The Farmer's Wife
Said the Baron Rene du Treilles to me:
"Will you come and open the hunting season with me at my farm at
Marinville? I shall be delighted if you will, my dear boy. In the first
place, I am all alone. It is rather a difficult ground to get at, and
the place I live in is so primitive that I can invite only my most
intimate friends."
I accepted his invitation, and on Saturday we set off on the train going
to Normandy. We alighted at a station called Almivare, and Baron Rene,
pointing to a carryall drawn by a timid horse and driven by a big
countryman with white hair, said:
"Here is our equipage, my dear boy."
The driver extended his hand to his landlord, and the baron pressed it
warmly, asking:
"Well, Maitre Lebrument, how are you?"
"Always the same, M'sieu le Baron."
We jumped into this swinging hencoop perched on two enormous wheels, and
the young horse, after a violent swerve, started into a gallop, pitching
us into the air like balls. Every fall backward on the wooden bench gave
me the most dreadful pain.
The peasant kept repeating in his calm, monotonous voice:
"There, there! All right all right, Moutard, all right!"
But Moutard scarcely heard, and kept capering along like a goat.
Our two dogs behind us, in the empty part of the hencoop, were standing
up and sniffing the air of the plains, where they scented game.
The baron gazed with a sad eye into the distance at the vast Norman
landscape, undulating and melancholy, like an immense English park, where
the farmyards, surrounded by two or four rows of trees and full of
dwarfed apple trees which hid the houses, gave a vista as far as the eye
could see of forest trees, copses and shrubbery such as landscape
gardeners look for in laying out the boundaries of princely estates.
And Rene du Treilles suddenly exclaimed:
"I love this soil; I have my very roots in it."
He was a pure Norman, tall and strong, with a slight paunch, and of the
old race of adventurers who went to found kingdoms on the shores of every
ocean. He was about fifty years of age, ten years less perhaps than the
farmer who was driving us.
The latter was a lean peasant, all skin and bone, one of those men who
live a hundred years.
After two hours' travelling over stony roads, across that green and
monotonous plain, the vehicle entered one of those orchard farmyards and
drew up before in old structure falling into decay, where an old maid-
servant stood waiting beside a young fellow, who took charge of the
horse.
We entered the farmhouse. The smoky kitchen was high and spacious. The
copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the hearth.
A cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived an
odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old
farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor
of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the
smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons,
the odor of time, and of things that have passed away.
I went out to have a look at the farmyard. It was very large, full of
apple trees, dwarfed and crooked, and laden with fruit which fell on the
grass around them. In this farmyard the Norman smell of apples was as
strong as that of the bloom of orange trees on the shores of the south of
France.
Four rows of beeches surrounded this inclosure. They were so tall that
they seemed to touch the clouds at this hour of nightfall, and their
summits, through which the night winds passed, swayed and sang a
mournful, interminable song.
I reentered the house.
The baron was warming his feet at the fire, and was listening to the
farmer's talk about country matters. He talked about marriages, births
and deaths, then about the fall in the price of grain and the latest news
about cattle. The "Veularde" (as he called a cow that had been bought at
the fair of Veules) had calved in the middle of June. The cider had not
been first-class last year. Apricots were almost disappearing from the
country.
Then we had dinner. It was a good rustic meal, simple and abundant, long
and tranquil. And while we were dining I noticed the special kind of
friendly familiarity which had struck me from the start between the baron
and the peasant.
Outside, the beeches continued sighing in the night wind, and our two
dogs, shut up in a shed, were whining and howling in an uncanny fashion.
The fire was dying out in the big fireplace. The maid-servant had gone
to bed. Maitre Lebrument said in his turn:
"If you don't mind, M'sieu le Baron, I'm going to bed. I am not used to
staying up late."
The baron extended his hand toward him and said: "Go, my friend," in so
cordial a tone that I said, as soon as the man had disappeared:
"He is devoted to you, this farmer?"
