The Immoralist/Part 2, 1

We arrived at La Morinière in the first days of July, having stayed in Paris only just long enough to do our shopping and pay a very few visits.

La Morinière is situated, as I have told you, between Lisieux and Pont-L'Évêque in the shadiest, wettest country I know. Innumerable narrow coombes and gently rounded hills terminate near the wide 'Vallée d'Auge,' which then stretches in an uninterrupted plain as far as the sea. There is no horizon; some few copse-woods, filled with mysterious shade, some few fields of corn, but chiefly meadow land—softly sloping pastures, where the lush grass is mown twice a year, where the apple-trees, when the sun is low, join shadow to shadow, where flocks and herds graze untended; in every hollow there is water—pond or pool or river; from every side comes the continual murmur of streams.

Oh, how well I remembered the house! its blue ​roofs, its walls of stone and brick, its moat, the reflections in the still waters.… It was an old house which would easily have lodged a dozen persons; Marceline, three servants, and myself, who occasionally lent a helping hand, found it all we could do to animate a part of it. Our old bailiff, who was called Bocage, had already done his best to prepare some of the rooms; the old furniture awoke from its twenty years' slumber; everything had remained just as I remembered it—the panelling not too dilapidated, the rooms easy to live in. Bocage, to welcome us, had put flowers in all the vases he could lay hands on. He had had the large courtyard and the nearest paths in the park weeded and raked. When we arrived, the sun's last rays were falling on the house, and from the valley facing it a mist had arisen which hovered there motionless, masking and revealing the river. We had not well arrived, when all at once I recognized the scent of the grass; and when I heard the piercing cries of the swallows as they flew round the house, the whole past suddenly rose up, as though it had been lying in wait for my approach to close over and submerge me.

In a few days the house was more or less comfortable; I might have settled down to work; but I ​delayed, at first still listening to the voice of my past as it recalled its slightest details to my memory, and then too much absorbed by an unwonted emotion. Marceline, a week after our arrival, confided to me that she was expecting a child.

Thenceforward I thought I owed her redoubled care, and that she had a right to greater tenderness than ever; at any rate during the first weeks that followed her confidence, I spent almost every minute of the day in her company. We used to go and sit near the wood, on a bench where in old days I had been used to sit with my mother; there, each moment brought us a richer pleasure, each hour passed with a smoother flow. If no distinct memory of this period of my life stands out for me, it is not because I am less deeply grateful for it—but because everything in it melted and mingled into a state of changeless ease, in which evening joined morning without a break, in which day passed into day without a surprise.

I gradually set to work again with a quiet mind, in possession of itself, certain of its strength, looking calmly and confidently to the future; with a will that seemed softened, as though by harkening to the counsels of that temperate land.

There can be no doubt, I thought, that the ex​ample of such a land, where everything is ripening towards fruition and harvest, must have the best of influences on me. I looked forward with admiring wonder to the tranquil promise of the great oxen and fat cows that grazed in those opulent meadows. The apple-trees, planted in order on the sunniest slopes of the hill-sides, gave hopes this summer of a magnificent crop. I saw in my mind's eye the rich burden of fruit which would soon bow down their branches. From this ordered abundance, this joyous acceptance of service imposed, this smiling cultivation, had arisen a harmony that was the result not of chance but of intention, a rhythm, a beauty, at once human and natural, in which the teeming fecundity of nature and the wise effort of man to regulate it, were combined in such perfect agreement, that one no longer knew which was most admirable. What would man's effort be worth, thought I, without the savagery of the power it controls? What would the wild rush of these upwelling forces become without the intelligent effort that banks it, curbs it, leads it by such pleasant ways to its outcome of luxury? And I let myself go in a dream of lands where every force should be so regulated, all expenditure so compensated, all exchanges so strict, that the slightest waste ​would be appreciable; then I applied my dream to life and imagined a code of ethics which should institute the scientific and perfect utilization of a man's self by a controlling intelligence.

Where had my rebelliousness vanished to? Where was it hiding itself? It seemed never to have existed, so tranquil was I. The rising tide of my love had swept it all away.

Meanwhile old Bocage bustled round us; he gave directions, he superintended, he advised; his need of feeling himself indispensable was tiresome in the extreme. In order not to hurt his feelings I had to go over his accounts and listen for hours to his endless explanations. Even that was not enough; I had to visit the estate with him. His sententious truisms, his continual speeches, his evident self-satisfaction, the display he made of his honesty drove me to exasperation; he became more and more persistent and there was nothing I would not have done to recover my liberty, when an unexpected occurrence brought about a change in my relations with him. One evening Bocage announced that he was expecting his son Charles the next day.

