The Immoralist — Chapter 12

Chapter 13 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

The season was growing mild. As soon as my course of lectures was over, I took Marceline to La Morinière, the Doctor declaring that every pressing danger had passed and that, to complete her recovery, nothing was so needful as better air. I myself had great need of rest. Those vigils I had insisted on bearing almost entirely alone, that prolonged anguish, and above all that sort of physical sympathy which, at the time of Marceline's embolism, had made me feel within myself the frightful startings of her heart — all this had wearied me as though I had been ill myself.

I should have preferred to take Marceline into the mountains; but she showed the keenest wish to return to Normandy, maintained that no climate could be better for her, and reminded me that I had to look again into those two farms, which I had taken upon myself somewhat rashly. She persuaded me that I had made myself answerable for them, and that I owed it to myself to succeed there. So we had no sooner arrived than she urged me out to run about the land… I do not know whether there was not a great deal of self-denial in her friendly insistence; the fear that otherwise, believing myself kept at her side by the care she still needed, I might not feel my freedom large enough… Marceline, however, was better; blood was colouring her cheeks again; and nothing rested me more than to feel her smile less sad; I could leave her without fear.

So I went back to the farms. The first hay was being cut. The air, laden with pollen and with scents, went to my head at first like a heady drink. It seemed to me that since the year before I had not breathed, or had breathed nothing but dust, so honeyed was the way the atmosphere entered into me. From the bank where I had sat down, as though tipsy, I looked out over La Morinière; I saw its blue roofs, the sleeping water of its moats; round about, fields already mown, others still full of grass; farther off, the curve of the stream; farther still, the woods where last autumn I used to ride with Charles. Singing that I had been hearing for some moments drew nearer; it was the haymakers coming home, fork or rake on the shoulder. These labourers, nearly all of whom I recognized, reminded me disagreeably that I was not there as a charmed traveller, but as master. I went up to them, smiled at them, spoke to them, asked after each one at length. That morning Bocage had already been able to inform me of the state of the crops; by a regular correspondence he had, besides, never ceased to keep me abreast of the smallest incidents on the farms. The working of the place was not going badly, far better than Bocage had at first let me hope. Yet I was awaited for certain important decisions, and for some days I directed everything as best I could, without pleasure, but hanging my undone life upon this semblance of work.

As soon as Marceline was well enough to receive, a few friends came to stay with us. Their company, affectionate and not at all noisy, knew how to please Marceline, but had the effect of making me leave the house all the more willingly. I preferred the company of the farm people; it seemed to me that with them I should find more to learn — not that I questioned them much — no, and I hardly know how to express the sort of joy I felt beside them: it seemed to me that I felt through them — and whereas the conversation of our friends was already wholly known to me before they had begun to speak, the mere sight of those ragged fellows caused me a continual wonder.

If at first one might have said that they put into answering me all the condescension I avoided putting into my questions, they soon bore my presence better. I came ever more into contact with them. Not content to follow them at their work, I wanted to see them at their games; their dull thoughts hardly interested me, but I was present at their meals, listened to their jokes, watched over their pleasures lovingly. It was, in a kind of sympathy like that which made my heart start at the startings of Marceline's, an immediate echo of every sensation not my own — not vague, but precise, sharp. I felt in my arms the mower's aching; I was weary with his weariness; the mouthful of cider he drank quenched my thirst; I felt it slipping down his throat; one day, whetting his scythe, one of them cut deep into his thumb: I felt his pain, right to the bone.

It seemed to me thus that my sight was no longer alone in teaching me the landscape, but that I felt it besides through a kind of touch which this strange sympathy made boundless.

Bocage's presence hampered me; when he came I had to play the master, and I found no taste in it any longer. I still gave orders — it had to be — and directed the workmen in my own fashion; but I no longer rode on horseback, for fear of dominating them too much. — Yet, in spite of the precautions I took so that they should no longer suffer from my presence nor constrain themselves before me, I remained before them, as before, full of an evil curiosity. The existence of each of them stayed mysterious to me. It always seemed to me that a part of their life was in hiding. What did they do when I was no longer there? I would not allow that they did not amuse themselves more. — And I credited each of them with a secret which I stubbornly desired to know. I prowled, I followed, I spied. I attached myself to the roughest natures, as if from their obscurity I expected some light to enlighten me.

