do to animate a part of it. Our old bailiff, who was called Bocage, had already done his best to prepare some of the rooms; the old furniture awoke from its twenty years’ slumber; everything had remained just as I remembered it—the panelling not too dilapidated, the rooms easy to live in. Bocage, to welcome us, had put flowers in all the vases he could lay hands on. He had had the large courtyard and the nearest paths in the park weeded and raked. When we arrived, the sun’s last rays were falling on the house, and from the valley facing it a mist had arisen which hovered there motionless, masking and revealing the river. We had not well arrived, when all at once I recognized the scent of the grass; and when I heard the piercing cries of the swallows as they flew round the house, the whole past suddenly rose up, as though it had been lying in wait for my approach to close over and submerge me.

In a few days the house was more or less comfortable; I might have settled down to work; but I delayed, at first still listening to the voice of my past as it recalled its slightest details to my memory, and then too much absorbed by an unwonted emotion. Marceline, a week after our arrival, confided to me that she was expecting a child.

Thenceforward I thought I owed her redoubled care, and that she had a right to greater tenderness than ever; at any rate during the first weeks that followed her confidence, I spent almost every minute of the day in her company. We used to go and sit near the wood, on a bench where in old days I had been used to sit with my mother; there, each moment brought us a richer pleasure, each hour passed with a smoother flow. If no distinct memory of this period of my life stands out for me, it is not because I am less deeply grateful for it—but because everything in it melted and mingled into a state of changeless ease, in which evening joined morning without a break, in which day passed into day without a surprise.

I gradually set to work again with a quiet mind, in possession of itself, certain of its strength, looking calmly and confidently to the future; with a will that seemed softened, as though by harkening to the counsels of that temperate land.

There can be no doubt, I thought, that the example of such a land, where everything is ripening towards fruition and harvest, must have the best of influences on me. I looked forward with admiring wonder to the tranquil promise of the great oxen and fat cows that grazed in those opulent meadows. The apple-trees, planted in order on the sunniest slopes of the hill-sides, gave hopes this summer of a magnificent crop. I saw in my mind’s eye the rich burden of fruit which would soon bow down their branches. From this ordered abundance, this joyous acceptance of service imposed, this smiling cultivation, had arisen a harmony that was the result not of chance but of intention, a rhythm, a beauty, at once human and natural, in which the teeming fecundity of nature and the wise effort of man to regulate it, were combined in such perfect agreement, that one no longer knew which was most admirable. What would man’s effort be worth, thought I, without the savagery of the power it controls? What would the wild rush of these upwelling forces become without the intelligent effort that banks it, curbs it, leads it by such pleasant ways to its outcome of luxury? And I let myself go in a dream of lands where every force should be so regulated, all expenditure so compensated, all exchanges so strict, that the slightest waste would be appreciable; then I applied my dream to life and imagined a code of ethics which should institute the scientific and perfect utilization of a man’s self by a controlling intelligence.

Where had my rebelliousness vanished to? Where was it hiding itself? It seemed never to have existed, so tranquil was I. The rising tide of my love had swept it all away.

Meanwhile old Bocage bustled round us; he gave directions, he superintended, he advised; his need of feeling himself indispensable was tiresome in the extreme. In order not to hurt his feelings I had to go over his accounts and listen for hours to his endless explanations. Even that was not enough; I had to visit the estate with him. His sententious truisms, his continual speeches, his evident self-satisfaction, the display he made of his honesty drove me to exasperation; he became more and more persistent and there was nothing I would not have done to recover my liberty, when an unexpected occurrence brought about a change in my relations with him. One evening Bocage announced that he was expecting his son Charles the next day.

I said, “Oh!” rather casually, having so far troubled myself very little as to any children Bocage might or might not have; then, seeing my indifference offended him and that he expected some expression of interest and surprise, “Where has he been?” I asked.

“In a model farm near Alençon,” answered Bocage.

“How old is he now? About...?” I went on, calculating the age of this son, of whose existence I had so far been totally unaware, and leaving him time enough to interrupt me....

“Past seventeen,” went on Bocage. “He was not much more than four when your father’s good lady died. Ah! He’s a big lad now; he’ll know more than his dad soon....” Once Bocage was started, nothing could stop him, not even the boredom I very plainly showed.

I had forgotten all about this, when the next evening, Charles, newly arrived from his journey, came to pay his respects to Marceline and me. He was a fine strong young fellow, so exuberantly healthy, so lissom, so well-made, that not even the frightful town clothes he had put on in our honour could make him look ridiculous; his shyness hardly added anything to the fine natural red of his cheeks. He did not look more than fifteen, his eyes were so bright and so childlike; he expressed himself clearly, without embarrassment, and, unlike his father, did not speak when he had nothing to say. I cannot remember what we talked about that first evening; I was so busy looking at him that I found nothing to say and let Marceline do all the talking. But next day, for the first time, I did not wait for old Bocage to come and fetch me, in order to go down to the farm, where I knew they were starting work on a pond that had to be repaired.

This pond—almost as big as a lake—was leaking. The leak had been located and had to be cemented. In order to do this, the pond had first to be drained, a thing that had not been done for fifteen years. It was full of carp and tench, great creatures, some of them, that lay at the bottom of the pond without ever coming up. I wanted to stock the moat with some of these fish and give some to the labourers, so that upon this occasion the pleasure of a fishing party was added to the day’s work, as could be seen from the extraordinary animation of the farm; some children from the neighbourhood had joined the workers and Marceline herself had promised to come down later.

The water had already been sinking for some time when I got there. Every now and then a great ripple suddenly stirred its surface and the brown backs of the disturbed fish came into sight. The children paddling in the puddles round the edges, amused themselves with catching gleaming handfuls of small fry, which they flung into pails of clear water. The water in the pond was muddy and soon became more and more thick and troubled owing to the agitation of the fish. Their abundance was beyond all expectation; four farm labourers, dipping into the water at random, pulled them out in handfuls. I was sorry that Marceline had not arrived and decided to run and fetch her, when a shout signalled the appearance of the first eels. But no-one could succeed in catching them; they slipped between the men’s fingers. Charles, who up till then had been standing beside his father on the bank, could restrain himself no longer; he took off his shoes and socks in a moment, flung aside his coat and waistcoat, then, tucking up his trousers and shirtsleeves as high as they would go, stepped resolutely into the mud. I immediately did the same.

“Charles!” I cried, “it was a good thing you came back yesterday, wasn’t it?” He was already too busy with his fishing to answer, but he looked at me, laughing. I called him after a moment to help me catch a big eel; we joined hands in trying to hold it.... Then came another and another; our faces were splashed with mud; sometimes the ooze suddenly gave way beneath us and we sank into it up to our waists; we were soon drenched. In the ardour of the sport, we barely exchanged a shout or two, a word or two; but at the end of the day, I became aware I was saying ‘thou’ to Charles, without having any clear idea when I had begun. Our work in common had taught us more about each other than a long conversation. Marceline had not come yet; she did not come at all, but I ceased to regret her absence; I felt as though she would have a little spoilt our pleasure.

Early next morning, I went down to the farm to look for Charles. We took our way together to the woods.

As I myself knew very little about my estate and was not much distressed at knowing so little, I was astonished to find how much Charles knew about it and about the way it was farmed; he told me what I was barely aware of, namely, that I had six farmer-tenants, that the rents might have amounted to sixteen or eighteen thousand francs, and that if they actually amounted to barely half that sum, it was because almost everything was eaten up by repairs of all sorts and by the payment of middlemen. His way of smiling as he looked at the fields in cultivation soon made me suspect that the management of the estate was not quite so good as I had at first thought and as Bocage had given me to understand; I pressed Charles further on this subject, and the intelligence of practical affairs which had so exasperated me in Bocage, amused me in a child like him. We continued our walks day after day; the estate was large and when we had visited every corner of it, we began again with more method. Charles did not hide his irritation at the sight of certain fields, certain pieces of land that were overgrown with gorse, thistles and weeds; he instilled into me his hatred of fallow land and set me dreaming with him of a better mode of agriculture.

“But,” I said to him at first, “who is it that suffers from this lack of cultivation? Isn’t it only the farmer himself? However much the profits of his farm vary, his rent still remains the same.”