I said, "Oh!" rather casually, having so far troubled myself very little as to any children Bocage ​might or might not have; then, seeing my indifference offended him and that he expected some expression of interest and surprise, "Where has he been?" I asked.

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

"How old is he now? About…?" I went on, calculating the age of this son, of whose existence I had so far been totally unaware, and leaving him time enough to interrupt me.…

"Past seventeen," went on Bocage. "He was not much more than four when your father's good lady died. Ah! He's a big lad now; he'll know more than his dad soon… Once Bocage was started, nothing could stop him, not even the boredom I very plainly showed.

I had forgotten all about this, when the next evening, Charles, newly arrived from his journey, came to pay his respects to Marceline and me. He was a fine strong young fellow, so exuberantly healthy, so lissom, so well-made, that not even the frightful town clothes he had put on in our honour could make him look ridiculous; his shyness hardly added anything to the fine natural red of his cheeks. He did not look more than fifteen, his eyes were so bright ​and so childlike; he expressed himself clearly, without embarrassment, and, unlike his father, did not speak when he had nothing to say. I cannot remember what we talked about that first evening; I was so busy looking at him that I found nothing to say and let Marceline do all the talking. But next day, for the first time, I did not wait for old Bocage to come and fetch me, in order to go down to the farm, where I knew they were starting work on a pond that had to be repaired.

This pond—almost as big as a lake—was leaking. The leak had been located and had to be cemented. In order to do this, the pond had first to be drained, a thing that had not been done for fifteen years. It was full of carp and tench, great creatures, some of them, that lay at the bottom of the pond without ever coming up. I wanted to stock the moat with some of these fish and give some to the labourers, so that upon this occasion the pleasure of a fishing party was added to the day's work, as could be seen from the extraordinary animation of the farm; some children from the neighbourhood had joined the workers and Marceline herself had promised to come down later.

The water had already been sinking for some time ​when I got there. Every now and then a great ripple suddenly stirred its surface and the brown backs of the disturbed fish came into sight. The children paddling in the puddles round the edges, amused themselves with catching gleaming handfuls of small fry, which they flung into pails of clear water. The water in the pond was muddy and soon became more and more thick and troubled owing to the agitation of the fish. Their abundance was beyond all expectation; four farm labourers, dipping into the water at random, pulled them out in handfuls. I was sorry that Marceline had not arrived and decided to run and fetch her, when a shout signalled the appearance of the first eels. But no-one could succeed in catching them; they slipped between the men's fingers. Charles, who up till then had been standing beside his father on the bank, could restrain himself no longer; he took off his shoes and socks in a moment, flung aside his coat and waistcoat, then, tucking up his trousers and shirtsleeves as high as they would go, stepped resolutely into the mud. I immediately did the same.

"Charles!" I cried, "it was a good thing you came back yesterday, wasn't it?" He was already too busy with his fishing to answer, but he looked at me, ​laughing. I called him after a moment to help me catch a big eel; we joined hands in trying to hold it.… Then came another and another; our faces were splashed with mud; sometimes the ooze suddenly gave way beneath us and we sank into it up to our waists; we were soon drenched. In the ardour of the sport, we barely exchanged a shout or two, a word or two; but at the end of the day, I became aware I was saying 'thou' to Charles, without having any clear idea when I had begun. Our work in common had taught us more about each other than a long conversation. Marceline had not come yet; she did not come at all, but I ceased to regret her absence; I felt as though she would have a little spoilt our pleasure.

Early next morning, I went down to the farm to look for Charles. We took our way together to the woods.

As I myself knew very little about my estate and was not much distressed at knowing so little, I was astonished to find how much Charles knew about it and about the way it was farmed; he told me what I was barely aware of, namely, that I had six farmer-tenants, that the rents might have amounted to sixteen or eighteen thousand francs, and that if ​they actually amounted to barely half that sum, it was because almost everything was eaten up by repairs of all sorts and by the payment of middlemen. His way of smiling as he looked at the fields in cultivation soon made me suspect that the management of the estate was not quite so good as I had at first thought and as Bocage had given me to understand; I pressed Charles further on this subject, and the intelligence of practical affairs which had so exasperated me in Bocage, amused me in a child like him. We continued our walks day after day; the estate was large and when we had visited every corner of it, we began again with more method. Charles did not hide his irritation at the sight of certain fields, certain pieces of land that were overgrown with gorse, thistles and weeds; he instilled into me his hatred of fallow land and set me dreaming with him of a better mode of agriculture.

