The Immoralist — Chapter 10

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We reached La Morinière in the first days of July, having stopped in Paris only for the time strictly needed to lay in our supplies and to pay a very few calls.

La Morinière, as I have told you, lies between Lisieux and Pont-l'Évêque, in the shadiest, wettest country I know. Numberless little valleys, narrow and softly curved, come out not far from the very wide valley of Auge, which flattens all at once and runs down to the sea. No horizon; coppices full of mystery; a few fields, but meadows above all, pastures on gentle slopes whose thick grass is mown twice a year, where the many apple trees, when the sun is low, join their shadows together, where herds graze free; in every hollow, water — pond, pool, or river; one hears a continual running of streams.

Ah, how well I knew the house again! Its blue roofs, its walls of brick and stone, its moats, the reflections in the sleeping water… It was an old house that would have lodged more than a dozen; Marceline, three servants, and I myself lending a hand at times, we had all we could do to bring one part of it to life. Our old keeper, whose name was Bocage, had already had a few rooms made ready as best he could: the old furniture woke from its twenty years' sleep; everything had stayed just as my memory saw it, the wainscoting not too far gone, the rooms easily habitable. To welcome us the better, Bocage had filled with flowers every vase he could find. He had had the great courtyard and the nearest walks of the park weeded and raked. The house, when we arrived, was taking the last ray of the sun, and from the valley before it a motionless mist had risen that veiled the river and revealed it. Even before arriving I suddenly knew the smell of the grass again; and when I heard once more the shrill cries of the swallows wheeling about the house, the whole past rose up at once, as though it had been waiting for me and, recognizing me, meant to close again upon my coming.

Within a few days the house had become tolerably comfortable; I might have set to work; I delayed, still listening to my past recall itself in me detail by detail, and then soon taken up by an emotion too new: a week after our arrival, Marceline confided to me that she was pregnant.

From then on it seemed to me that I owed her a new sort of care, that she had a right to more tenderness; at least in the first days that followed her confidence I spent beside her nearly every hour of the day. We would go and sit near the wood, on the bench where long ago I used to sit with my mother; there each moment offered itself to us more voluptuously, there the hour ran out more imperceptibly. If no distinct memory stands out from that time of my life, it is not that I keep a less lively gratitude for it — but rather that everything in it mingled and melted into one even well-being, where evening joined with morning, where the days linked themselves to the days without surprises.

I took up my work again slowly, my mind calm, ready, sure of its strength, looking towards the future with confidence and without fever, my will as if softened, and as if listening to the counsel of that temperate land.

There could be no doubt, I thought, that the example of this land, where everything prepares itself for fruit, for the useful harvest, must have the best influence upon me. I admired what a tranquil future was promised by those sturdy oxen, those cows in calf in those opulent meadows. The apple trees planted in order along the favourable slopes of the hills promised a superb crop that summer; I dreamed of the rich weight of fruit that would soon bend down their branches. Out of that ordered abundance, that joyous servitude, those smiling cultivations, a harmony established itself, no longer accidental but dictated, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural, in which one no longer knew what it was one admired, so completely were blended, in a most perfect accord, the fertile bursting-out of free nature and the learned effort of man to govern it. What would that effort be, I thought, without the powerful wildness it masters? What would the wild surge of that overflowing sap be without the intelligent effort that dams it and leads it, laughing, to luxuriance? — And I let myself dream of lands where all forces should be so well regulated, all expenditure so exactly made good, all exchanges so strict that the least waste would be felt; then, applying my dream to life, I built myself an ethic that became a science of the perfect employment of oneself through an intelligent constraint.

Where had they sunk to, where were they hiding then, my turbulences of the day before? So calm was I that they seemed never to have existed. The flood of my love had covered them all over…

Meanwhile old Bocage was full of zeal about us; he directed, supervised, advised; one felt to excess his need to appear indispensable. So as not to offend him, I had to go through his accounts, to hear his endless explanations out to the end. Even that was not enough for him; I had to go with him over the land. His sententious rectitude, his unceasing speeches, his evident satisfaction with himself, the parade he made of his own honesty, before long exasperated me; he grew more and more pressing, and any means would have seemed good to me for winning back my ease — when an unexpected event gave my relations with him a different character: one evening Bocage announced that he expected his son Charles the next day.

