He was a taller, broader and much stronger man than I am. I have been told that at the fairs, when he had been drinking, he was always ready to bet that he could hold a horse on his back, and the old men of the region affirm that he would actually win his wager.
He married late, when he was past forty. He was a good-looking man and still owned enough property to aspire to a rich marriage and so recover his former position.
If you knew Fontenay-le-Comte, about thirty miles from us, you would certainly have heard of the Lanoue girls. There were five of them and an old mother who had been a widow for many years. They had been rich before the death of their father, who had lost his fortune in foolish speculations.
In my father’s time the Lanoues, mother and five daughters, still lived in the big house on the Rue Rabelais and even today there are two old-maid sisters, the last of them, still living there.
I truly believe that it would be impossible to find a more absolute or a more dignified poverty than that which existed for years in that household. Their income was so meagre that it allowed hardly more than the shadow of one meal a day, yet this did not prevent the young Lanoue ladies, always accompanied by their mother, from appearing at Mass and at Vespers formally attired in gloves and their Sunday best hats, or from marching home afterwards along the Rue de la République, holding their heads high.
The youngest must have been twenty-five, but it was the thirty-year-old sister whom, one fine day, my father married.
That is my mother. You can understand, your Honour, that the words ‘to be happy’ have a different meaning for this woman than for the gentlemen of the law.
When she arrived at Bourgneuf she was so anaemic that for several months the stimulating air of the country gave her fits of dizziness. She had a difficult confinement and was not expected to live, hardly surprising considering the fact that I weighed over twelve pounds. I have told you that my father himself cultivated a portion of his land, which is true and yet not altogether true. A large part of the work of our farms consists in ‘doing’ all the country fairs, and there are fairs in all the market towns of the county as well as in the neighbouring counties.
That was my father’s job, as well as organizing rabbit and wild boar hunts when these animals were playing havoc in the region.
My father was, so to speak, born with a gun in his hand. He carried it on his back when he went into the fields. At the tavern he held it between his legs, and I have never seen him when there was not a dog lying at his feet with its muzzle on his boots.
You see that I was not exaggerating when I said that I am closer to the soil than you.
I went to the village school. I fished in the brooks and I climbed the trees like my playmates.
Did I notice at that time that my mother was sad? As a matter of fact, I didn’t. For me that gravity which never left her was simply the characteristic of mothers, as well as that gentleness and that smile which seemed always slightly veiled.
As for my father, he would pick me up and swing me on to the back of the work horses or the oxen, would play with me or tease me in language so crude that it would make my mother wince, and his moustache, which I had never known to be anything but grey, always, even in the early morning, reeked of wine or spirits.
My father drank, your Honour. Isn’t there invariably one drunkard in every family? In mine, it was my father. He drank at the fairs. He drank at the farmhouses and at the tavern. He drank at home. He would stand in the doorway watching for someone to pass so as to have an excuse to go to the wine-shed with them for a drink.
It was at the fairs that it became dangerous, for when he had drunk, the most hair-raising things seemed to him normal.
I only understood all this later, for I have seen many others like him. I might say that there is one in every village.
A generation separates you from the soil and you have probably never known the unrelenting monotony of the seasons, the weight of the sky on your shoulders from four o’clock in the morning, the passage of the hours with their accumulation of worries.
There are some who don’t seem to mind and they are said to be happy. Others drink, do the fairs, and run after the girls. That was my father’s case.
As soon as he was awake in the morning he needed a glass of brandy to revive those jovial high spirits for which he was famous throughout the country. Afterwards he needed more glasses, more bottles, to maintain this semblance of optimism. And you see, your Honour, I believe my mother understood that. Who knows, perhaps it is for that reason, more than any other, that I love and respect her.
Never, although most of our time we spent together in the kitchen and, like all children, I kept my ears constantly pricked up, did I hear my mother say:
‘You’ve been drinking again, François.’
Never did she ask my father where he had been, not even on days when there was a fair and he spent the whole proceeds from the sale of a cow on girls.
I firmly believe that, in her mind, that is what she called respect. She respected her man. It was not only gratitude for his having married one of the Lanoue girls. It was simply because she felt that he could not be other than he was.
How often at night, after I had gone to bed, have I heard my father’s booming voice announcing the invasion of our house by friends picked up almost anywhere, each one drunker than the other, brought home for a last bottle!
She waited on them. From time to time she would come and listen at my door. And I always pretended to be asleep, for I knew that she was fearful lest I should remember the offensive words being bawled out downstairs.
Every season, or almost, a piece of land was sold, just a splinter, as we say.
‘Bah! That bit there, so far away, it gives us more bother than it’s worth,’ my father would say, but on such days he was not himself.
And he would not touch a drop for days, sometimes weeks, not even a glass of wine. He tried to behave as gaily as usual, but his gaiety was forced.
One day — I can still remember it — when I was playing, near the well, I caught sight of him lying full length at the foot of a haystack with his face turned towards the sky, and he seemed to me so long, so still, that I thought he was dead and I began to cry.