"Better than that, my dear fellow! It is a drama, an old drama, simple
and very sad, that attaches him to me. Here is the story:
"You know that my father was colonel in a cavalry regiment. His orderly
was this young fellow, now an old man, the son of a farmer. When my
father retired from the army he took this former soldier, then about
forty; as his servant. I was at that time about thirty. We were living
in our old chateau of Valrenne, near Caudebec-en-Caux.
"At this period my mother's chambermaid was one of the prettiest girls
you could see, fair-haired, slender and sprightly in manner, a genuine
soubrette of the old type that no longer exists. To-day these creatures
spring up into hussies before their time. Paris, with the aid of the
railways, attracts them, calls them, takes hold of them, as soon as they
are budding into womanhood, these little sluts who in old times remained
simple maid-servants. Every man passing by, as recruiting sergeants did
formerly, looking for recruits, with conscripts, entices and ruins them--
these foolish lassies--and we have now only the scum of the female sex
for servant maids, all that is dull, nasty, common and ill-formed, too
ugly, even for gallantry.
"Well, this girl was charming, and I often gave her a kiss in dark
corners; nothing more, I swear to you! She was virtuous, besides; and I
had some respect for my mother's house, which is more than can be said of
the blackguards of the present day.
"Now, it happened that my man-servant, the ex-soldier, the old farmer you
have just seen, fell madly in love with this girl, perfectly daft. The
first thing we noticed was that he forgot everything, he paid no
attention to anything.
"My father said incessantly:
"'See here, Jean, what's the matter with you? Are you ill?'
"He replied:
"'No, no, M'sieu le Baron. There's nothing the matter with me.'
"He grew thin; he broke glasses and let plates fall when waiting on the
table. We thought he must have been attacked by some nervous affection,
and sent for the doctor, who thought he could detect symptoms of spinal
disease. Then my father, full of anxiety about his faithful man-servant,
decided to place him in a private hospital. When the poor fellow heard
of my father's intentions he made a clean breast of it.
"'M'sieu le Baron'
"'Well, my boy?'
"'You see, the thing I want is not physic.'
"'Ha! what is it, then?'
"'It's marriage!'
"My father turned round and stared at him in astonishment.
"'What's that you say, eh?'
"'It's marriage."
"'Marriage! So, then, you jackass, you're to love.'
"'That's how it is, M'sieu le Baron.'
"And my father began to laugh so immoderately that my mother called out
through the wall of the next room:
"'What in the world is the matter with you, Gontran?'
"He replied:
"'Come here, Catherine.'
"And when she came in he told her, with tears in his eyes from sheer
laughter, that his idiot of a servant-man was lovesick.
"But my mother, instead of laughing, was deeply affected.
"'Who is it that you have fallen in love with, my poor fellow?' she
asked.
"He answered without hesitation:
"'With Louise, Madame le Baronne.'
"My mother said with the utmost gravity: 'We must try to arrange this
matter the best way we can.'
"So Louise was sent for and questioned by my mother; and she said in
reply that she knew all about Jean's liking for her, that in fact Jean
had spoken to her about it several times, but that she did not want him.
She refused to say why.
"And two months elapsed during which my father and mother never ceased to
urge this girl to marry Jean. As she declared she was not in love with
any other man, she could not give any serious reason for her refusal. My
father at last overcame her resistance by means of a big present of
money, and started the pair of them on a farm--this very farm. I did not
see them for three years, and then I learned that Louise had died of
consumption. But my father and mother died, too, in their turn, and it
was two years more before I found myself face to face with Jean.
"At last one autumn day about the end of October the idea came into my
head to go hunting on this part of my estate, which my father had told me
was full of game.
"So one evening, one wet evening, I arrived at this house. I was shocked
to find my father's old servant with perfectly white hair, though he was
not more than forty-five or forty-six years of age. I made him dine with
me, at the very table where we are now sitting. It was raining hard.
We could hear the rain battering at the roof, the walls, and the windows,
flowing in a perfect deluge into the farmyard; and my dog was howling in
the shed where the other dogs are howling to-night.