I said: ah! almost with indifference, having until then given little thought to what children Bocage might have; then, seeing that my indifference touched him, that he was waiting for some mark of interest and surprise from me:

"And where is he now?" I asked.

"On a model farm, near Alençon," Bocage answered.

"He must be getting on now for…" I went on, reckoning up the age of this son whose existence I had known nothing of until then, and speaking slowly enough to leave him time to interrupt me…

"Turned seventeen," said Bocage. "He wasn't much more than four when Madame your mother died. Ah, he's a big lad now; soon he'll know more than his father…" And once Bocage was launched nothing could stop him, however plain my weariness might be.

Next day I had stopped thinking of it, when towards the end of the afternoon Charles, newly arrived, came to pay his respects to Marceline and to me. He was a handsome fellow, so rich in health, so supple, so well made that the frightful town clothes he had put on in our honour could not manage to make him too ridiculous; his shyness scarcely deepened the fine natural colour of his cheeks. He seemed no more than fifteen, so childlike had the colour of his eyes remained; he spoke out very clearly, without false shame, and, unlike his father, did not talk merely for the sake of talking. I no longer remember what we said to one another that first evening; busy with looking at him, I could find nothing to say to him and let Marceline do the talking. But the next day, for the first time, I did not wait for old Bocage to come and fetch me before going up to the farm, where I knew the work had begun.

The business was to repair a pool. This pool, as large as a pond, was leaking; the place of the leak was known and had to be cemented. For that it was first necessary to empty the pool, which had not been done for fifteen years. Carp and tench swarmed in it, some of them very large, that never left the deep bottom now. I was eager to acclimatize a few of them in the water of the moats and to give some to the workmen, so that this time the pleasure party of a fishing was added to the labour, as the extraordinary animation of the farm announced; some children from round about had come and mixed with the workers. Marceline herself was to join us a little later.

The water had been going down for a long while when I got there. Now and then a great shiver suddenly wrinkled the surface, and the brown backs of the startled fish showed through. In the puddles along the edge, children paddling caught a bright small fry which they threw into buckets full of clear water. The water of the pool, which the panic of the fish was finishing off clouding, was earthy and from moment to moment more opaque. The fish were more abundant than any hope; four farm-hands were bringing them up by plunging in a hand at random. I was sorry Marceline should keep us waiting, and was making up my mind to run and fetch her, when a few shouts announced the first eels. No one could get hold of them; they slipped between the fingers. Charles, who till then had stayed beside his father on the bank, could bear it no longer; he pulled off his shoes and his stockings abruptly, threw down his coat and his waistcoat, then, rolling his trousers and his shirtsleeves very high, went resolutely into the mud. I did the same at once.

"Well, Charles!" I called out, "did you do well to come back yesterday?"

He answered nothing, but looked at me laughing, already hard at his fishing. Soon I called him to help me corner a big eel; we joined our hands to seize it… Then, after that one, came another; the mud splashed our faces; sometimes we sank in suddenly and the water rose to our thighs; we were soon soaked through. In the heat of the game we hardly exchanged a few shouts, a few words; but at the end of the day I noticed that I had come to speak to Charles familiarly, without quite knowing when I had begun. That shared undertaking had taught us more about each other than a long conversation could have done. Marceline had not yet come, and did not come, but already I no longer regretted her absence; it seemed to me that she would have got a little in the way of our joy.

The very next day I went out to join Charles at the farm. The two of us made for the woods.

I, who knew my land badly and troubled little about not knowing it, was greatly astonished to find that Charles knew it very well, and the division of the tenancies with it; he informed me, what I had hardly suspected, that I had six tenants, that I might have drawn sixteen to eighteen thousand francs in rents, and that if I barely drew half of that, it was because nearly all of it was swallowed up in repairs of every kind and in the payment of middlemen. Certain smiles of his as he examined the crops soon made me doubt that my land was as excellently worked as I had at first been able to believe and as Bocage gave me to understand; I pressed Charles on the subject, and that wholly practical intelligence which exasperated me in Bocage knew how to amuse me in the boy. Day after day we took up our walks again; the property was large, and when we had thoroughly searched out every corner, we began over with more method. Charles made no secret of the irritation caused him by the sight of certain badly worked fields, of stretches overrun with broom, with thistles, with sour grasses; he knew how to make me share this hatred of fallow land, and to dream with him of a better ordered cultivation.