Charles was a little annoyed: “You understand nothing about it,” he ventured to say—and I smiled. “You think only of income and won’t consider that the capital is deteriorating. Your land is slowly losing its value by being badly cultivated.”

“If it were to bring in more by being better cultivated, I expect the farmers would set about it. They are too eager for gain not to make as much profit as they can.”

“You are not counting,” continued Charles, “the cost of increased labour. These neglected bits of land are sometimes a long way from the farms. True, if they were cultivated, they would bring in nothing or next to nothing, but at any rate, they would keep from spoiling.”

And so the conversation went on. Sometimes for an hour on end we seemed to be interminably repeating the same things as we walked over the fields; but I listened, and little by little gathered information.

“After all, it’s your father’s business,” I said one day impatiently. Charles blushed a little.

“My father is old,” he said; “he has a great deal to do already, seeing to the upkeep of the buildings, collecting the rents and so on. It’s not his business to make reforms.”

“And what reforms would you make?” I asked. But at that he became evasive and pretended he knew nothing about it; it was only by insisting that I forced him to explain.

“I should take away all the uncultivated fields from the tenants,” he ended by advising. “If the farmers leave part of their land uncultivated, it’s a proof they don’t need it all in order to pay you; or if they say they must keep it all, I should raise their rents. All the people hereabouts are idle,” he added.

Of the six farms that belonged to me, the one I most liked visiting was situated on a hill that overlooked La Morinière; it was called La Valterie; the farmer who rented it was a pleasant enough fellow and I used to like talking to him. Nearer La Morinière, was a farm called the ‘home farm,’ which was let on a system that left Bocage, pending the landlord’s absence, in possession of part of the cattle. Now that my doubts had been awakened, I began to suspect honest Bocage himself, if not of cheating me, at any rate, of allowing other people to cheat me. One stable and one cow-house were, it is true, reserved to me, but it soon dawned upon me that they had merely been invented so as to allow the farmer to feed his cows and horses with my oats and hay. So far, I had listened indulgently to the very unconvincing reports which Bocage gave me from time to time of deaths, malformations and diseases. I swallowed everything. It had not then occurred to me that it was sufficient for one of the farmer’s cows to fall ill for it to become one of my cows, nor that it was sufficient for one of my cows to do well for it to become one of the farmer’s; but a few rash remarks of Charles’s, a few observations of my own began to enlighten me, and my mind once given the hint, worked quickly.

Marceline, at my suggestion, went over the accounts minutely, but could find nothing wrong with them; Bocage’s honesty was displayed on every page. What was to be done? Let things be. At any rate, I now watched the management of the cattle in a state of suppressed indignation, but without letting it be too obvious.

I had four horses and ten cows—quite enough to be a considerable worry to me. Among my four horses was one which was still called ‘the colt,’ though it was more than three years old; it was now being broken in; I was beginning to take an interest in it, when one fine morning I was informed that it was perfectly unmanageable, that it would be impossible ever to do anything with it and that the best thing would be to get rid of it. As if on purpose to convince me of this, in case I had doubted it, it had been made to break the front of a small cart and had cut its hocks in doing so.

I had much ado that day to keep my temper, but what helped me was Bocage’s obvious embarrassment. After all, thought I, he is more weak than anything else; it is the men who are to blame, but they want a guiding hand over them.

I went into the yard to see the colt; one of the men who had been beating it began to stroke it as soon as he heard me coming; I pretended to have seen nothing. I did not know much about horses, but this colt seemed to me a fine animal; it was half-bred, light bay in colour and remarkably elegant in shape, with a very bright eye and a very light mane and tail. I made sure it had not been injured, insisted on its cuts being properly dressed and went away without another word.

That evening, as soon as I saw Charles, I tried to find out what he personally thought of the colt.

“I think he’s a perfectly quiet beast,” he said, “but they don’t know how to manage him; they’ll drive him wild.”

“And how would you manage him?”

“Will you let me have him for a week, Sir? I’ll answer for him.”

“And what will you do?”

“You will see.”

The next morning, Charles took the colt down to a corner of the field that was shaded by a superb walnut-tree and bordered by the river; I went too, together with Marceline. It is one of my most vivid recollections. Charles had tied the colt with a rope a few yards long to a stake firmly planted in the ground. The mettlesome creature had, it seems, objected for some time with great spirit; but now, tired and quieted, it was going round more calmly; the elasticity of its trot was astonishing and as delightful and engaging to watch as a dance. Charles stood in the centre of the circle and avoided the rope at every round with a sudden leap, exciting or calming the beast with his voice; he held a long whip in his hand, but I did not see him use it. Everything about his look and movements—his youthfulness, his delight—gave his work the fervent and beautiful aspect of pleasure. Suddenly—I have no idea how—he was astride the animal; it had slackened its pace and then stopped; he had patted it a little and then, all of a sudden, I saw he was on horseback, sure of himself, barely holding its mane, laughing, leaning forward, still patting and stroking its neck. The colt had hardly resisted for a moment; then it began its even trot again, so handsome, so easy, that I envied Charles and told him so.

“A few days’ more training and the saddle won’t tickle him at all; in a fortnight, Sir, your lady herself won’t be afraid to mount him; he’ll be as quiet as a lamb.”

It was quite true; a few days later, the horse allowed himself to be stroked, harnessed, led, without any signs of restiveness; and Marceline might really have ridden him if her state of health had permitted.

“You ought to try him yourself, Sir,” said Charles.

I should never have done so alone; but Charles suggested saddling another of the farm horses for himself, and the pleasure of accompanying him proved irresistible.

How grateful I was to my mother for having sent me to a riding-school when I was a boy! The recollection of those long-ago lessons stood me in good stead. The sensation of feeling myself on horseback was not too strange; after the first few moments, I had no tremors and felt perfectly at ease. Charles’s mount was heavier; it was not pure bred, but far from bad-looking, and above all, Charles rode it well. We got into the habit of going out every day; for choice, we started in the early morning, through grass that was still bright with dew; we rode to the limit of the woods; the dripping hazels, shaken by our passage, drenched us with their showers; suddenly the horizon opened out; there, in front of us, lay the vast Vallée d’Auge and far in the distance could be divined the presence of the sea. We stayed a moment without dismounting; the rising sun coloured the mists, parted them, dispersed them; then, we set off again at a brisk trot; we lingered a little at the farm, where the work was only just beginning; we enjoyed for a moment the proud pleasure of being earlier than the labourers—of looking down on them; then, abruptly, we left them; I was home again at La Morinière just as Marceline was beginning to get up.

I used to come in drunk with the open air, dazed with speed, my limbs a little stiff with a delicious fatigue, all health and appetite and freshness. Marceline approved, encouraged my fancy. I went straight to her room, still in my gaiters, and found her lingering in bed, waiting for me; I came bringing with me a scent of wet leaves, which she said she liked. And she listened while I told her of our ride, of the awakening of the fields, of the recommencing of the day’s labour.... She took as much delight, it seemed, in feeling me live as in living herself. Soon I trespassed on this delight too; our rides grew longer, and sometimes I did not come in till nearly noon.

I kept the afternoons and evenings, however, as much as possible for the preparation of my lectures. My work on them made good progress; I was satisfied with it and thought they might perhaps be worth publishing later as a book. By a kind of natural reaction, the more regular and orderly my life became and the more pleasure I took in establishing order about me—the more attracted I felt by the rude ethics of the Goths. With a boldness, for which I was afterwards blamed, I took the line throughout my lectures of making the apology and eulogy of non-culture; but, at the same time, in my private life, I was laboriously doing all I could to control, if not to suppress, everything about me and within me that in any way suggested it. How far did I not push this wisdom—or this folly?

Two of my tenants whose leases expired at Christmas time, came to me with a request for renewal; it was a matter of signing the usual preliminary agreement. Strong in Charles’s assurances and encouraged by his daily conversations, I awaited the farmers with resolution. They on the other hand, equally strong in the conviction that tenants are hard to replace, began by asking for their rents to be lowered. Their stupefaction was great when I read them the agreement I had myself drawn up, in which I not only refused to lower the rents but also withdrew from the farms certain portions of land, which I said they were making no use of. They pretended at first to take it as a laughing matter—I must be joking. What could I do with the land? It was worth nothing; and if they made no use of it, it was because no use could be made of it.... Then, seeing I was serious, they turned obstinate; I was obstinate too. They thought they would frighten me by threatening to leave. It was what I was waiting for:

“All right! Go if you like! I won’t keep you,” I said, tearing the agreement up before their eyes.

