Sons of the Soil, Honoré de Balzac [epub read online books TXT] 📗

"If you are handsome, you are well ogled. What is the good of being as pretty as you are if you are not admired by the men? Ha! when I heard one of them say for the first time, 'What a fine sprig of a girl!' all my blood was on fire. It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's lighted up, my dear, with glass lamps, and you'll think you are in paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes will be there. Ever since that first night I've loved the place where those words rang in my ears like military music. It's worthy giving your eternity to hear such words said of you by a man you love."

"Yes, perhaps," replied La Pechina, thoughtfully.

"Then come, and get the praise of men; you're sure of it!" cried Catherine. "Ha! you'll have a fine chance, handsome as you are, to pick up good luck. There's the son of Monsieur Lupin, Amaury, he might marry you. But that's not all; if you only knew what comforts you can find there against vexation and worry. Why, Socquard's boiled wine will make you forget every trouble you ever had. Fancy! it can make you dream, and feel as light as a bird. Didn't you ever drink boiled wine? Then you don't know what life is."

The privilege enjoyed by older persons to wet their throats with boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put her lips to a glass of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her grandfather when ill. The taste had left a sort of magic influence in the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine had held in reserve, was to end the matter by intoxicating the victim.

"What do they put into it?" asked La Pechina.

"All sorts of things," replied Catherine, glancing back to see if her brother were coming; "in the first place, those what d' ye call 'ems that come from India, cinnamon, and herbs that change you by magic,--you fancy you have everything you wish for; boiled wine makes you happy! you can snap your fingers at all your troubles!"

"I should be afraid to drink boiled wine at a dance," said La Pechina.

"Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There's not the slightest danger. Think what lots of people there will be. All the bourgeois will be looking at us! Ah! it is one of those days that make up for all our misery. See it and die,--for it's enough to satisfy any one."

"If Monsieur and Madame Michaud would only take me!" cried La Pechina, her eyes blazing.

"Ask your grandfather Niseron; you have not given him up, poor dear man, and he'd be pleased to see you admired like a little queen. Why do you like those Arminacs the Michauds better than your grandfather and the Burgundians. It's bad to neglect your own people. Besides, why should the Michauds object if your grandfather takes you to the fair? Oh! if you knew what it is to reign over a man and put him beside himself, and say to him, as I say to Godain, 'Go there!' and he goes, 'Do that!' and he does it! You've got it in you, little one, to turn the head of a bourgeois like that son of Monsieur Lupin. Monsieur Amaury took a fancy to my sister Marie because she is fair and because he is half-afraid of me; but he'd adore you, for ever since those people at the pavilion have spruced you up a bit you've got the airs of an empress."

Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar of compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina, without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as prematurely as it blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl was doubtless in many ways the result of her congenital circumstances. Thin, slender, brown as a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she nevertheless possessed extraordinary strength,--a strength unseen by the eyes of peasants, to whom the mysteries of the nervous system are unknown. Nerves are not admitted into the medical rural mind.

At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of Burgundy? Medical science may dismiss the inquiry. The premature old age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars. Like all eyes which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen, the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length. The hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow moulded like that of the Farnese Juno. That magnificent diadem of hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest of the face. The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils. Anger increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely furious expression. All the lower part of the face, like the lower part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of the divine sculptor had proved insufficient. Between the lower lip and the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of this defect. One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral. The shells of the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they were rose-colored. The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl's skin must have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of daturas. The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous power, and a vigorous organism.

This mixture of diabolical imperfections and divine beauties, harmonious in spite of discords, for they blended in a species of savage dignity, also this triumph of a powerful soul over a feeble body, as written in those eyes, made the child, when once seen, unforgettable. Nature had wished to make that frail young being a woman; the circumstances of her conception moulded her with the face and body of a boy. A poet observing the strange creature would have declared her native clime to be Arabia the Blest; she belonged to the Afrite and Genii of Arabian tales. Her face told no lies. She had the soul of that glance of fire, the intellect of those lips made brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the thought enshrined within that glorious brow, the passion of those nostrils ready at all moments to snort flame. Therefore love, such as we imagine it on burning sands, in lonely deserts, filled that heart of twenty in the breast of a child, doomed, like the snowy heights of Montenegro, to wear no flowers of the spring.

Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from whom passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the feelings deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of those twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; they begin and end in questions to which there is no answer.

The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, "Piccina!" when she first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be understood. This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the handsome, noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do love, that is to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of youth, with the devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to divinest poesy. Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the sensitive strings of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point. To dance before Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe herself on the memory of that adored master! What glorious thoughts! To fling them into that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon straw dried in the August sun.

"No, Catherine," replied La Pechina, "I am ugly and puny; my lot is to sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world."

"Men like weaklings," said Catherine. "You see me, don't you?" she added, showing her handsome, strong arms. "I please Godain, who is a poor stick; I please that little Charles, the count's groom; but Lupin's son is afraid of me. I tell you it is the small kind of men who love me, and who say when they see me go by at Ville-aux-Fayes and at Soulanges, 'Ha! what a fine girl!' Now YOU, that's another thing; you'll please the fine men."

"Ah! Catherine, if it were true--that!" cried the bewitched child.

"It is true, it is so true that Nicolas, the handsomest man in the canton, is mad about you; he dreams of you, he is losing his mind; and yet all the other girls are in love with him. He is a fine lad! If you'll put on a white dress and yellow ribbons, and come to Socquard's for the midsummer ball, you'll be the handsomest girl there, and all the fine people from Ville-aux-Fayes will see you. Come, won't you?--See here, I've been cutting grass for the cows, and I brought some boiled wine in my gourd; Socquard gave it me this morning," she added quickly, seeing the half-delirious expression in La Pechina's eyes which women understand so well. "We'll share it together, and you'll fancy the men are in love with you."