"But," I said to him at first, "who is it that suffers from this lack of cultivation? Isn't it only the farmer himself? However much the profits of his farm vary, his rent still remains the same."

Charles was a little annoyed: "You understand nothing about it," he ventured to say—and I smiled. ​"You think only of income and won't consider that the capital is deteriorating. Your land is slowly losing its value by being badly cultivated."

"If it were to bring in more by being better cultivated, I expect the farmers would set about it. They are too eager for gain not to make as much profit as they can."

"You are not counting," continued Charles, "the cost of increased labour. These neglected bits of land are sometimes a long way from the farms. True, if they were cultivated, they would bring in nothing or next to nothing, but at any rate, they would keep from spoiling."

And so the conversation went on. Sometimes for an hour on end we seemed to be interminably repeating the same things as we walked over the fields; but I listened, and little by little gathered information.

"After all, it's your father's business," I said one day impatiently. Charles blushed a little.

"My father is old," he said; "he has a great deal to do already, seeing to the upkeep of the buildings, collecting the rents and so on. It's not his business to make reforms."

"And what reforms would you make?" I asked. ​But at that he became evasive and pretended he knew nothing about it; it was only by insisting that I forced him to explain.

"I should take away all the uncultivated fields from the tenants," he ended by advising. "If the farmers leave part of their land uncultivated, it's a proof they don't need it all in order to pay you; or if they say they must keep it all, I should raise their rents. All the people hereabouts are idle," he added.

Of the six farms that belonged to me, the one I most liked visiting was situated on a hill that overlooked La Morinière; it was called La Valterie; the farmer who rented it was a pleasant enough fellow and I used to like talking to him. Nearer La Morinière, was a farm called the 'home farm,' which was let on a system that left Bocage, pending the landlord's absence, in possession of part of the cattle. Now that my doubts had been awakened, I began to suspect honest Bocage himself, if not of cheating me, at any rate, of allowing other people to cheat me. One stable and one cow-house were, it is true, reserved to me, but it soon dawned upon me that they had merely been invented so as to allow the farmer to feed his cows and horses with my oats and hay. So far, I had listened indulgently to the very un​convincing reports which Bocage gave me from time to time of deaths, malformations and diseases. I swallowed everything. It had not then occurred to me that it was sufficient for one of the farmer's cows to fall ill for it to become one of my cows, nor that it was sufficient for one of my cows to do well for it to become one of the farmer's; but a few rash remarks of Charles's, a few observations of my own began to enlighten me, and my mind once given the hint, worked quickly.

Marceline, at my suggestion, went over the accounts minutely, but could find nothing wrong with them; Bocage's honesty was displayed on every page. What was to be done? Let things be. At any rate, I now watched the management of the cattle in a state of suppressed indignation, but without letting it be too obvious.

I had four horses and ten cows—quite enough to be a considerable worry to me. Among my four horses was one which was still called 'the colt,' though it was more than three years old; it was now being broken in; I was beginning to take an interest in it, when one fine morning I was informed that it was perfectly unmanageable, that it would be impossible ever to do anything with it and that the best ​thing would be to get rid of it. As if on purpose to convince me of this, in case I had doubted it, it had been made to break the front of a small cart and had cut its hocks in doing so.

I had much ado that day to keep my temper, but what helped me was Bocage's obvious embarrassment. After all, thought I, he is more weak than anything else; it is the men who are to blame, but they want a guiding hand over them.

I went into the yard to see the colt; one of the men who had been beating it began to stroke it as soon as he heard me coming; I pretended to have seen nothing. I did not know much about horses, but this colt seemed to me a fine animal; it was half-bred, light bay in colour and remarkably elegant in shape, with a very bright eye and a very light mane and tail. I made sure it had not been injured, insisted on its cuts being properly dressed and went away without another word.

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

"I think he's a perfectly quiet beast," he said, "but they don't know how to manage him; they'll drive him wild."

"And how would you manage him?"

​"Will you let me have him for a week. Sir? I'll answer for him."

"And what will you do?"

"You will see."