So there I was, with more than two hundred acres left on my hands. I had planned for some time past to give the chief management of this land to Bocage, thinking that in this way I should be giving it indirectly to Charles; my intention also was to look after it a good deal myself; but in reality, I reflected very little about it; the very risk of the undertaking tempted me. The tenants would not be turning out before Christmas; between this and then we should have time to look about us. I told Charles; his delight annoyed me; he could not hide it; it made me feel more than ever that he was much too young. We were already pressed for time; it was the season when the reaping of the crops leaves the fields empty for early ploughing. By an established custom, the outgoing tenant works side by side with the incoming; the former quits the land bit by bit, as soon as he has carried his crops. I was afraid the two farmers I had dismissed would somehow revenge themselves on me; but, on the contrary, they made a pretence of being perfectly amiable (I only learnt later how much they benefited by this). I took advantage of their complaisance to go up to their land—which was soon going to be mine—every morning and evening. Autumn was beginning; more labourers had to be hired to get on with the ploughing and sowing; we had bought harrows, rollers, ploughs; I rode about on horseback, superintending and directing the work, taking pleasure in ordering people about and in using my authority.

Meanwhile, in the neighbouring meadows, the apples were being gathered; they dropped from the trees and lay rolling in the thick grass; never had there been a more abundant crop; there were not enough pickers; they had to be brought in from the neighbouring villages and taken on for a week; Charles and I sometimes amused ourselves by helping them. Some of the men beat the branches with sticks to bring down the late fruit; the fruit that fell of itself was gathered into separate heaps; often the overripe apples lay bruised and crushed in the long grass so that it was impossible to walk without stepping on them. The smell that rose from the ground was acrid and sickly and mingled with the smell of the ploughed land.

Autumn was advancing. The mornings of the last fine days are the freshest, the most limpid of all. There were times when the moisture-laden atmosphere painted all the distances blue, made them look more distant still, turned a short walk into a day’s journey; and the whole country looked bigger; at times again the abnormal transparency of the air brought the horizon closer; it seemed as though it might be reached by one stroke of the wing; and I could not tell which of the two states filled me with a heavier languor. My work was almost finished—at least, so I told myself, as an encouragement to be idle. The time I did not spend at the farm, I spent with Marceline. Together we went out into the garden; we walked slowly, she languidly hanging on my arm; the bench where we went to sit looked over the valley, which the evening gradually filled with light. She had a tender way of leaning against my shoulder; and we would stay so till evening, motionless, speechless, letting the day sink and melt within us.... In what a cloak of silence our love had already learnt to wrap itself! For already Marceline’s love was stronger than words—for sometimes her love was almost an anguish to me. As a breath of wind sometimes ripples the surface of a tranquil pool, the slightest emotion was visible in her face; she was listening now to the new life mysteriously quivering within her, and I leant over her as over deep transparent waters where, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen but love. Ah! if this was still happiness, I know I did my best to hold it, as one tries—in vain—to hold the water that slips between one’s joined hands; but already I felt, close beside my happiness, something not happiness, something indeed that coloured my love, but with the colours of autumn.

Autumn was passing. Every morning the grass was wetter, till it no longer dried in the fringe of the woods on the shady side of the valley; at the first streak of dawn, it was white. The ducks on the waters of the moat fluttered and flapped their wings; they grew fiercely agitated; sometimes they rose together, calling loudly, and flew in a noisy flight right round La Morinière. One morning we missed them. Bocage had shut them up. Charles told me that every autumn at migration time they had to be shut up in this way. And a few days later the weather changed. One evening, suddenly, there came a great blast, a breath from the sea, stormy, steady, bringing with it cold and rain, carrying off the birds of passage. Marceline’s condition, the business of settling into a new apartment, the work entailed by my lectures, would in any case have soon called us back to town. The bad weather, which began early, drove us away at once.

It is true that the farm affairs were to bring me back in November. I was greatly vexed to hear of Bocage’s plans for the winter; he told me he wished to send Charles back to his model farm where, so he declared, he had still a great deal to learn; I talked to him long, used all the arguments I could think of, but I could not make him budge; at the outside, he consented to shorten Charles’s training by a trifle, so as to allow him to come back a little sooner. Bocage did not conceal from me that the running of the two farms would be a matter of no small difficulty; but he had in view, so he said, two highly trustworthy peasants whom he intended to employ; they would be partly farmers, partly tenants, partly labourers; the thing was too unusual in these parts for him to hope much good would come of it; but, he said, it was my own wish. This conversation took place towards the end of October. In the first days of November, we moved to Paris.

ii

It was in S... Street, near Passy, that we took up our residence. The apartment, which had been found for us by one of Marceline’s brothers, and which we had visited when we had last passed through Paris, was much bigger than the one my father had left me, and Marceline was a little uneasy, not only at the increased rent, but at all the other expenses we should certainly be led into. I countered all her fears by pretending I had a horror of anything temporary; I forced myself to believe in this feeling and deliberately exaggerated it. Certainly, the cost of furnishing and arranging the apartment would exceed our income for the present year, but our fortune, which was already large, was sure to increase still further; I counted on my lectures for this, on the publication of my book and, such was my folly, on the profits from my new farms. In consequence, I stopped short at no expense, telling myself at each new one that here was another tie and thinking also that by these means I should suppress every vagabond inclination I felt—or feared I might feel—within me.

For the first few days, our time was taken up from morning to night by shopping and other business of the sort; and though eventually, Marceline’s brother very obligingly offered to do as much as he could for us, it was not long before Marceline felt thoroughly tired out. Then, as soon as we were settled in, instead of resting as she should have done, she felt obliged to receive visitors; they flocked to see us now because we had been absent from Paris during the first days of our marriage, and Marceline, who had become unused to society, was incapable of getting rid of them quickly or of shutting her doors altogether. When I came home in the evening, I found her exhausted, and, though her fatigue, which seemed only natural, caused me no anxiety, I did my best to lessen it; often receiving visits in her stead, which was very little to my taste, and sometimes paying them—which was still less so.

I have never been a brilliant talker; the frivolity, the wit, the spirit of fashionable drawing-rooms, were things in which I could take no pleasure; yet in old days I had frequented some of these salons—but how long ago that seemed! What had happened since then? In other people’s company, I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring.... By a singular piece of ill-luck, you, whom I considered my only real friends, were absent from Paris and not expected back for long. Should I have been able to speak to you more openly? Would you have perhaps understood me better than I did myself? But what did I know at that time of all that was growing up within me, of all I am now telling you about? The future seemed to me absolutely assured and I had never thought myself more master of it.

And even if I had been more perspicacious, what help against myself should I have found in Hubert, Didier or Maurice, or in all the others whom you know and judge as I do? I very soon discovered, alas, the impossibility of their understanding me. In our very first conversations, I found myself forced to impersonate a false character, to resemble the man they imagined I still was; and for convenience’ sake, I pretended to have the thoughts and tastes with which they credited me. One cannot both be sincere and seem so.

I was rather more willing to renew my acquaintance with the people of my own profession—archaeologists and philologists—but I found very little more pleasure and no more emotion in talking to them than in consulting a good dictionary. I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live—contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing. I could not blame them for it; and I do not affirm that the mistake was not mine.... As to that, what did I mean by ‘living’? That is exactly what I wanted to find out. One and another talked cleverly of the different events of life—never of what is at the back of them.

As for the few philosophers whose business it should have been to instruct me, I had long known, what to expect of them; whether mathematicians or neo-Kantians, they kept as far away as possible from the disturbing reality and had no more concern for it than the algebraist has for the existence of the quantities he measures.

When I got back to Marceline, I did not conceal from her how tedious I found all these acquaintances.

“They are all alike,” I said to her. “When I talk to one, I feel as if I were talking to the whole lot.”

“But, my dear,” said Marceline, “you can’t expect each of them to be different from all the others.”

“The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me.”