One in particular drew me: he was rather handsome, tall, not at all stupid, but led solely by instinct; he never did anything but on the sudden, and gave way to every passing impulse. He was not from that part of the country; he had been taken on by chance. An excellent worker for two days, on the third he would drink himself senseless. One night I went furtively to look at him in the barn; he was sprawling in the hay; he was sleeping the thick sleep of the drunk. How long I looked at him!… One fine day he went off as he had come. I should have liked to know along what roads… That very evening I learned that Bocage had turned him away.

I was furious with Bocage; I sent for him.

"It appears you have turned Pierre away," I began. "Will you tell me why?"

A little taken aback by my anger, which nevertheless I was tempering as best I could:

"Surely Monsieur did not want to keep a filthy drunkard about the place, who was leading the best workmen astray…"

"I know better than you whom I wish to keep."

"A good-for-nothing! Nobody so much as knows where he come from. In the district it made a bad impression… And some night when he'd have set fire to the barn, Monsieur would perhaps have been pleased."

"But after all this concerns me, and the farm is mine, I believe; — I intend to run it as I please. In future you will be so good as to acquaint me with your reasons before you execute anybody."

Bocage, as I have said, had known me as a small child; however wounding the tone of my words, he was too fond of me to be much angered by them. And indeed he did not take me seriously enough. The Norman peasant too often remains without belief in whatever motive he cannot fathom, that is to say, in whatever is not driven by interest. Bocage simply regarded this quarrel as a whim.

Still, I did not wish to break off the interview upon a reproach, and, feeling that I had been too sharp, I cast about for something I might add.

"Isn't your son Charles due back soon?" I decided to ask after a moment's silence.

"I thought Monsieur had forgotten him, seeing how little he troubled himself about him," said Bocage, still hurt.

"I forget him, Bocage! And how could I, after all we did together last year? I am even counting on him a great deal for the farms…"

"Monsieur is very good. Charles is to be back in a week."

"Come, I am glad of it, Bocage"; — and I dismissed him.

Bocage was very nearly right: I had certainly not forgotten Charles, but I now cared very little about him. How am I to explain that after so ardent a comradeship I felt toward him nothing more than a dispirited want of curiosity? It was that my tastes were no longer those of the year before. My two farms, I had to admit it to myself, no longer interested me as much as the people I employed upon them; and for keeping company with those, Charles's presence was going to be a hindrance. He was far too reasonable and made himself too much respected. So, in spite of the lively emotion his memory stirred in me, I saw his return approaching with dread.

He came back. — Ah, how right I was to be afraid, and how well Ménalque did to disown all remembrance! — In Charles's place I saw come in an absurd Monsieur, crowned with a ridiculous bowler hat. God, how changed he was! Ill at ease, constrained, I tried nevertheless not to answer with too much coldness the joy he showed at seeing me again; but even that joy displeased me; it was awkward and did not seem to me sincere. I had received him in the drawing-room, and as it was late I could not make out his face well; but when the lamp was brought, I saw with disgust that he had let his side-whiskers grow.

The talk that evening was rather dismal; then, as I knew he would be for ever on the farms, I avoided going there for nearly a week, and fell back upon my studies and the company of my guests. Then, as soon as I began going out again, I was claimed by a very new occupation:

Woodcutters had invaded the woods. Every year a part of them was sold; divided into twelve equal cuttings, the woods yielded each year, together with a few tall standards from which no further growth was hoped for, a twelve-year-old coppice that was made up into faggots.

This work was done in winter, and then, before the spring, by the terms of the sale, the woodcutters were to have cleared the cutting. But the carelessness of old Heurtevent, the timber merchant who directed the operation, was such that sometimes spring came into a cutting still encumbered; one saw then new frail shoots stretching up through the dead branches, and when at last the woodcutters carried away, it was not without ruining a great many buds.

That year the negligence of old Heurtevent, the buyer, went beyond our fears. In the absence of any competing bid, I had had to let him have the cutting very cheap; and so, sure of finding his profit in it whatever happened, he was in very little haste to cut up wood he had paid so little for. And from week to week he put the work off, pleading now the lack of workmen, now bad weather, then a sick horse, statute labour, other jobs — what do I know? So that by the middle of summer nothing had yet been carried away.