The next morning, Charles took the colt down to a corner of the field that was shaded by a superb walnut-tree and bordered by the river; I went too, together with Marceline. It is one of my most vivid recollections. Charles had tied the colt with a rope a few yards long to a stake firmly planted in the ground. The mettlesome creature had, it seems, objected for some time with great spirit; but now, tired and quieted, it was going round more calmly; the elasticity of its trot was astonishing and as delightful and engaging to watch as a dance. Charles stood in the centre of the circle and avoided the rope at every round with a sudden leap, exciting or calming the beast with his voice; he held a long whip in his hand, but I did not see him use it. Everything about his look and movements—his youthfulness, his delight—gave his work the fervent and beautiful aspect of pleasure. Suddenly—I have no idea how—he was astride the animal; it had slackened its pace and then stopped; he had patted it a little and then, all of a sudden, I saw he was on horseback, sure of ​himself, barely holding its mane, laughing, leaning forward, still patting and stroking its neck. The colt had hardly resisted for a moment; then it began its even trot again, so handsome, so easy, that I envied Charles and told him so.

"A few days' more training and the saddle won't tickle him at all; in a fortnight. Sir, your lady herself won't be afraid to mount him; he'll be as quiet as a lamb."

It was quite true; a few days later, the horse allowed himself to be stroked, harnessed, led, without any signs of restiveness; and Marceline might really have ridden him if her state of health had permitted.

"You ought to try him yourself. Sir," said Charles.

I should never have done so alone; but Charles suggested saddling another of the farm horses for himself, and the pleasure of accompanying him proved irresistible.

How grateful I was to my mother for having sent me to a riding-school when I was a boy! The recollection of those long-ago lessons stood me in good stead. The sensation of feeling myself on horseback was not too strange; after the first few moments, I had no tremors and felt perfectly at ease. Charles's ​mount was heavier; it was not pure bred, but far from bad-looking, and above all, Charles rode it well. We got into the habit of going out every day; for choice, we started in the early morning, through grass that was still bright with dew; we rode to the limit of the woods; the dripping hazels, shaken by our passage, drenched us with their showers; suddenly the horizon opened out; there, in front of us, lay the vast Vallée d'Auge and far in the distance could be divined the presence of the sea. We stayed a moment without dismounting; the rising sun coloured the mists, parted them, dispersed them; then, we set off again at a brisk trot; we lingered a little at the farm, where the work was only just beginning; we enjoyed for a moment the proud pleasure of being earlier than the labourers—of looking down on them; then, abruptly, we left them; I was home again at La Morinière just as Marceline was beginning to get up.

I used to come in drunk with the open air, dazed with speed, my limbs a little stiff with a delicious fatigue, all health and appetite and freshness. Marceline approved, encouraged my fancy. I went straight to her room, still in my gaiters, and found her lingering in bed, waiting for me; I came bringing with ​me a scent of wet leaves, which she said she liked. And she listened while I told her of our ride, of the awakening of the fields, of the recommencing of the day's labour.… She took as much delight, it seemed, in feeling me live as in living herself. Soon I trespassed on this delight too; our rides grew longer, and sometimes I did not come in till nearly noon.

I kept the afternoons and evenings, however, as much as possible for the preparation of my lectures. My work on them made good progress; I was satisfied with it and thought they might perhaps be worth publishing later as a book. By a kind of natural reaction, the more regular and orderly my life became and the more pleasure I took in establishing order about me—the more attracted I felt by the rude ethics of the Goths. With a boldness, for which I was afterwards blamed, I took the line throughout my lectures of making the apology and eulogy of nonculture; but, at the same time, in my private life, I was laboriously doing all I could to control, if not to suppress, everything about me and within me that in any way suggested it. How far did I not push this wisdom—or this folly?

Two of my tenants whose leases expired at Christmas time, came to me with a request for renewal; it ​was a matter of signing the usual preliminary agreement. Strong in Charles's assurances and encouraged by his daily conversations, I awaited the farmers with resolution. They on the other hand, equally strong in the conviction that tenants are hard to replace, began by asking for their rents to be lowered. Their stupefaction was great when I read them the agreement I had myself drawn up, in which I not only refused to lower the rents but also withdrew from the farms certain portions of land, which I said they were making no use of. They pretended at first to take it as a laughing matter—I must be joking. What could I do with the land? It was worth nothing; and if they made no use of it, it was because no use could be made of it.… Then, seeing I was serious, they turned obstinate; I was obstinate too. They thought they would frighten me by threatening to leave. It was what I was waiting for:

"All right! Go if you like! I won't keep you," I said, tearing the agreement up before their eyes.

