The Farmer
The Baron René de Treilles said: “Won’t you come to my farm at Marinville for the first of the shooting? It would be a real pleasure. Besides, I shall be alone. The shooting is so difficult of access and the house so primitive that I can only invite intimate friends.”
I accepted the invitation.
We left on a Saturday by the line for Normandy and got out at Alvimare, where Baron René, pointing out a country conveyance drawn by a restive horse that a tall white-haired peasant was holding, said:
“That is our carriage, old chap.”
The peasant held his hand out to the Baron, who, shaking it heartily, asked:
“Well, Master Lebrument, how goes it?”
“Always the same, sir.”
We got into the hen-coop that hung and swung between two enormous wheels, and the young horse, after a violent swerve, started off at a gallop, throwing us up in the air like balls; each bump back on to the wooden bench hurt me terribly.
The peasant kept on repeating in his calm, monotonous voice:
“There, there, gently, gently, Mustard, gently.”
But Mustard paid no attention and gambolled along like a young goat.
Behind us, in the empty part of the coop, our two dogs were sitting up and sniffing the air that smelt of game.
The Baron, with sad eyes, looked out at the spacious, undulating, melancholy Norman country landscape, so like an English park—one of those extensive parks with farmyards, surrounded by two or four rows of trees and full of squat apple trees that hide the house, with an endless vista of hedges, groups and clusters of trees, which artistic gardeners engaged on developing large estates appreciate. René de Treilles said suddenly: “I love this place; it is the home of my fathers.” He was a pure Norman, tall and broad, rather stout, of the old stock of adventurers who set off to found new kingdoms on the shores of every ocean. He was about fifty, maybe ten years younger than the farmer who was driving and who was nothing but skin and bone—one of those men who live for a century.
After two hours’ travelling over stony roads, through the green monotonous plain, the conveyance turned into a yard full of apple trees and stopped in front of an old, dilapidated building, where an antiquated servant waited beside a boy who seized hold of the horse.
We went into the farmhouse. The well-smoked kitchen was high and roomy. The brasses and china shone in the reflection thrown by the fire. A cat was asleep on a chair and a dog asleep under the table. You could smell a mixture of milk, apple and smoke, and that indefinable odour of old peasant houses: the odour of earth, walls, furniture, of spilt soup, washing-days, and former inhabitants, the mingled smell of beasts and human beings, of things and of people, the smell of time in its flight.
I went out again to look at the farmyard, which was very large, full of old, gnarled, squat apple trees, covered with fruit that fell on to the grass round the roots. The Norman perfume of apples in the yard was as strong as that of the blossoming orange-trees in the South.
The enclosure was surrounded by four rows of beeches so tall that at nightfall they seemed to reach the clouds; the evening breeze stirred in the treetops, which tossed about restlessly, droning over a never-ending, sad lament.
When I went back, the Baron was warming his feet and listening to the farmer’s account of the countryside. He told of marriages, births and deaths, of the drop in the price of grain, and then he talked about the cattle: La Veularde (a cow bought at Veules) had had a calf in mid-June. Last year the cider was not good and apricots were dying out in the country.
After this we had a good, leisurely, quiet dinner, simple but abundant, throughout which I kept noticing the very special friendly relations between the Baron and the peasant, which had struck me from the very first.
Out of doors the beeches continued their lament under the lash of the night wind, and our two dogs, shut up in a stable, whined and howled in a foreboding manner. The fire on the open hearth got lower and lower and the servant had gone to bed, and Master Lebrument said:
“I will go to bed, if I may, sir. I am not accustomed to sit up late, that I am not.”
The Baron held out his hand and said: “Certainly, old fellow,” in such a friendly tone that when the man had gone, I said:
“This farmer is very devoted to you?”
“Better than that, old chap; I am deeply attached to him because of the tragedy of his life, quite a simple and a very sad affair.
