“The mother was raving drunk beside the blue
body of her dead baby. Kerandec, the nurse, and
the Kermagan woman were snoring on the floor.
I had to take care of the mother, who died towards
noon.”
The old doctor was silent. He took up the brandy-bottle
and poured out another glass. He held it up to
the lamp, and the light streaming through it imparted
to the liquid the amber color of molten topaz.
With one gulp he swallowed the treacherous drink.
Said the Baron Rene du Treilles to me:
“Will you come and open the hunting season with
me at my farm at Marinville? I shall be delighted
if you will, my dear boy. In the first place,
I am all alone. It is rather a difficult ground
to get at, and the place I live in is so primitive
that I can invite only my most intimate friends.”
I accepted his invitation, and on Saturday we set
off on the train going to Normandy. We alighted
at a station called Almivare, and Baron Rene, pointing
to a carryall drawn by a timid horse and driven by
a big countryman with white hair, said:
“Here is our equipage, my dear boy.”
The driver extended his hand to his landlord, and
the baron pressed it warmly, asking:
“Well, Maitre Lebrument, how are you?”
“Always the same, M’sieu le Baron.”
We jumped into this swinging hencoop perched on two
enormous wheels, and the young horse, after a violent
swerve, started into a gallop, pitching us into the
air like balls. Every fall backward on the wooden
bench gave me the most dreadful pain.
The peasant kept repeating in his calm, monotonous
voice:
“There, there! All right all right, Moutard,
all right!”
But Moutard scarcely heard, and kept capering along
like a goat.
Our two dogs behind us, in the empty part of the hencoop,
were standing up and sniffing the air of the plains,
where they scented game.
The baron gazed with a sad eye into the distance at
the vast Norman landscape, undulating and melancholy,
like an immense English park, where the farmyards,
surrounded by two or four rows of trees and full of
dwarfed apple trees which hid the houses, gave a vista
as far as the eye could see of forest trees, copses
and shrubbery such as landscape gardeners look for
in laying out the boundaries of princely estates.
And Rene du Treilles suddenly exclaimed:
“I love this soil; I have my very roots in it.”
He was a pure Norman, tall and strong, with a slight
paunch, and of the old race of adventurers who went
to found kingdoms on the shores of every ocean.
He was about fifty years of age, ten years less perhaps
than the farmer who was driving us.
The latter was a lean peasant, all skin and bone,
one of those men who live a hundred years.
After two hours’ travelling over stony roads,
across that green and monotonous plain, the vehicle
entered one of those orchard farmyards and drew up
before in old structure falling into decay, where an
old maid-servant stood waiting beside a young fellow,
who took charge of the horse.