What, the year before, would have irritated me to the highest degree left me, that year, calm enough; I did not conceal from myself the wrong Heurtevent was doing me; but the woods thus laid waste were beautiful, and I walked in them with pleasure, watching, spying upon the game, coming suddenly on vipers, and sometimes sitting a long while on one of the fallen trunks that seemed to be living still and threw out a few green sprigs from its wounds.

Then, all at once, toward the middle of the first fortnight of August, Heurtevent made up his mind to send his men. They came six at a time, claiming to finish the whole work in ten days. The part of the woods being cut ran almost up to La Valterie; to make the woodcutters' work easier, I agreed that their meals should be brought from the farm. The man charged with this office was a joker named Bute, whom the regiment had just sent back to us thoroughly rotten — in mind, I mean, for his body was doing wonderfully; he was one of those of my people with whom I most willingly talked. In this way, then, I could see him again without going to the farm for it. For it was precisely then that I began going out again. And for some days I hardly left the woods, returning to La Morinière only for meal-times, and often keeping the house waiting. I made a show of overseeing the work, but in truth I saw nothing but the workers.

There sometimes joined this band of six two of the Heurtevent sons; one twenty years old, the other fifteen, slender, arched, with hard features. They seemed of foreign type, and I learned later that in fact their mother had been Spanish. At first I was astonished that she could have come as far as here, but Heurtevent, an out-and-out vagabond in his youth, had, it appeared, married her in Spain. For that reason he was rather ill thought of in the district. The first time I had met the younger of the sons was, I remember, in the rain; he was alone, seated on a cart at the very top of a heap of faggots; and there, flung right back among the branches, he was singing, or rather bawling, a kind of strange song such as I had never heard in that country. The horses that drew the cart, knowing the road, went on without being driven. I cannot tell the effect that song had upon me; for I had heard none like it save in Africa… The boy, exalted, seemed drunk; when I passed he did not even look at me. The next day I learned that he was a son of Heurtevent's. It was to see him again, or at least to wait for him, that I loitered so in the cutting. It was soon cleared. The Heurtevent boys came only three times. They seemed proud, and I could not get a word out of them.

Bute, on the other hand, loved to tell; I contrived that he should soon understand what might be said in front of me; from then on he hardly restrained himself, and stripped the district bare. Greedily I bent over my mystery. It went at once beyond my hope and did not satisfy me. Was this what growled beneath the appearance? or was it perhaps only a fresh hypocrisy? No matter! And I questioned Bute as I had once questioned the shapeless chronicles of the Goths. Out of his tales rose a murky vapour of the abyss which was already going to my head and which uneasily I breathed in. Through him I learned first that Heurtevent slept with his daughter. I was afraid that if I showed the least disapproval I should stop every confidence; so I smiled; curiosity urged me on.

"And the mother? Doesn't she say anything?"

"The mother! It's a good twelve years now that she's been dead… He used to beat her."

"How many of them are there in the family?"

"Five children. You've seen the eldest of the sons and the youngest. There's another one of sixteen, who isn't strong, and who wants to go for a priest. And then the eldest girl has already had two children by the father…"

And little by little I learned a great many other things, which made the Heurtevent house a burning place, strong-smelling, around which, in spite of myself, my imagination circled like a blowfly: — One evening the eldest son tried to rape a young servant girl; and as she struggled, the father stepped in to help his son, and held her down with his enormous hands; while the second son, on the floor above, tenderly went on with his prayers, and the youngest, witness to the drama, was enjoying himself. As for the rape, I imagine it cannot have been very difficult, for Bute went on to tell me that, a little while afterward, the servant, having acquired a taste for it, had tried to debauch the little priest.

“And the attempt failed?” I asked.

“He's holding out still, but not so stoutly,” Bute answered.

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

“One who takes all she can get; and without asking anything for it either. When the fit is on her, she'd sooner be the one to pay. Mind you, you mustn't sleep at the father's; he'd lay into you. He says a family has the right to do whatever it pleases among themselves, but that it's nobody else's business. Pierre, the farmhand you had turned off, never boasted about it, but one night he didn't come out of there without a hole in his head. Ever since then, it's in the château woods that the work gets done.”

