The leaves were sleeping motionless and in supreme
peace, and in the distance they could hear the monotonous
sound of the brooks as they flowed over the stones.
Amidst the dull noise of the insects, the nightingales
were answering each other from tree to tree, and everything
seemed alive with hidden life, and the sky was bright
with such a shower of falling stars, that they might
have been taken for white forms wandering among the
dark trunks of the trees.
“Why have we come?” Margot asked, in a
panting voice. “Do you not want me any
more, Tiennou?”
“Alas! I dare not,” he replied.
“Listen: you know that I was picked up
on the high road, that I have nothing in the world
except my two arms, and that Miller Fresquyl will
never let his daughter marry a poor devil like me.”
She interrupted him with a painful gesture, and putting
her lips to his, she said:
“What does that matter? I love you, and
I want you ... Take me ...”
And it was thus, on St. John’s night, Margot
Fresquyl for the first time yielded to the mortal
sin of love.
Did the miller guess his daughter’s secret,
when he heard her singing merrily from dawn till dusk,
and saw her sitting dreaming at her window instead
of sewing as she was in the habit of doing?
Did he see it when she threw ardent kisses from the
tips of her fingers to her lover at a distance?
However that might have been, he shut poor Margot
in the mill as if it had been a prison. No more
love or pleasure, no more meetings at night at the
verge of the wood. When she chatted with the passers-by,
when she tried furtively to open the gate of the enclosure
and to make her escape, her father beat her as if
she had been some disobedient animal, until she fell
on her knees on the floor with clasped hands, scarcely
able to move and her whole body covered with purple
bruises.
She pretended to obey him, but she revolted in her
whole being, and the string of bitter insults which
he heaped upon her rang in her head. With clenched
hands, and a gesture of terrible hatred, she cursed
him for standing in the way of her love, and at night,
she rolled about on her bed, bit the sheets, moaned,
stretched herself out for imaginary embraces, maddened
by the sensual heat with which her body was still
palpitating. She called out Tiennou’s name
aloud, she broke the peaceful stillness of the sleeping
house with her heartrending sobs, and her dejected
voice drowned the monotonous sound of the water that
was dripping under the arch of the mill, between the
immovable paddles of the wheel.
Then there came that terrible week in October when
the unfortunate young fellows who had drawn bad numbers
had to join their regiments.[11] Tiennou was one of
them, and Margot was in despair to think that she
should not see him for five interminable years, that
they could not even, at that hour of sad farewells,
be alone and exchange those consoling words which
afterwards alleviate the pain of absence.