And then I went on with a sigh, “Not one of them has managed to be ill. They are alive—they seem to be alive, and yet not to know they are alive. For that matter, since I have been in their company, I have ceased to be alive myself. Today, amongst other days, what have I done? I had to leave you about nine o’clock. I had just a bare moment for a little reading before I went out; it was the only satisfactory moment of the day. Your brother was waiting for me at the solicitor’s, and after the solicitor’s, he insisted on sticking to me; I had to see the upholsterer with him; he was really a nuisance at the cabinet-maker’s and I only got rid of him at Gaston’s; I had lunch in the neighbourhood with Philip and then I met Louis at a café and went with him to Theodore’s absurd lecture, and paid him compliments when it was over; then, in order to get out of his invitation for Sunday, I had to go with him to Arthur’s; then to a water-colour exhibition with Arthur; then left cards on Albertine and Julie.... I came in thoroughly exhausted and found you as tired as myself, after visits from Adeline, Marthe, Jeanne and Sophie.... And now, in the evening, as I look back on my day, it seems to me so vain and so empty, that I long to have it back and live it over again hour by hour—and the thought of it makes me inclined to weep.”

And yet I should not have been able to say what I meant by ‘living,’ nor whether the very simple secret of my trouble was not that I had acquired a taste for a more spacious, breezier life, one that was less hemmed in, less regardful of others; the secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who has known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave. And at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling. I had known no pride, I repeat, when the publication of my Essay had brought me such praise. Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me—distinguished me—from other people was crucial; what no-one said, what no-one could say but myself, that it was my task to say.

My lectures began soon after; the subject was congenial and I poured into the first of them all my newly born passion. Speaking of the later Latin civilization, I depicted artistic culture as welling up in a whole people, like a secretion, which is at first a sign of plethora, of a superabundance of health, but which afterwards stiffens, hardens, forbids the perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides under the persistent appearance of life a diminution of life, turns into an outside sheath, in which the cramped mind languishes and pines, in which at last it dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its logical conclusion, I showed Culture, born of life, as the destroyer of life.

The historians blamed a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.

It was at the end of my lecture that I came across Ménalque again for the first time. I had never seen much of him, and shortly before my marriage, he had started on one of those distant voyages of discovery which sometimes kept him from us for over a year. In the old days, I had never much liked him; he seemed proud and he took no interest in my existence. I was therefore astonished to see him at my first lecture. His very insolence, which had at first held me aloof from him, pleased me, and I thought the smile he gave me all the more charming because I knew he smiled rarely. Recently, an absurd—a shameful—lawsuit had caused a scandal and given the newspapers a convenient occasion to drag him through the mud; those whom he had offended by his disdain and superiority seized this pretext to revenge themselves; and what irritated them most was that he appeared not to care.

“One must allow other people to be right,” he used to say when he was insulted, “it consoles them for not being anything else.”

But ‘good society’ was indignant and people who, as they say, ‘respect themselves,’ thought it their duty to turn their backs on him, and so pay him back his contempt. This was an extra encouragement to me; feeling myself attracted by a secret influence, I went up to him and embraced him before everyone.

When they saw to whom I was talking, the last intruders withdrew; I was left alone with Ménalque.

After the irritating criticisms and inept compliments I had been listening to, his few words on the subject of my lecture were very soothing.

“You are burning what you used to adore,” said he. “Very good. It is a little late in the day, but never mind, the fire is all the fiercer. I am not sure whether I altogether understand you. You make me curious. I don’t much care about talking, but I should like to talk to you. Come and dine with me tonight.”

“Dear Ménalque,” I answered, “you seem to forget that I am married.”

“Yes,” he answered, “quite true. The frank cordiality with which you were not afraid to greet me made me think you might be free.”

I was afraid I might have wounded him; still more so of seeming weak, and I told him I would join him after dinner.

Ménalque never did more than pass through Paris on his way to somewhere else; he always stayed in a hotel. On this occasion he had had several rooms fitted up for him as a private apartment; he had his own servants, took his meals apart, lived apart; stuffs and hangings of great value which he had brought back from Nepal had been hung on the walls and thrown over the furniture, whose commonplace ugliness was an offence to him. He was dirtying them out, he said, before presenting them to a museum. My haste to rejoin him had been so great, that I found him still at table when I came in; as I excused myself for disturbing his meal:

“But I have no intention of letting you disturb it,” he said, “and I expect you to let me finish it. If you had come to dinner, I should have given you some Chiraz—the wine that Hafiz celebrated—but it is too late now; one must only drink it fasting; but you’ll take some liqueur, won’t you?”

I accepted, thinking he would take some too, and when only one glass was brought in, I expressed astonishment.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but I hardly ever drink such things.”

“Are you afraid of getting drunk?”

“Oh!” replied he, “on the contrary! But I consider sobriety a more powerful intoxication—in which I keep my lucidity.”

“And you pour the drink out for others?”

He smiled.

“I cannot,” said he, “expect everyone to have my virtues. It’s good enough to meet with my vices....”

“You smoke, at any rate?”

“No, not even that. Smoking is an impersonal, negative, too easily achieved kind of drunkenness; what I want from drunkenness is an enhancement not a diminution of life. But that’s enough. Do you know where I have just come from? Biskra. I heard you had been staying there, and I thought I would like to follow up your tracks. What could the blindfolded scholar, the learned bookworm have come to do at Biskra? It’s my habit to be discreet only about things that are confided to me; for things that I find out myself, I’ll admit that I have an unbounded curiosity. So I searched, poked about, questioned wherever I could. My indiscretion was rewarded, since it has made me wish to meet you again; since instead of the learned man of habit you seemed to be in the old days, I know now that you are ... it’s for you to tell me what.”

I felt myself blushing.

“What did you find out about me, Ménalque?”

“Do you want to know? But there’s no need to be alarmed! You know your friends and mine well enough to be sure there is no-one I can talk to about you. You saw how well your lecture was understood?”

“But,” said I, a little impatiently, “there’s nothing yet to prove that I can talk to you better than to them. Come on then! What is it you found out about me?”

“First of all, that you had been ill.”

“But there’s nothing in that to ...”

“Oh, yes! That in itself is very important. Then I was told you liked going out alone, without a book (that’s what started me wondering), or, when you were not alone, you preferred the company of children to that of your wife ... Don’t blush like that, or I shan’t go on.”

“Go on without looking at me.”

“One of the children—his name was Moktir, if I remember right—(I have scarcely ever seen a handsomer boy, and never a greater little swindler) seemed to have a good deal to say about you. I enticed him—I bribed him to confide in me ... not an easy thing to do, as you know, for I think it was only another lie, when he said he was not lying that time.... Tell me whether what he told me about you is true.”

In the meantime, Ménalque had got up and taken a little box out of a drawer.

“Are these scissors yours?” he said, opening the box and taking out a shapeless, twisted, rusty object, which, however, I had little difficulty in recognizing as the pair of scissors Moktir had purloined.

“Yes, they are; they were my wife’s scissors.”

“He pretends he took them when your head was turned away one day he was alone in the room with you; but that’s not the point; he pretends that at the moment he was hiding them in his burnous, he saw you were watching him in the glass and caught the reflection of your eyes looking at him. You saw the theft and said nothing! Moktir was very much astonished at this silence—and so was I.”

“And I am too at what you have just said. What! Do you mean to say he knew I had caught him at it?”

“It isn’t that that matters; you were trying to be more cunning than he; it’s a game at which children like that will always get the better of us. You thought you had him, and in reality, it was he who had you.... But that’s not what matters. I should like an explanation of your silence.”

“I should like one myself.”

Some time passed without a word from either of us. Ménalque, who was pacing up and down the room, lighted a cigarette absent-mindedly and then immediately threw it away.

“The fact is,” said he, “there’s a ‘sense,’ as people say, ‘a sense’ which seems to be lacking in you, my dear Michel.”

“The ‘moral sense,’” said I, forcing myself to smile.

“Oh, no! simply the sense of property.”

“You don’t seem to have much of it yourself.”

“I have so little of it that, as you see, nothing in this place is mine; not even—or rather, especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and there’s nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life well enough to want to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health....”

“Then what do you blame me for?” I interrupted.

“Oh, how little you understand me, my dear Michel; for once that I am foolish enough to try and make a profession of faith!... If I care little for the approbation or disapprobation of men, Michel, it is not in order to approve or disapprove in my turn; those words have very little sense for me. I spoke of myself too much just now.... I was carried away by thinking you understood me.... I simply meant to say that, for a person who has not got the sense of property, you seem to possess a great deal. Isn’t that rather serious?”