Then, encouraging him with a look:

“Have you tried her?” I asked.

He lowered his eyes for form's sake and said with a snigger:

“Now and then.” Then, quickly raising his eyes again: “Old Bocage's boy too.”

“What boy of old Bocage's?”

“Alcide, the one who sleeps at the farm. Doesn't Monsieur know him, then?”

I was utterly astounded to learn that Bocage had another son.

“It's true,” Bute went on, “that last year he was still at his uncle's. But it's a wonder Monsieur hasn't come across him in the woods already; he poaches nearly every evening.”

Bute had said these last words lower. He looked hard at me and I understood that it was urgent to smile. Then Bute, satisfied, went on:

“Monsieur knows well enough, by God, that the place gets poached. Bah! the woods are so big it does no great harm…”

I showed so little displeasure at this that Bute, soon emboldened, and, as I think today, glad to do Bocage a small disservice, showed me in a certain hollow some snares set by Alcide, then pointed out a certain place in the hedge where I could be all but sure of catching him. It was, at the top of a bank, a narrow gap in the hedge that formed the border of the wood, and through which Alcide was accustomed to pass toward six o'clock. There Bute and I, hugely amused, stretched a copper wire, very prettily hidden. Then, having made me swear that I would not give him away, Bute went off, not wanting to compromise himself. I lay down against the far side of the bank; I waited.

And for three evenings I waited in vain. I began to think Bute had played a trick on me… The fourth evening at last, I hear a very light step approaching. My heart beats and I suddenly learn the dreadful pleasure of the man who poaches… The snare is so well set that Alcide walks straight into it. I see him sprawl abruptly, his ankle caught. He tries to get away; falls again, and struggles like a trapped animal. But already I have him. He is a nasty little scamp, green-eyed, with tow-colored hair and a weaselish look. He kicks at me; then, pinned down, tries to bite, and, being unable to manage it, begins flinging in my face the most extraordinary insults I had ever heard till then. In the end I can hold out no longer; I burst out laughing. At that he stops short, looks at me, and, in a lower tone:

“You brute, you've crippled me.”

“Let me see.”

He slides his stocking down over his clogs and shows his ankle, where one can barely make out a slight, faintly pink mark. — It is nothing. — He smiles a little, then, slyly:

“I'm going to tell my father it's you that sets the snares.”

“Good Lord! that one is yours.”

“Sure enough it wasn't you that set that one.”

“And why not?”

“You wouldn't know how, not half so well. Show me, then, how you do it.” — “Teach me…”

That evening I came in very late for dinner, and as no one knew where I was, Marceline was anxious. I did not tell her, however, that I had set six snares and that, far from scolding Alcide, I had given him ten sous.

The next day, going with him to look at those snares, I had the amusement of finding two rabbits taken in the traps; naturally I left them to him. The season was not yet open. What became, then, of this game, which could not be shown without giving oneself away? That was what Alcide refused to tell me. At last I learned, again from Bute, that Heurtevent was a master receiver of stolen goods, and that between Alcide and him the youngest of the sons ran the errands. Was I then to work my way further into that savage family? With what passion I poached!

I met Alcide again every evening; we took rabbits in great numbers, and once even a roe deer: it was still feebly alive…, I cannot remember without horror the joy Alcide took in killing it. We put the deer in a safe place, where the Heurtevent boy could come for it in the night.

From then on I no longer went out so willingly by day, when the emptied woods held fewer attractions for me. I even tried to work; sad, aimless work — for at the end of my course of lectures I had refused to go on as a substitute — thankless work, from which the least song, the least sound in the countryside would suddenly distract me; every cry became a summons to me. How many times did I leap up like that from my reading to my window, to see nothing at all go by! How many times, going abruptly out… The only attention I was capable of was the attention of all my senses.

But when night fell — and night, by now, fell quickly — that was our hour, whose beauty I had never suspected until then; and I went out as thieves come in. I had given myself the eyes of a night bird. I admired the grass, taller and more astir, the trees grown thick. The night hollowed everything out, set it at a distance, made the ground remote and every surface deep. The smoothest path seemed dangerous. One felt waking everywhere whatever lived a life of darkness.