So there I was, with more than two hundred acres left on my hands. I had planned for some time past to give the chief management of this land to Bocage, thinking that in this way I should be giving it indirectly to Charles; my intention also was to look after ​it a good deal myself; but in reality, I reflected very little about it; the very risk of the undertaking tempted me. The tenants would not be turning out before Christmas; between this and then we should have time to look about us. I told Charles; his delight annoyed me; he could not hide it; it made me feel more than ever that he was much too young. We were already pressed for time; it was the season when the reaping of the crops leaves the fields empty for early ploughing. By an established custom, the outgoing tenant works side by side with the incoming; the former quits the land bit by bit, as soon as he has carried his crops. I was afraid the two farmers I had dismissed would somehow revenge themselves on me; but, on the contrary, they made a pretence of being perfectly amiable (I only learnt later how much they benefited by this). I took advantage of their complaisance to go up to their land—which was soon going to be mine—every morning and evening Autumn was beginning; more labourers had to be hired to get on with the ploughing and sowing; we had bought harrows, rollers, ploughs; I rode about on horseback, superintending and directing the work, taking pleasure in ordering people about and in using my authority.

​Meanwhile, in the neighbouring meadows, the apples were being gathered; they dropped from the trees and lay rolling in the thick grass; never had there been a more abundant crop; there were not enough pickers; they had to be brought in from the neighbouring villages and taken on for a week; Charles and I sometimes amused ourselves by helping them. Some of the men beat the branches with sticks to bring down the late fruit; the fruit that fell of itself was gathered into separate heaps; often the overripe apples lay bruised, and crushed in the long grass so that it was impossible to walk without stepping on them. The smell that rose from the ground was acrid and sickly and mingled with the smell of the ploughed land.

Autumn was advancing. The mornings of the last fine days are the freshest, the most limpid of all. There were times when the moisture-laden atmosphere painted all the distances blue, made them look more distant still, turned a short walk into a day's journey; and the whole country looked bigger; at times again the abnormal transparency of the air brought the horizon closer; it seemed as though it might be reached by one stroke of the wing; and I could not tell which of the two states filled me with ​a heavier languor. My work was almost finished—at least, so I told myself, as an encouragement to be idle. The time I did not spend at the farm, I spent with Marceline. Together we went out into the garden; we walked slowly, she languidly hanging on my arm; the bench where we went to sit looked over the valley, which the evening gradually filled with light. She had a tender way of leaning against my shoulder; and we would stay so till evening, motionless, speechless, letting the day sink and melt within us.… In what a cloak of silence our love had already learnt to wrap itself! For already Marceline's love was stronger than words—for sometimes her love was almost an anguish to me. As a breath of wind sometimes ripples the surface of a tranquil pool, the slightest emotion was visible in her face; she was listening now to the new life mysteriously quivering within her, and I leant over her as over deep transparent waters where, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen but love. Ah! if this was still happiness, I know I did my best to hold it, as one tries—in vain—to hold the water that slips between one's joined hands; but already I felt, close beside my happiness, something not happiness, something ​indeed that coloured my love, but with the colours of autumn.

Autumn was passing. Every morning the grass was wetter, till it no longer dried in the fringe of the woods on the shady side of the valley; at the first streak of dawn, it was white. The ducks on the waters of the moat fluttered and flapped their wings; they grew fiercely agitated; sometimes they rose together, calling loudly, and flew in a noisy flight right round La Morinière. One morning we missed them. Bocage had shut them up. Charles told me that every autumn at migration time they had to be shut up in this way. And a few days later the weather changed. One evening, suddenly, there came a great blast, a breath from the sea, stormy, steady, bringing with it cold and rain, carrying off the birds of passage. Marceline's condition, the business of settling into a new apartment, the work entailed by my lectures, would in any case have soon called us back to town. The bad weather, which began early, drove us away at once.

It is true that the farm affairs were to bring me back in November. I was greatly vexed to hear of Bocage's plans for the winter; he told me he wished ​to send Charles back to his model farm where, so he declared, he had still a great deal to learn; I talked to him long, used all the arguments I could think of, but I could not make him budge; at the outside, he consented to shorten Charles's training by a trifle, so as to allow him to come back a little sooner. Bocage did not conceal from me that the running of the two farms would be a matter of no small difficulty; but he had in view, so he said, two highly trustworthy peasants whom he intended to employ; they would be partly farmers, partly tenants, partly labourers; the thing was too unusual in these parts for him to hope much good would come of it; but, he said, it was my own wish. This conversation took place towards the end of October. In the first days of November, we moved to Paris.