“And what is this great deal I possess?”

“Nothing, if you take it in that way.... But are you not beginning a course of lectures? Have you not an estate in Normandy? Have you not just settled yourself—and luxuriously too—in an apartment at Passy? You are married? Are you not expecting a child?”

“Well!” said I, impatiently, “it merely proves that I have succeeded in making my life more dangerous than yours.”

“Yes, merely,” repeated Ménalque ironically; then, turning abruptly, he put out his hand:

“Well, good-bye now; I don’t think any more talk tonight would be of much use. But I shall see you again soon.”

Some time went by before I saw him again.

Fresh work, fresh preoccupations took up my time; an Italian scholar brought to my notice some new documents he had discovered which were important for my lectures and which I had to study at some length. The feeling that my first lesson had been misunderstood stimulated me to shed a different and more powerful light on the succeeding ones; I was thus led to enounce as a doctrine what I had at first only tentatively suggested as an ingenious hypothesis. How many assertions owe their strength to the lucky circumstance that as suggestions they were not understood? In my own case, I admit I cannot distinguish what proportion of obstinacy may have mingled with my natural propensity for asserting my opinions. The new things I had to say seemed to me especially urgent because of the difficulty of saying them, and above all of getting them understood.

But, alas, how pale words become when compared with deeds! Was not Ménalque’s life, Ménalque’s slightest action a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? How well I understood now that the great philosophers of antiquity, whose teaching was almost wholly moral, worked by example as much—even more than by precept!

The next time I saw Ménalque was in my own house, nearly three weeks after our first meeting. We had been giving a crowded evening party, and he came in almost at the end of it. In order to avoid being continually disturbed, Marceline and I had settled to be at home on Thursdays; in this way it was easier to keep our doors shut for the rest of the week. Every Thursday evening then, those people who called themselves our friends used to come and see us; our rooms were large enough to hold a good many guests and they used to stay late. I think that what attracted them most was Marceline’s exquisite charm and the pleasure of talking to each other, for as to myself, from the very beginning of these parties, there was nothing I could find either to say or to listen to, and it was with difficulty I concealed my boredom.

That evening, I was wandering aimlessly from the drawing-room to the smoking-room, from the antechamber to the library, caught by a sentence here and there, observing very little but looking about me more or less vaguely.

Antoine, Etienne and Godefroi were discussing the last vote in the Chamber, as they lolled on my wife’s elegant armchairs. Hubert and Louis were carelessly turning over some fine etchings from my father’s collection, entirely regardless of how they were creasing them. In the smoking-room, Mathias, the better to listen to Leonard, had put his red-hot cigar down on a rosewood table. A glass of curaçoa had been spilt on the carpet. Albert was sprawling impudently on a sofa, with his muddy boots dirtying the cover. And the very dust of the air one breathed came from the horrible wear and tear of material objects.... A frantic desire seized me to send all my guests packing. Furniture, stuffs, prints, lost all their value for me at the first stain; things stained were things touched by disease, with the mark of death on them. I wanted to save them, to lock them up in a cupboard for my own use alone. How lucky Ménalque is, thought I, to have no possessions! The reason I puffer is that I want to preserve things. But after all, what does it really matter to me?...

There was a small, less brilliantly lighted drawing-room, partitioned off by a transparent glass door, and there Marceline was receiving some of her more intimate friends; she was half reclining on a pile of cushions and looked so fearfully pale and tired that I suddenly took fright and vowed that this reception should be the last. It was already late. I was beginning to take out my watch, when I suddenly felt Moktir’s little scissors in my pocket.

“Why did the little wretch steal them,” thought I, “if it was only to spoil and destroy them at once?”

At that moment someone touched me on the shoulder; I turned quickly; it was Ménalque.

He was almost the only person in evening dress. He had just arrived. He asked me to present him to my wife; I should certainly not have done so of my own accord. Ménalque was distinguished looking—almost handsome; his face was like a pirate’s, barred by an enormous drooping moustache, already quite grey; his eyes shone with a cold flame that denoted courage and decision rather than kindness. He was no sooner standing before Marceline than I knew she had taken a dislike to him. After he had exchanged a few banal words of courtesy with her, I carried him off to the smoking-room.

I had heard that very morning of the new mission on which the Colonial Office was sending him; the newspapers, as they recalled his adventurous career, seemed to have forgotten their recent base insults and now could find no words fine enough to praise him with. Each was more eager than the other to extol and exaggerate his services to his country, to the whole of humanity, as if he never undertook anything but with a humanitarian purpose; and they quoted examples of his abnegation, his devotion, his courage, as if such encomiums might be considered a reward.

I began to congratulate him, but he interrupted me at the first words.

“What! You too, my dear Michel! But you didn’t begin by insulting me,” said he. “Leave all that nonsense to the papers. They seem to be surprised that a man with a certain reputation can still have any virtues at all. They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.”

“That may lead far,” I said.

“Indeed I hope so,” answered Ménalque. “If only the people we know could persuade themselves of the truth of this! But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don’t dare to—they don’t dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone—that is what they suffer from—and so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia—the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything—but they don’t want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value—and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.”

I let Ménalque speak on; he was saying exactly what I myself had said the month before to Marceline; I ought to have approved him. For what reason, through what moral cowardice did I interrupt him and say, in imitation of Marceline, the very sentence word for word with which she had interrupted me then?

“But, my dear Ménalque, you can’t expect each one of them to be different from all the others.”...

Ménalque stopped speaking abruptly, looked at me oddly and then, as at that very moment Eusèbe came up to take leave, he unceremoniously turned his back on me and went off to talk about some trifle or other to Hector.

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I realized not only that they were stupid, but worse still, that they might have given Ménalque the impression that I thought his remarks had been pointed at me. It was late; my guests were leaving. When the drawing-room was nearly empty, Ménalque came back to me.

“I can’t leave you like this,” he said. “No doubt, I misunderstood what you said. Let me at least hope so.”

“No,” I answered, “you did not misunderstand it ... but it was senseless, and I had no sooner said it than I knew it was foolish. I was sorry, and especially sorry to think it would make you place me among the very people you were attacking and who, I assure you, are as odious to me as to you. I hate people of principle.”

“Yes,” answered Ménalque, laughing, “there is nothing more detestable in the world. It is impossible to expect any sort of sincerity from them; for they never do anything but what their principles have decreed they should do; or if they do, they think they have done wrong. At the mere suspicion you might be one of them, the words froze on my lips. I felt by my distress what a great affection I have for you; I hoped I was mistaken—not in my affection, but in the conclusion I had drawn.”

“Yes, really; your conclusion was wrong.”

“Oh! it was, I am sure,” said he, suddenly taking my hand. “Listen a moment; I shall soon be going away, but I should like to see you again. My expedition this time will be a longer one and more risky than any of the others; I don’t know when I shall come back. I must start in a fortnight’s time; no-one knows I am leaving so soon; I tell you so in confidence. I start at daybreak. The night before leaving is always a night of terrible heart-ache for me. Give me a proof that you are not a man of principle; may I count on it that you will spend that last night with me?”

“But we shall see each other again before then,” I said, a little astonished.

“No; during the next fortnight I shall be at home to no-one. I shall not even be in Paris. Tomorrow I leave for Buda-Pesth; in six days’ time I must be in Rome. I have friends dotted here and there to whom I must say good-bye before leaving. There is one expecting me in Madrid.”

“Very well then, I will pass your night of vigil with you.”

“And we will have some Chiraz to drink,” said Ménalque.

A few days after this party, Marceline began to feel less well. I have already said she was easily tired; but she did not complain, and as I attributed her fatigue to her condition, I thought it natural and felt no particular anxiety. A rather foolish—or rather ignorant—old doctor had at first been over reassuring. Some fresh symptoms, however, accompanied by fever, decided me to send for Dr. Tr... who was considered at that time the cleverest specialist in Paris for such cases. He expressed astonishment that I had not called him in sooner and prescribed a strict régime which she ought to have begun to follow some time ago. Marceline had been very courageous, but not very prudent, and had overtired herself. She was told she must now lie up till the date of her confinement, which was expected about the end of January. Feeling no doubt a little anxious and more unwell than she would admit, Marceline consented very meekly to the most tiresome orders. She had a moment’s rebellion, however, when Tr... prescribed quinine in such heavy doses that she knew it might endanger the child. For three days she obstinately refused to take it; then as her fever increased she was obliged to submit to that too; but this time it was with deep sadness and as if she were mournfully giving up all hope of the future; the resolution which had hitherto sustained her seemed broken down by a kind of religious resignation, and her condition grew suddenly worse in the days that followed.