Hearing me, he seemed to come out of a dream. I wonder if he recognized me right away, his eyes had such a faraway look in them.
It was one of those sickly evenings with a sky of a uniform white, at the hour when the grass becomes a sombre green and each blade stands out, shivering in the immensity, as in the paintings of the old Flemish masters.
‘What’s the matter, sonny?’
‘I twisted my ankle running.’
‘Come and sit over here.’
I was frightened, but I went and sat down on the grass beside him. He put his arm round my shoulder. We could see the house in the distance and the smoke rising up straight out of the chimney against the white sky. My father was silent, and sometimes I could feel a slight contraction of his hand on my shoulder.
We stared into empty space, both of us. Our eyes must have been the same colour, and I wondered if my father, too, was frightened.
I don’t know how long I could have endured that agony, and I must have been very pale, when a gun went off in the direction of the Bois Perdu.
Then my father shook himself, took his pipe out of his pocket and, recovering his normal voice, remarked as he rose:
‘That must be Mathieu shooting hares in the Low Meadow.’
Two years went by. I didn’t realize that my father was already old, older than the other fathers. More and more frequently he would get up in the night and I could hear the sound of water and voices whispering, and in the morning he would seem tired. At table my mother would push a little cardboard box towards him, saying:
‘Don’t forget your pill …’
Then, one day when I was nine and at school, one of the neighbours, old man Courtois, came into the classroom and spoke to the teacher in a low voice. Both of them loo
ked at me.
‘Now, children, I want you to behave yourselves. Alavoine, my boy, will you come out to the courtyard with me?’
It was summer. The cement in the courtyard was hot. There were moss roses around the windows.
‘Come here, son …’
Old Courtois had already reached the entrance and was leaning against the wrought-iron gate. The teacher put his arm round my shoulder just as my father used to do. The sky was very blue and filled with the song of larks.
‘You are a little man now, aren’t you, Charles, and I think you love your mama dearly? Well, from now on, you will have to love her even more, because she is going to need you very much.’
Long before he reached the last words, I had understood. And although I had never thought that my father could die, I had a picture of him dead, saw him lying full length at the foot of the haystack as I had seen him that September evening two years before.
I did not cry, your Honour. No more than at the trial. So much for the gentlemen of the press, who would have another chance to call me a slimy toad. I did not cry, but I felt as if I had no more blood in my veins, and when old Courtois, holding me by the hand, took me home with him, I walked on feathers, I went through a universe as weightless as feathers.
They didn’t let me see my father. When I got home he was already in his coffin. Everybody who came to the house, where food and drink had to be served from morning to night and from night to morning, everybody kept repeating, as they shook their heads:
‘And to think how he loved to hunt and you never saw him without his gun!’
Thirty-five years later a lawyer puffed up with importance and flushed with vanity was to insist upon asking my poor mother:
‘Are you sure that your husband did not commit suicide?’
Our peasants of Bourgneuf had more tact. Naturally they gossiped among themselves. But they didn’t find it necessary to say anything to my mother.
My father committed suicide. And what of it?
My father drank.
And I, your Honour, am very much tempted to tell you something. But, even with your intelligence, I’m afraid you won’t understand.
I won’t say that the best men are the ones who drink, but at least they are the ones who have caught a glimpse of something, something they could never attain, something the desire for which has hurt them to the quick, something which perhaps my father and I were staring at that evening when we sat together at the foot of the haystack, our eyes reflecting the colour of the sky.
Think of saying that to the gentlemen of the law and to that snake of a reporter.
I should rather begin telling you about Jeanne, my first wife.
One day at Nantes, when I was twenty-five, solemn personages presented me with my degree of Doctor of Medicine. The same day, after the ceremonies during which I had sweat blood, a gentleman at the door handed me a small box containing a fountain-pen on which my name and the date were engraved in gold letters.
That fountain-pen gave me more pleasure than all the rest. It was the first thing I had ever received for nothing.
You aren’t as lucky at the Faculty of Law, your Honour, because you are not as directly connected with certain big industries.
The fountain-pen was given me, as to all the young doctors, by an important pharmaceutical company.
We spent a fairly sordid night celebrating, while my mother, who had been at the ceremony, waited for me in her hotel room. The next morning, without having been to bed, I left with her, not for Bourgneuf, where she had sold almost all the land that was left, but for a little town, Ormois, about twenty kilometres from La Roche-sur-Yon.
That day I think my mother was completely happy. Such a frail little thing, she sat there beside her big son, first in the train, then in the bus. If I had allowed her to, she would have carried the bags.
Would she have preferred it if I had become a priest? It is possible. She had always wanted me to be either a priest or a doctor. I had chosen medicine to please her, when the life of the fields would have suited me so much better.
That very afternoon I began, so to speak, my career as a doctor at Ormois, where my mother had bought the practice of an old doctor who, almost blind, had at last decided to retire.