"But," I said to him at first, "who suffers from this poor upkeep? Only the tenant, surely? What his farm yields may vary, but that does not vary the rent he pays."

And Charles grew a little heated: "You know nothing about it," he made bold to answer — and I smiled at once. "Looking only at the income, you refuse to notice that the capital is going to ruin. Your land, being imperfectly cultivated, slowly loses its value."

"If it could yield more by being better cultivated, I doubt whether the tenant would fail to set about it; I know him to be too self-interested not to reap all he can."

"You are reckoning," Charles went on, "without the extra labour. These pieces of land are sometimes far from the farms. Cultivated, they would bring in nothing, or next to nothing, but at least they would not go to ruin."

And the conversation went on. Sometimes, for an hour together as we paced the fields, we seemed to be going over the same things again and again: but I listened, and little by little I learned.

"After all, that is your father's affair," I said to him one day, out of patience. Charles flushed a little:

"My father is old," he said; "he has enough to do already, seeing to the carrying out of the leases, to the upkeep of the buildings, to the rents coming in properly. His business here is not to reform."

"And what reforms would you propose?" I went on. But at that he drew back, claimed to know nothing of the matter; it was only by dint of insisting that I forced him to explain himself:

"Take away from the tenants all the land they leave uncultivated," he ended by advising. "If the tenants leave part of their fields fallow, it is proof that they have more than enough of it for what they pay you; or, if they insist on keeping it all, raise their rents. They are all lazy in this country," he added.

Of the six farms I found myself possessed of, the one I went to most willingly stood on the hill that overlooked La Morinière; it was called La Valterie; the tenant who held it was not disagreeable; I talked with him gladly. Nearer La Morinière, a farm known as "the Château farm" was let by halves, on a share system that left Bocage, in default of the absent owner, in possession of part of the livestock. Now that mistrust had been born, I began to suspect honest Bocage himself, if not of cheating me, at least of letting several others cheat me. A stable and a cow-house were indeed kept apart for me, but it soon seemed to me that they had been invented only to allow the tenant to feed his own cows and horses on my oats and my hay. Until then I had listened good-naturedly to the most improbable news Bocage brought me of them from time to time: deaths, malformations and diseases — I accepted everything. That one of the tenant's cows had only to fall ill in order to become one of my cows, I had not yet thought possible; nor that one of my cows had only to do very well in order to become the tenant's; a few imprudent remarks of Charles's, however, a few observations of my own, began to enlighten me; and once my mind was warned it moved fast.

Marceline, warned by me, went minutely through all the accounts, but could find no error in them; it was there that Bocage's honesty took refuge. What was to be done? — Let it be. But at least, with a dull irritation, I now kept watch on the beasts, though without letting it be seen too much.

I had four horses and ten cows; that was quite enough to torment me. Of my four horses there was one still called “the colt,” though he was past three; they were busy breaking him at the time; I was beginning to take an interest in it when one fine day they came to inform me that he was utterly unmanageable, that nothing would ever be made of him, and that the best thing was to get rid of him. As though I might have wanted to doubt it, they had let him smash the front of a small cart and bloody his hocks on it.

That day I had trouble keeping my temper, and what held me back was Bocage's embarrassment. After all, there is more weakness in him than ill will, I thought; the fault lies with the servants; but they do not feel that anyone is directing them.

I went out into the yard to look at the colt. As soon as he heard me coming, a servant who had been striking him began to stroke him; I acted as though I had seen nothing. I knew very little about horses, but this colt seemed to me a fine one; he was a light bay half-bred, remarkably slender in build; his eye was very lively, his mane and his tail almost flaxen. I made sure he was not hurt, insisted that his grazes be dressed, and went off again without another word.

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

“I believe he is very gentle,” he said to me; “but they don't know how to handle him; they will give him back to you a maddened animal.”

“How would you go about it yourself?”

“Will Monsieur trust him to me for a week? I answer for him.”

“And what will you do to him?”