I tended her with greater care than ever, did my best to reassure her and repeated the very words Dr. Tr... had used, that he could see nothing very serious in her case; but her extreme anxiety ended by alarming me too. Alas! our happiness was already resting on the dangerous foundations of hope—and hope of what an uncertain future! I, who at first had taken pleasure only in the past, may have one day felt, thought I, the sudden and intoxicating sweetness of a fugitive moment, but the future disenchants the present even more than the present then disenchanted the past; and since our night at Sorrento my whole love, my whole life have been projected into the future.

In the meantime the evening I had promised Ménalque came round; and notwithstanding the reluctance I felt at abandoning Marceline for a whole winter’s night, I got her, as best I could, to acknowledge the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of my promise. Marceline was a little better that evening and yet I was anxious; a nurse took my place beside her. But as soon as I was in the street, my anxiety gained ground; I shook it off, struggled against it, was angry with myself for not being better able to get rid of it; thus I gradually reached a state of excessive tension, of singular excitement, both very unlike and very like the painful uneasiness from which it sprang, but liker still to happiness. It was late and I strode along rapidly; the snow began to fall in thick flakes; I was glad to be breathing a keener air, to be struggling with the cold; I was happy with the wind, the night, the snow against me; I rejoiced in my strength.

Ménalque had heard me coming and came out on to the landing to welcome me. He was waiting for me not without impatience. His face was pale and he looked overwrought. He helped me off with my overcoat and forced me to change my wet boots for some soft Persian slippers. Sweets and cakes were standing on a small table by the fire. There were two lamps, but the light in the room came chiefly from the fire on the hearth. Ménalque immediately enquired after Marceline; for the sake of simplicity I answered that she was very well.

“Are you expecting your child soon?” he went on.

“In a month.”

Ménalque bent down towards the fire as if he wished to hide his face. He remained silent. He remained silent so long that at last I felt embarrassed, and as I myself could think of nothing to say either, I got up, took a few steps, and then went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Presently, as though he were pursuing his thoughts aloud:

“One must choose,” he murmured. “The chief thing is to know what one wants....”

“Don’t you want to go?” I asked, in some uncertainty as to what he meant.

“It looks like it.”

“Are you hesitating then?”

“What is the use? You have a wife and child, so stay at home.... Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one. It is madness to envy other people’s happiness; one would not know what to do with it. Happiness won’t come to one ready-made; it has to be made to measure. I am going away tomorrow; yes, I know; I have tried to cut out my happiness to fit me ... keep your calm happiness of hearth and home....”

“I cut out my happiness to fit me too,” I said, “but I have grown; I am not at ease in my happiness now; sometimes I think it is strangling me....”

“Pooh! you’ll get accustomed to it!” said Ménalque. Then he planted himself in front of me and looked deep into my eyes; as I found nothing to say, he smiled rather sadly.

“One imagines one possesses and in reality one is possessed,” he went on. “Pour yourself out a glass of Chiraz, dear Michel; you won’t often taste it; and eat some of those rose-coloured sweets which the Persians take with it. I shall drink with you this evening, forget that I am leaving tomorrow, and talk as if the night were long.... Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead letter now-a-days? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand in hand with life; so that the artist’s life itself was already a poetic realization, the philosopher’s life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy—and the result was admirably persuasive. Now-a-days beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart.”

“But you live your wisdom,” said I; “why do you not write your memoirs? Or simply,” I added, seeing him smile, “recollections of your travels?”

“Because I do not want to recollect,” he replied. “I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour’s freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been.”

These words were too far in advance of my thoughts not to end by irritating me; I should have liked to hang back, to stop him; but I tried in vain to contradict, and besides I was more irritated with myself than with Ménalque. I remained silent therefore, while he, sometimes pacing up and down like a wild beast in a cage, sometimes stooping over the fire, kept up a long and moody silence, or again broke abruptly into words:

“If only our paltry minds,” he said, “were able to embalm our memories! But memories keep badly. The most delicate fade and shrivel; the most voluptuous decay; the most delicious are the most dangerous in the end. The things one repents of were at first delicious.”

Again a long silence; and then he went on:

“Regrets, remorse, repentance, are past joys seen from behind. I don’t like looking backwards and I leave my past behind me as the bird leaves his shade to fly away. Oh, Michel! every joy is always awaiting us, but it must always be the only one; it insists on finding the bed empty and demands from us a widower’s welcome. Oh, Michel! every joy is like the manna of the desert which corrupts from one day to the next; it is like the fountain of Ameles, whose waters, says Plato, could never be kept in any vase.... Let every moment carry away with it all that it brought.”

Ménalque went on speaking for long; I cannot repeat all his words; but many of them were imprinted on my mind the more deeply, the more anxious I was to forget them; not that they taught me much that was new—but they suddenly laid bare my thoughts—thoughts I had shrouded in so many coverings that I had almost hoped to smother them.

And so the night of watching passed.

The next morning, after I had seen Ménalque into the train that carried him away, as I was walking home on my way back to Marceline, I felt horribly sad and full of hatred of his cynical joy; I wanted to believe it was a sham; I tried to deny it. I was angry with myself for not having found anything to say to him in reply; for having said words that might make him doubt my happiness, my love. And I clung to my doubtful happiness—my “calm happiness,” as Ménalque had called it; I could not, it was true, banish uneasiness from it, but I assured myself that uneasiness was the very food of love. I imagined the future and saw my child smiling at me; for his sake I would strengthen my character, I would build it up anew.... Yes, I walked with a confident step.

Alas! when I got in that morning, I was struck by a sight of unaccustomed disorder. The nurse met me and told me guardedly that my wife had been seized in the night with bad sickness and pains, though she did not think the term of her confinement was at hand; feeling very ill, she had sent for the doctor; he had arrived post-haste in the night and had not yet left the patient; then, seeing me change colour, I suppose, she tried to reassure me, said that things were going much better now, that ... I rushed to Marceline’s room.

The room was darkened and at first I could make out nothing but the doctor, who signed to me to be quiet; then I saw a figure in the dark I did not know. Anxiously, noiselessly, I drew near the bed. Marceline’s eyes were shut; she was so terribly pale that at first I thought she was dead; but she turned her head towards me, though without opening her eyes. The unknown figure was in a dark corner of the room, arranging, hiding, various objects; I saw shining instruments, cotton wool; I saw, I thought I saw a cloth stained with blood.... I felt I was tottering. I almost fell into the doctor’s arms; he held me up. I understood; I was afraid of understanding....

“The child?” I asked anxiously.

He shrugged his shoulders sadly. I lost all sense of what I was doing and flung myself sobbing against the bed. Oh! how suddenly the future had come upon me! The ground had given way abruptly beneath my feet; there was nothing there but an empty hole into which I stumbled headlong.

My recollections here are lost in dark confusion. Marceline, however, seemed at first to recover fairly quickly. The Christmas holidays allowed me a little respite and I was able to spend nearly the whole day with her. I read or wrote in her room, or read aloud to her quietly. I never went out without bringing her back flowers. I remembered the tenderness with which she had nursed me when I was ill, and surrounded her with so much love that sometimes she smiled as though it made her happy. Not a word was exchanged about the melancholy accident that had shattered our hopes....

Then phlebitis declared itself; and when that got better, a clot of blood suddenly set her hovering between life and death. It was night time; I remember leaning over her, feeling my heart stop and go on again with hers. How many nights I watched by her bedside, my eyes obstinately fixed on her, hoping by the strength of my love to instil some of my own life into hers. I no longer thought much about happiness; my single melancholy pleasure was sometimes seeing Marceline smile.

My lectures had begun again. How did I find strength to prepare them, to deliver them?... My memory of this time is blurred; I have forgotten how the weeks passed. And yet there was a little incident I must tell you about.