“Where does your father think you are now?”

“Minding the beasts, in the byre.”

Alcide slept there, I knew, close beside the pigeons and the hens; since he was shut in at night, he got out through a hole in the roof; his clothes kept a warm smell of poultry…

Then abruptly, as soon as the game had been gathered, he would plunge into the night as into a trapdoor, without a gesture of farewell, without so much as a till tomorrow. I knew that before going back into the farm, where the dogs kept silent for him, he met the young Heurtevent and handed over his haul. But where? That was what my longing could never manage to catch out: threats and tricks alike failed; the Heurtevents would let no one near them. And I do not know where my folly most triumphed: in pursuing a paltry mystery that kept retreating before me? in inventing the mystery, perhaps, out of sheer curiosity? — But what did Alcide do when he left me? Did he really sleep at the farm? or did he only make the farmer believe it? Ah! however much I compromised myself, I achieved nothing but a further lessening of his respect, without any increase of his trust; and that enraged and grieved me at once…

Once he had vanished, suddenly I was left horribly alone; and I went home across the fields, through grass heavy with dew, drunk with night, with wild life and with anarchy, soaked, muddy, covered with leaves. From far off, in La Morinière asleep, there seemed to guide me, like a peaceful beacon, the lamp of my study, where Marceline believed me shut up, or the lamp of Marceline's room — I had persuaded her that without going out at night like this I should not have been able to fall asleep. It was true: I had come to loathe my bed, and I should have preferred the barn.

Game was plentiful that year. Rabbits, hares, pheasants followed one another. Seeing everything go so well, Bute, after three days, took a fancy to joining us.

On the sixth evening of poaching, we found no more than two snares out of twelve; a clean sweep had been made during the day. Bute asked me for a hundred sous to buy more copper wire, iron wire being worthless.

The next day I had the pleasure of seeing my ten snares at Bocage's, and I was obliged to commend his zeal. The best of it is that the year before I had rashly promised ten sous for every snare seized; I had to give him a hundred. Meanwhile, with his hundred sous, Bute buys more copper wire. Four days later, the same story; ten new snares are seized. Again a hundred sous to Bute; again a hundred sous to Bocage. And as I am congratulating him:

“It isn't I,” he says, “who should be congratulated. It's Alcide.”

“Really!” — Too much astonishment can be our undoing: I hold myself in.

“Yes,” Bocage goes on; “what would you have, Monsieur, I am getting old, and the farm takes up too much of me. The boy runs the woods for me; he knows them; he's sharp, and he knows better than I do where to look for the traps and find them.”

“I can well believe it, Bocage.”

“So, out of the ten sous Monsieur gives, I let him have five sous a trap.”

“He certainly deserves them. By Jove! Twenty snares in five days! He has worked well. The poachers had better look out. They'll be taking a rest, I'll wager.”

“Oh! Monsieur, the more we take, the more we find. Game sells dear this year, and for the few sous it costs them…”

I am so thoroughly taken in that I could almost believe Bocage was in on it. And what vexes me in the business is not Alcide's triple trade, it is seeing him deceive me like this. And besides, what do they do with the money, Bute and he? I have no idea; I shall never know anything about such creatures. They will always lie, will deceive me for the sake of deceiving me. This evening it is not a hundred sous but ten francs that I give Bute: I warn him it is for the last time and that if the snares are taken again, so much the worse.

The next day I see Bocage coming; he seems very ill at ease; I at once become more so than he. What can have happened? And Bocage informs me that Bute did not get back to the farm until early morning; Bute is dead drunk; at the first words Bocage said to him, Bute insulted him foully, then threw himself upon him and struck him…

“In short,” Bocage says to me, “I came to know whether Monsieur authorizes me” (he dwells a moment on the word), “authorizes me to dismiss him.”

“I shall think it over, Bocage. I am very sorry he was disrespectful to you. I see… Leave me alone to think it over; and come back here in two hours.” — Bocage goes out.

To keep Bute is to fail Bocage painfully; to turn Bute out is to drive him to revenge… So much the worse; come what may; I alone, after all, am to blame… And as soon as Bocage returns:

“You may tell Bute that we do not wish to see him here again.”