A wide street. White houses. A square with a church on one side and the town hall on the other. A few old women who still wore the white bonnets of the Vendée.
Finally, since we could not afford a car and since I had to have some sort of a conveyance to take me on my visits to the outlying farms, my mother had bought me a big blue motor-cycle.
The house was sunny and much too big for us, for my mother refused to have a servant and, during my office hours, she herself opened the door for the patients.
The old doctor, whose name was Marchandeau, had gone to live at the other end of town where he had bought a small house and spent his whole time working in his garden.
He was all grey and wizened, and wore an enormous straw hat that made him look like a queer mushroom. He always stared at people before speaking because of his uncertain eyesight, waiting to hear the sound of their voices.
Perhaps I too was happy, your Honour! I don’t know. I was full of goodwill. I have always been full of goodwill. I wanted to please everybody and first of all my mother.
Can you see our little household? She looked after me, spoiled me. All day long she trotted around our unnecessarily large house, trying to make it more and more agreeable, as though she vaguely realized the need for holding me.
Holding me from what? Wasn’t it in order to hold me that she wanted me to be a priest or a doctor?
Towards her son she showed the same docility, the same humility as she had always shown towards his father and I hardly ever saw her opposite me at table, for she insisted on waiting on me like a servant.
I was often obliged to jump on to my motor-cycle and go to consult my old colleague, for I felt inexperienced and was sometimes embarrassed by certain cases that came to me.
I wanted to do what was right, you see. I aimed at perfection. Since I was a doctor, I looked upon medicine as a sacred calling.
‘Old man Cochin?’ Marchandeau would exclaim. ‘As long as you stuff him full of twenty francs worth of pills, any old pills, he’ll be satisfied.’
For there was no chemist in the village and I myself sold the medicines I prescribed.
‘They are all the same. And don’t go telling them that a glass of water would do them as much good as a drug. They would lose all confidence in you and, what’s more, at the end of the year you would have earned barely enough to pay your licence and your taxes. Drugs, my friend, and more drugs!’
The amusing thing was that as a gardener, old Marchandeau was exactly like the patients he made fun of. From morning to night he treated his borders with the most improbable concoctions which he read about in horticultural catalogues and sent for at great expense.
‘Drugs! … They don’t want to be cured, but to be treated … and whatever you do, don’t ever tell them they’re not sick … That’ll finish you …’
Dr Marchandeau, who was a widower, had married off the elder of his two daughters to a chemist in La Roche and lived with the younger one, Jeanne, who was then twenty-two.
I wanted to do what was right, I have told you that, and I repeat it. I don’t even know if she was pretty. But I knew that a man, at a certain age, ought to get married.
Why Jeanne? She used to smile at me shyly every time I came to the house. And she it was who served the glass of white wine that is traditional with us. She always wore a discreet, self-effacing air. Everything about her was self-effacing, to such a point that after sixteen years I can scarcely remember what she looked like.
She was gentle, like my mother.
I had no friends in the village. I seldom went to La Roche-sur-Yon for, in my free moments, I preferred taking my motor-cycle and going off somewhere to fish or to hunt.
I might say that I never really courted her.
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‘It seems to me,’ my mother said one evening as we were waiting for time to go to bed, ‘that you’re beginning to take quite a fancy to Jeanne.’
‘You think so?’
‘She’s a very nice girl … No one could say the contrary …’
One of those young girls, you know, who dons her summer dress and her new hat for the first time Easter Sunday and her winter coat on All Saints’ Day.
‘Since you won’t remain a bachelor all your life …’
Poor Mama. She would certainly have preferred my being a priest.
It was my mother who married us. We were engaged for almost a year because in the country if you marry too soon, people are sure to say it was a marriage of necessity.
I can still see the Marchandeaus’ garden and, in winter, the living-room with its log fire, where the old doctor would promptly fall asleep in his armchair.
Jeanne worked on her trousseau. Then came the moment for deciding about the wedding dress and finally the period when we spent our evenings drawing up and revising the list of guests.
Is that the way you were married, your Honour? I think in the end I began to be a little impatient. When I would kiss her good night at the door I was troubled by the warmth that emanated from her body.
Old Marchandeau was happy to see his last daughter settled.
‘Now, at last, I’ll be able to live like an old fox …’ he would say in his slightly cracked voice.
We spent three days in Nice, for I was not sufficiently affluent to pay a substitute, and I could not very well leave my patients for any longer than that.
My mother had gained a daughter, a daughter more docile than if she had been her own child. She continued to take charge of the house.
‘What shall I do, Mama?’ Jeanne would ask with angelic sweetness.
‘You must rest, daughter. In your condition …’
For Jeanne became pregnant right away. I wanted to send her to the hospital at La Roche-sur-Yon for her confinement. I was a little frightened. My father-in-law laughed at me.
‘Our midwife here will do the job just as well … She has brought a good third of the village into the world …’
Act of Passion Page 4