"All of a sudden, when the servant-maid had gone to bed, the man said in
a timid voice:
"'M'sieu le Baron.'
"'What is it, my dear Jean?'
"'I have something to tell you.'
"'Tell it, my dear Jean.'
"'You remember Louise, my wife.'
"'Certainly, I remember her.'
"'Well, she left me a message for you.'
"'What was it?'
"'A--a--well, it was what you might call a confession.'
"'Ha--and what was it about?'
"'It was--it was--I'd rather, all the same, tell you nothing about it--
but I must--I must. Well, it's this--it wasn't consumption she died of
at all. It was grief--well, that's the long and short of it. As soon as
she came to live here after we were married, she grew thin; she changed
so that you wouldn't know her, M'sieu le Baron. She was just as I was
before I married her, but it was just the opposite, just the opposite.
"'I sent for the doctor. He said it was her liver that was affected--he
said it was what he called a "hepatic" complaint--I don't know these big
words, M'sieu le Baron. Then I bought medicine for her, heaps on heaps
of bottles that cost about three hundred francs. But she'd take none of
them; she wouldn't have them; she said: "It's no use, my poor Jean; it
wouldn't do me any good." I saw well that she had some hidden trouble;
and then I found her one time crying, and I didn't know what to do, no,
I didn't know what to do. I bought her caps, and dresses, and hair oil,
and earrings. Nothing did her any good. And I saw that she was going to
die. And so one night at the end of November, one snowy night, after she
had been in bed the whole day, she told me to send for the cure. So I
went for him. As soon as he came--
"Jean," she said, "I am going to make a confession to you. I owe it to
you, Jean. I have never been false to you, never! never, before or after
you married me. M'sieu le Cure is there, and can tell you so; he knows
my soul. Well, listen, Jean. If I am dying, it is because I was not
able to console myself for leaving the chateau, because I was too fond of
the young Baron Monsieur Rene, too fond of him, mind you, Jean, there was
no harm in it! This is the thing that's killing me. When I could see
him no more I felt that I should die. If I could only have seen him, I
might have lived, only seen him, nothing more. I wish you'd tell him
some day, by and by, when I am no longer here. You will tell him, swear
you, will, Jean--swear it--in the presence of M'sieu le Cure! It will
console me to know that he will know it one day, that this was the cause
of my death! Swear it!"
'Well, I gave her my promise, M'sieu It Baron, and on the faith of an
honest man I have kept my word.'
"And then he ceased speaking, his eyes filling with tears.
"Good God! my dear boy, you can't form any idea of the emotion that
filled me when I heard this poor devil, whose wife I had killed without
suspecting it, telling me this story on that wet night in this very
kitchen.
"I exclaimed: 'Ah! my poor Jean! my poor Jean!'
"He murmured: 'Well, that's all, M'sieu le Baron. I could not help it,
one way or the other--and now it's all over!'
"I caught his hand across the table, and I began to weep.
"He asked, 'Will you come and see her grave?' I nodded assent, for I
couldn't speak. He rose, lighted a lantern, and we walked through the
blinding rain by the light of the lantern.
"He opened a gate, and I saw some crosses of black wood.
"Suddenly he stopped before a marble slab and said: 'There it is,' and he
flashed the lantern close to it so that I could read the inscription:
"'TO LOUISE HORTENSE MARINET,
"'Wife of Jean-Francois Lebrument, Farmer,
"'SHE WAS A FAITHFUL WIFE. GOD REST HER SOUL.'
"We fell on our knees in the damp grass, he and I, with the lantern
between us, and I saw the rain beating on the white marble slab. And I
thought of the heart of her sleeping there in her grave. Ah! poor heart!
poor heart! Since then I come here every year. And I don't know why,
but I feel as if I were guilty of some crime in the presence of this man
who always looks as if he forgave me."
-THE END-
Guy De Maupassant's short story: The Farmer's Wife
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