Then I wait. What is Bocage doing? What is Bute saying? — And only in the evening do I get some echoes of the scandal. Bute has talked. I gather it first from the cries I hear at Bocage's; it is young Alcide who is being beaten. — Bocage will be coming; he comes; I hear his old step approaching and my heart beats harder still than it beat for the game. The unbearable moment! All the great sentiments will be called for; I shall be obliged to take him seriously. What explanations am I to invent? How badly I shall play it! Ah! I should like to hand back my part… Bocage comes in. I understand strictly nothing of what he says. It is absurd: I have to make him begin again. At last I make out this much: he believes Bute alone is guilty; the incredible truth escapes him; that I should have given Bute ten francs, and what for? He is too much of a Norman to admit it. The ten francs Bute stole, that is certain; in claiming that I gave them to him, he adds a lie to the theft; a way of covering up the theft; Bocage is not the man to be taken in by a whopper of that size… Of the poaching there is no longer any question. If Bocage was beating Alcide, it was because the boy had been sleeping out.

Come! I am saved; with Bocage at least all is well. What an imbecile that Bute is! Certainly, this evening I have little desire to go poaching.

I thought it was all over already, but an hour later here is Charles. He does not look as though he were joking; from a distance already he seems more tiresome than his father. And to think that last year…

“Well! Charles, it is a long time since we have seen you.”

“If Monsieur cared to see me, he had only to come to the farm. God knows it isn't the woods or the night that I have any business with.”

“Ah! your father has told you…”

“My father has told me nothing because my father knows nothing. What need has he, at his age, to learn that his master is making a fool of him?”

“Careful, Charles! you are going too far…”

“Oh! of course, you are the master! and you do as you please.”

“Charles, you know perfectly well that I have made a fool of no one, and if I do as I please it is because it harms no one but myself.”

He gave a slight shrug of the shoulders.

"How do you expect anyone to defend your interests when you attack them yourself? You cannot protect the keeper and the poacher at once."

"Why?"

"Because then… ah! look here, sir, all this is too clever for me, and it simply does not please me to see my master make common cause with the men we arrest, and undo along with them the work that has been done for him."

And Charles says this in a voice that grows steadily surer. He holds himself almost nobly. I notice that he has had his side-whiskers cut off. What he says is, besides, quite just. And as I say nothing (what should I say to him?), he goes on:

"That one has duties toward what one possesses, sir taught me last year, but seems to have forgotten it. Those duties must be taken seriously, and one must give up playing with them… or else one did not deserve to possess."

A silence.

"Is that all you had to say?"

"For this evening, yes, sir; but on another evening, if sir drives me to it, perhaps I shall come and tell sir that my father and I are leaving La Morinière."

And he goes out, bowing to me very low. I scarcely take the time to think:

"Charles!" — He is right, by God… Oh! Oh! But if that is what possessing means!… Charles. And I run after him; I overtake him in the darkness, and, very quickly, as though to make my sudden decision sure:

"You may tell your father that I am putting La Morinière up for sale."

Charles bows gravely and moves off without a word.

All this is absurd! absurd!

That evening Marceline cannot come down to dinner and sends word that she is unwell. I go up to her room in haste and full of anxiety. She reassures me at once. "It is only a cold," she hopes. She has caught a chill.

"Could you not have covered yourself up, then?"

"But I did; at the very first shiver I put on my shawl."

"It was not after the shiver that you should have put it on; it was before."

She looks at me, tries to smile… Ah! perhaps a day begun so badly disposes me to dread — had she said to me aloud: "Do you care so much, then, that I should live?" I could not have heard her more distinctly. Decidedly everything is coming undone around me; of all that my hand seizes, my hand can keep nothing… I fling myself toward Marceline and cover her pale temples with kisses. Then she holds back no longer and sobs upon my shoulder…

"Oh! Marceline! Marceline! let us go away from here. Elsewhere I shall love you as I loved you at Sorrento… You have believed me changed, have you not? But elsewhere you will surely feel that nothing has changed our love."

And I do not cure her sadness yet, but already, how she catches at hope!…

The season was not far advanced, but the weather was damp and cold, and already the last buds on the rosebushes were rotting without being able to open. Our guests had left us long since. Marceline was not so unwell that she could not see to the closing of the house, and five days later we set out.