It was one morning, a little after the embolism; I was sitting with Marceline; she seemed a little better, but she was still ordered to keep absolutely motionless; she was not allowed to move even her arms. I bent over her to give her some drink and after she had drunk, and as I was still stooping over her, she begged me, in a voice made weaker still by her emotion, to open a little box, which she showed me by the direction of her glance; it was close by, on the table; I opened it and found it full of ribbons, bits of lace, little ornaments of no value.... I wondered what she wanted. I brought the box to her bedside and took out every object one by one. Was it this? That?... No, not yet; and I felt her getting agitated “Oh, Marceline, is it this little rosary you want?”

She tried to smile.

“Are you afraid then that I shan’t nurse you properly?”

“Oh, my dear,” she murmured. And I remembered our conversation at Biskra, and her timid reproaches when she heard me refuse what she called “the help of God.” I went on a little roughly:

“I got well alone all right.”

“I prayed for you so much,” she answered.

She said the words tenderly, sadly. There was something anxious and imploring in her look.... I took the rosary and slipped it into her weak hand as it lay on the sheet beside her. A tearful, love-laden glance rewarded me—but I could not answer it; I waited another moment or two, feeling awkward and embarrassed; finally not knowing what to do, “Goodbye,” I said, and left the room, with a feeling of hostility, and as though I had been turned out of it.

Meanwhile the horrible clot had brought on serious trouble; after her heart had escaped, it attacked her lungs, brought on congestion, impeded her breathing, made it short and laborious. I thought she would never get well. Disease had taken hold of Marceline, never again to leave her; it had marked her, stained her. Henceforth she was a thing that had been spoilt.

iii

The weather was now becoming warmer. As soon as my lectures were over, I took Marceline to La Morinière, the doctor having told me that all immediate danger was past and that nothing would be more likely to complete her cure than a change to purer air. I myself was in great need of rest. The nights I had spent nursing her, almost entirely by myself, the prolonged anxiety, and especially the kind of physical sympathy which had made me at the time of her attack feel the fearful throbbing of her heart in my own breast—all this had exhausted me as much as if I myself had been ill.

I should have preferred to take Marceline to the mountains, but she expressed the strongest desire to return to Normandy, declared that no climate could be better for her and reminded me that I must not neglect the two farms of which I had rather rashly assumed the charge. She insisted that as I had made myself responsible for them, it was my business to make them succeed. No sooner had we arrived therefore, than she urged me to visit the estate immediately.... I am not sure that her friendly insistence did not go with a good deal of abnegation; she was afraid perhaps, that as she still required assistance, I might think myself bound to stay with her and not feel as free as I might wish to.... Marceline was better however; the colour had returned to her cheeks, and nothing gave me greater comfort than to feel her smile was less sad; I was able to leave her without uneasiness.

I went then to the farms. The first hay was being made. The scented air, heavy with pollen, at first went to my head like a strong drink. I felt that I had hardly breathed at all since last year, or breathed nothing but dust, so drowned was I in the honied sweetness of the atmosphere. The bank, on which I seated myself in a kind of intoxication, overlooked the house; I saw its blue roofs; I saw the still waters of the moat; all around were fields, some newly mown, others rich with grass; further on, the curve of the brook; further again, the woods where last autumn I had so often gone riding with Charles. A sound of singing, which I had been listening to for the last moment or two, drew near; it was the haymakers going home, with a fork or a rake on their shoulders. I recognized nearly all of them, and the unpleasant recollection came to me that I was not there as an enchanted traveller, but as their master. I went up to them, smiled, spoke to them, enquired after each of them in turn. Bocage that morning had already given me a report of the crops; he had indeed kept me regularly informed by letter of everything that went on in the farms. They were not doing so badly—much better than Bocage had led me to expect. But my arrival was being awaited in order to take some important decisions, and during the next few days I devoted myself to farm business to the best of my ability—not taking much pleasure in it, but hoping by this semblance of work to give some stability to my disintegrated life.

As soon as Marceline was well enough to receive visitors, a few friends came to stay with us. They were affectionate, quiet people and Marceline liked their society, but it had the effect of making me leave the house with more pleasure than usual. I preferred the society of the farm hands; I felt that with them there was more to be learnt—not that I questioned them—no; and I hardly know how to express the kind of rapture I felt when I was with them; I seemed to feel things with their senses rather than with my own—and while I knew what our friends were going to say before they opened their mouths, the mere sight of these poor fellows filled me with perpetual amazement.

If at first they appeared as condescending in their answers as I tried to avoid being in my questions, they soon became more tolerant of my presence. I came into closer contact with them. Not content with following them at their work, I wanted to see them at their play; their obtuse thoughts had little interest for me, but I shared their meals, listened to their jokes, fondly watched their pleasures. By a kind of sympathy similar to that which had made my heart throb at the throbs of Marceline’s, their alien sensations immediately awoke the echo of my own—no vague echo, but a sharp and precise one. I felt my own arms grow stiff with the mower’s stiffness; I was weary with his weariness; the mouthful of cider he drank quenched my thirst; I felt it slip down his throat; one day, one of them, while sharpening his scythe, cut his thumb badly; his pain hurt me to the bone.

And it seemed to me that it was no longer with my sight alone that I became aware of the landscape, but that I felt it as well by some sense of touch, which my curious power of sympathy inimitably enlarged.

Bocage’s presence was now a nuisance to me; when he came I had to play the master, which I had no longer the least inclination to do. I still gave orders—I had to—still superintended the labourers; but I no longer went on horseback, for fear of looking down on them from too great a height. But notwithstanding the precautions I took to accustom them to my presence and prevent them from feeling ill at ease in it, in theirs I was still filled as before with an evil curiosity. There was a mystery about the existence of each one of them. I always felt that a part of their lives was concealed. What did they do when I was not there? I refused to believe that they had not better ways of amusing themselves. And I credited each of them with a secret which I pertinaciously tried to discover. I went about prowling, following, spying. For preference I fastened on the rudest and roughest among them, as if I expected to find a guiding light shine from their darkness.

One in particular attracted me; he was fairly good-looking, tall, not in the least stupid, but wholly guided by instinct, never acting but on the spur of the moment, blown hither and thither by every passing impulse. He did not belong to the place, and had been taken on by some chance. An excellent worker for two days—and on the third dead drunk. One night I crept furtively down to the barn to see him; he lay sprawling in a heavy, drunken sleep. I stayed looking at him a long time.... One fine day, he went as he had come. How much I should have liked to know along what roads!... I learnt that same evening that Bocage had dismissed him.

I was furious with Bocage and sent for him.

“It seems you have dismissed Pierre,” I began. “Will you kindly tell me why?”

He was a little taken aback by my anger, though I tried to moderate it.

“You didn’t want to keep a dirty drunkard, did you, Sir? A fellow who led all our best men into mischief!”

“It’s my business to know the men I want to keep, not yours.”

“A regular waster! No-one knew where he came from. It gave the place a bad name.... If he had set fire to the barn one night, you mightn’t have been so pleased, Sir.”

“That’s my affair, I tell you. It’s my farm, isn’t it? I mean to manage it in my own way. In future, be so good as to give me your reasons before dismissing people.”

Bocage, as I have told you, had known me since my childhood. However wounding my tone, he was too much attached to me to be much offended. He did not, in fact, take me sufficiently seriously. The Normandy peasant is too often disinclined to believe anything of which he cannot fathom the motive—that is to say, anything not prompted by interest. Bocage simply considered this quarrel as a piece of absurdity.

I did not want, however, to break off the conversation on a note of blame; feeling I had been too sharp with him, I cast about for something pleasant to add.

“Isn’t your son Charles coming back soon?” I ended by asking after a moment’s silence.

“I thought you had quite forgotten him, Sir; you seemed to trouble your head about him so little,” said Bocage, still rather hurt.

“Forget him, Bocage! How could I, after all we did together last year? I’m counting on him in fact to help me with the farms....”

“You’re very good, Sir. Charles is coming home in a week’s time.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it, Bocage,” and I dismissed him.

Bocage was not far wrong; I had not of course forgotten Charles, but I now cared very little about him. How can I explain that after such vehement camaraderie, my feeling for him now should be so flat and spiritless? The fact is my occupations and tastes were no longer the same as last year. My two farms, I must admit, did not interest me so much as the people employed on them; and if I wanted to foregather with them, Charles would be very much in the way. He was far too reasonable and too respectable. So notwithstanding the vivid and delightful memories I kept of him, I looked forward with some apprehension to his return.