“You shall see…”

The next day Charles led the colt off to a corner of the meadow shaded by a superb walnut tree and skirted by the river; I went there with Marceline. It is one of my most vivid memories. Charles had tied the colt, by a rope a few yards long, to a stake driven firmly into the ground. The colt, too high-strung, had struggled furiously for some time, it seems; by now, subdued and tired, he was going round in a circle more quietly; his trot, of a surprising springiness, was pleasant to watch and charmed one like a dance. Charles, at the center of the circle, avoiding the rope at each turn with an abrupt leap, urged him on or calmed him with a word; he held a long whip in his hand, but I did not see him use it. Everything in his bearing and in his gestures, by its youth and its joy, gave this labor the fine, fervent look of pleasure. Suddenly, and I do not know how, he was astride the animal; it had slackened its pace, then stopped; he had stroked it a little, and then all at once I saw him mounted, sure of himself, barely holding by the mane, laughing, bent forward, prolonging his caress. The colt had barely balked for an instant; now he took up again his even trot, so beautiful, so supple, that I envied Charles and told him so.

“A few more days of training and the saddle will no longer tickle him; in a fortnight Madame herself will dare to ride him: he will be as gentle as a lamb.”

He spoke the truth; a few days later the horse let himself be stroked, saddled, led, without mistrust; and Marceline herself would have ridden him if her condition had allowed her such exercise.

“Monsieur really ought to try him,” Charles said to me.

It was a thing I should never have done alone; but Charles offered to saddle another of the farm horses for himself; the pleasure of going with him carried me away.

How grateful I was to my mother for having taken me to the riding school in my early youth! The distant memory of those first lessons stood me in good stead. I did not feel too much astonished at being on horseback; after a few moments I was without any fear and at my ease. The horse Charles rode was heavier, of no breeding, but not unpleasant to look at; above all, Charles rode him well. We fell into the habit of going out a little every day; by preference we set off very early, in grass bright with dew; we came to the edge of the woods; hazel boughs streaming with wet, shaken as we passed, soaked us; all at once the horizon opened; it was the vast valley of Auge; far off one guessed at the sea. We would stay a moment without dismounting; the rising sun colored, drew apart, dispersed the mists; then we set off again at a fast trot; we lingered at the farm; work was barely beginning; we savored that proud joy of being up before the laborers and of looking down upon them; then abruptly we would leave them; I got back to La Morinière just as Marceline was getting up.

I came home drunk with air, dizzy with speed, my limbs a little numbed with a voluptuous weariness, my mind full of health, of appetite, of freshness. Marceline approved and encouraged my whim. Coming in, still in my gaiters, I brought to the bed where she lay on waiting for me a smell of wet leaves that pleased her, so she told me. And she listened while I recounted our ride, the waking of the fields, the beginning again of work… She took as much joy, it seemed, in feeling me live as in living. — Soon I abused this joy as well; our rides grew longer, and sometimes I no longer came in before noon.

Nevertheless I kept the end of the day and the evening as well as I could for the preparation of my course. My work was going forward; I was satisfied with it and did not consider it impossible that it might later be worth gathering my lectures into a volume. By a sort of natural reaction, while my life was ordering and regulating itself, and while I took pleasure in regulating and ordering everything about me, I grew more and more enamored of the rough ethic of the Goths; and while in the course of my lectures I busied myself, with a boldness for which I was reproached quite enough afterwards, in exalting the uncultivated state and drawing up its apologia, I laboriously contrived to master, if not to suppress, everything that could recall it around me as within myself. This wisdom, or else this madness, how far did I not push it?

Two of my tenant farmers, whose leases expired at Christmas and who wished to renew them, came to find me; it was a question of signing, as custom requires, the paper called a “promise of lease.” Fortified by Charles's assurances, spurred on by our daily conversations, I awaited the farmers with resolution. They, fortified by the fact that a tenant is not easily replaced, began by demanding a reduction of rent. Their stupefaction was all the greater when I read them the “promises” I had drawn up myself, in which not only did I refuse to lower the rents, but withdrew from them besides certain pieces of land which I had seen they put to no use. At first they pretended to take it laughingly: I was joking. What did I want with those fields? They were worth nothing; and if they made nothing of them, it was because nothing could be made of them… Then, seeing that I was in earnest, they grew obstinate; I grew obstinate on my side. They thought to frighten me by threatening to go. I, who was waiting for nothing but that word:

“Well! go then, if you like! I am not keeping you,” I said to them. I took up the promises of lease and tore them across in front of them.

So I was left with more than a hundred hectares on my hands. For some time already I had been planning to entrust the general management of them to Bocage, well aware that indirectly it was to Charles that I was giving it; I also meant to occupy myself a great deal with it in person; besides, I hardly reflected: the very risk of the undertaking tempted me. The tenants would not move out until Christmas; between now and then we could well manage. I told Charles; his joy at once displeased me; he could not hide it; it made me feel still more how far too young he was. Time was already pressing; we were at that season of the year when the first crops leave the fields free for the first plowing. By an established arrangement, the work of the outgoing tenant and that of the new one go on side by side, the former giving up his holding field by field as soon as the harvests are in. I dreaded, as a sort of revenge, the animosity of the two dismissed tenants; on the contrary it suited them to feign a perfect obligingness toward me (only later did I learn what advantage they found in it). I took the opportunity to ride morning and evening over the lands that were so soon to come back to me. Autumn was beginning; more men had to be hired to hurry on the plowing, the sowing; we had bought harrows, rollers, plows; I went about on horseback, supervising, directing the work, taking pleasure in giving orders.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring meadows, the farmers were gathering the apples; they fell, they rolled in the thick grass, more abundant than in any other year; the workers could not cope with them; men came from the villages nearby; they were hired for a week; Charles and I sometimes amused ourselves by helping them. Some beat the branches with poles to bring down the late fruit; the fruit that had fallen of itself was gathered apart, over-ripe, often bruised, crushed in the tall grass; one could not walk without treading on it. The smell rising from the meadow was sharp and sickly sweet and mingled with the smell of the plowed earth.

Autumn was drawing on. The mornings of the last fine days are the freshest, the most limpid. Sometimes the moist air turned the distances blue, set them still farther back, made a journey of a walk; the country seemed enlarged; sometimes, on the contrary, the unnatural transparency of the air brought the horizons quite close; one might have reached them at a single stroke of the wing; and I do not know which of the two filled me with the more languor. My work was nearly finished; at least I said so, the better to dare to draw myself away from it. The time I no longer spent at the farm I spent beside Marceline. We went out together into the garden; we walked slowly, she languidly and leaning her weight on my arm; we went and sat on a bench from which we looked down over the little valley that the evening filled with light. She had a tender way of resting against my shoulder; and we stayed so until dusk, feeling the day melt away within us, without gestures, without words… In how much silence our love already knew how to wrap itself! For Marceline's love was already stronger than the words to tell it, and I was sometimes almost made anxious by that love. As a breath will sometimes wrinkle a very still water, the slightest emotion could be read upon her brow; within her, mysteriously, she listened to a new life stirring; I bent over her as over a deep, clear water in which, however far one looked, one saw nothing but love. Ah! if that was still happiness, I know that from then on I wanted to hold it, as one wants to hold in one's cupped hands, in vain, an escaping water; but already I felt, beside happiness, something other than happiness, which did indeed color my love, but colored it as autumn colors.

Autumn was drawing on. The grass, wetter every morning, no longer dried on the shaded bank at the edge of the wood; at first light it was white. The ducks, on the water of the moat, beat their wings; they grew wildly restless; sometimes one saw them lift and, with great cries, in a clamorous flight, make the whole circuit of La Morinière. One morning we no longer saw them; Bocage had shut them up. Charles told me that they are shut up like this every autumn, at the season of the migration. And, a few days later, the weather changed. One evening there came, all at once, a great blast, a breath off the sea, strong and undivided, bringing the north wind and the rain, carrying off the wandering birds. Marceline's condition, the cares of a new installation, the first anxieties of my course would have called us back to town in any case. The bad season, which began early, drove us out.

The farm work, it is true, was to call me back in November. I had been much put out to learn Bocage's arrangements for the winter; he declared to me his wish to send Charles back to the model farm, where he had, so he claimed, a fair amount still to learn; I argued at length, used every argument I could find, but could not make him give way; at most he agreed to shorten these studies a little so as to let Charles come back rather earlier. Bocage did not hide from me that the working of the two farms would not be done without great trouble; but he had in view, he informed me, two very reliable peasants whom he meant to take under his orders; they would be almost tenants, almost sharecroppers, almost servants; the thing was too new for the district for him to augur anything good from it; but it was I, he said, who had wanted it. — This conversation took place toward the end of October. In the first days of November we were settling in Paris.