He returned. Oh, how right I had been to be apprehensive—and how right Ménalque was to repudiate all memories! There entered the room in Charles’s place an absurd individual with a bowler hat. Heavens! how changed he was! Embarrassed and constrained though I felt, I tried not to respond too frigidly to the joy he showed at seeing me again; but even his joy was disagreeable to me; it was awkward, and I thought insincere. I received him in the drawing-room, and as it was late and dark, I could hardly distinguish his face; but when the lamp was brought in, I saw with disgust he had let his whiskers grow.

The conversation that evening was more or less dreary; then, as I knew he would be continually at the farms, I avoided going down to them for almost a week, and fell back on my studies and the society of my guests. And as soon as I began to go out again, I was absorbed by a totally new occupation.

Wood-cutters had invaded the woods. Every year a part of the timber on the estate was sold; the woods were marked off into twelve equal lots which were cut in rotation and every year furnished, besides a few fully grown trees, a certain amount of twelve-year-old copse wood for faggots.

This work was done in the winter, and the wood-cutters were obliged by contract to have the ground cleared before spring. But old Heurtevent, the timber-merchant who directed operations, was so slack that sometimes spring came upon the copses while the wood was still lying on the ground; fresh, delicate shoots could then be seen forcing their way upwards through the dead branches, and when at last the wood-cutters cleared the ground, it was not without destroying many of the young saplings.

That year old Heurtevent’s remissness was even greater than we had looked for. In the absence of any other bidder, I had been obliged to let him have the copse wood exceedingly cheap; so that being assured in any case of a handsome profit, he took very little pains to dispose of the timber which had cost him so little. And from week to week he put off the work with various excuses—a lack of labourers, or bad weather, or a sick horse, or an urgent call for work elsewhere, etc. etc.—with the result that as late as the middle of summer, none of it had been removed.

The year before, this would have irritated me to the highest degree; this year it left me fairly calm; I saw well enough the damage Heurtevent was causing me; but the devastated woods were beautiful; it gave me pleasure to wander in them, tracking and watching the game, startling the vipers, and sometimes sitting by the hour together on one of the fallen trunks which still seemed to be living on, with green shoots springing from its wounds.

Then suddenly, about the middle of the last fortnight in August, Heurtevent made up his mind to send his men. Six of them came with orders to finish the work in ten days. The part of the woods that had been cut was that bordering on La Valterie; it was arranged that the wood-cutters should have their food brought them from the farm, in order to expedite the work. The labourer chosen for this task was a curious young rascal called Bute; he had just come back from a term of military service which had utterly demoralized him; but physically, he was in admirable condition; he was one of the farm hands I most enjoyed talking to. By this arrangement I was able to see him without going down to the farm. For it was just at that time that I began going out again. For a few days I hardly left the woods except for my meals at La Morinière, and I was very often late for them. I pretended I had to superintend the work, though in reality, I only went to see the workers.

Sometimes two of Heurtevent’s sons joined the batch of six men; one was about twenty, the other about fifteen years old, long-limbed, wiry, hard-featured young fellows. They had a foreign look about them, and I learnt later that their mother was actually a Spanish woman. I was astonished at first that she should have travelled to such distant parts, but Heurtevent had been a rolling stone in his youth and had, it appears, married her in Spain. For this reason he was rather looked askance at in the neighbourhood. The first time I saw the younger of the sons was, I remember, on a rainy day; he was alone, sitting on a very high cart, on the top of a great pile of faggots. He was lolling back among the branches, and singing, or rather shouting, a kind of extraordinary song, which was like nothing I had ever heard in our parts. The cart-horses knew the road and followed it without any guidance from him. I cannot tell you the effect this song had on me; for I had never heard its like except in Africa.... The boy looked excited—drunk; when I passed, he did not even glance at me. The next day, I learnt he was a son of Heurtevent’s. It was in order to see him, or rather in the hopes of seeing him, that I spent so much time in the copse. The men by now had very nearly finished clearing it. The young Heurtevents came only three times. They seemed proud and I could not get a word out of them.

Bute, on the other hand, liked talking; I soon managed to make him understand that there was nothing it was not safe to say to me. Upon this he let himself go and soon stripped the countryside of every rag of respectability. I lapped up his mysterious secrets with avidity. They surpassed my expectation and yet at the same time failed to satisfy me. Was this what was really grumbling below the surface of appearances or was it merely another kind of hypocrisy? No matter! I questioned Bute as I had questioned the uncouth chronicles of the Goths. Fumes of the abyss rose darkly from his stories and as I breathed them uneasily and fearfully, my head began to turn. He told me to begin with that Heurtevent had relations with his daughter. I was afraid if I showed the slightest disapprobation I should put an end to his confidences; curiosity spurred me on.

“And the mother? Doesn’t she object?”

“The mother! She has been dead full twelve years.... He used to beat her.”

“How many are there in the family?”

“Five children. You’ve seen the eldest son and the youngest. There’s another of sixteen who’s delicate and wants to turn priest. And then the eldest daughter has already had two children by the father.”

And little by little, I learnt a good deal more, so that do what I would, my imagination began to circle round the lurid attractions of Heurtevent’s house like a blow-fly round a putrid piece of meat. One night the eldest son had tried to rape a young servant girl, and as she struggled, the father had intervened to help his son and had held her with his huge hands; while the second son went piously on with his prayers on the floor above, and the youngest looked on at the drama as an amused spectator. As far as the rape is concerned, I imagine it was not very difficult, for Bute went on to say that not long after, the servant girl, having acquired a taste for this sort of thing, had tried to seduce the young priest.

“And hasn’t she succeeded?” I asked.

“He hasn’t given in so far, but he’s a bit wobbly,” answered Bute.

“Didn’t you say there was another daughter?”

“Yes; she picks up as many fellows as she can lay hold of. And all for nothing too. When she’s set on it, she wouldn’t mind paying herself. But you mustn’t carry on at her father’s. He would give you what for. He says you can do as you like in your own house, but don’t let other people come nosing round! Pierre the farm hand you sent away, got a nasty knock on the head one night, though he held his tongue about it. Since then, she has her chaps in the home woods.”

“Have you had a go yourself?” I asked with an encouraging look.

He dropped his eyes for form’s sake and said, chuckling:

“Every now and then.” Then, raising his eyes quickly, “So has old Bocage’s boy,” he added.

“What boy is that?”

“Alcide, the one who sleeps in the farm. Surely you know him, Sir?”

I was simply astounded to hear Bocage had another son.

“It is true,” went on Bute, “that last year he was still at his uncle’s. But it’s very odd you’ve never met him in the woods, Sir; he poaches in them nearly every night.”

Bute said these last words in a lower voice. He looked at me and I saw it was essential to smile. Then Bute seemed satisfied and went on:

“Good Lord, Sir, of course you know your woods are poached. They’re so big it doesn’t do much harm to anyone.”

I looked so far from being displeased that Bute was emboldened to go on, and I think now he was glad to do Bocage an ill turn. He pointed out one or two hollows in the ground in which Alcide had set his snares, and then showed me a place in the hedge where I should be almost certain of catching him. It was a boundary hedge and ran along the top of a bank; there was a narrow opening in it through which Alcide was in the habit of coming about six o’clock in the evening. At this place Bute and I amused ourselves by stretching a copper wire which we very neatly concealed. Then, having made me swear not to give him away, Bute departed.

For three evenings I waited in vain. I began to think Bute had played me a trick.... At last on the fourth evening, I heard a light step approaching. My heart began to beat and I had a sudden revelation of the horrible allurement of the poacher’s life.... The snare was so well set that Alcide walked straight into it. I saw him suddenly fall flat, with his ankle caught in the wire. He tried to save himself, fell down again, and began struggling like a trapped rabbit. But I had hold of him in an instant. He was a wicked looking youngster, with green eyes, tow-coloured hair and a ferrety expression. He started kicking; then, as I held him so tight that he was unable to move, he tried to bite; and when that failed, he spat out the most extraordinary volley of abuse I have ever heard. In the end I could resist no longer and burst out laughing. At this, he stopped abruptly, looked at me, and went on in a lower tone: