Short Stories, vol 10 | Page 6

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.

THE FARMER'S WIFE
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.
We entered the farmhouse. The smoky kitchen was high and spacious.
The copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the
hearth. A cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived
an odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old
farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor of
spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the
smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of
persons, the odor of time, and of things that have passed away.
I went out to have a look at the farmyard. It was very large, full of
apple trees, dwarfed and crooked, and laden with fruit which fell on the
grass around them. In this farmyard the Norman smell of apples was as
strong as that of the bloom of orange trees on the shores of the south of
France.
Four rows of beeches surrounded this inclosure. They were so tall that
they seemed to touch the clouds at this hour of nightfall, and their
summits, through which the night winds passed, swayed and sang a
mournful, interminable song.
I reentered the house.
The baron was warming his feet at the fire, and was listening to the
farmer's talk about country matters. He talked about marriages, births
and deaths, then about the fall in the price of grain and the latest news
about cattle. The "Veularde" (as he called a cow that had been bought
at the fair of Veules) had calved in the middle of June. The cider had
not been first-class last year. Apricots were almost disappearing from
the country.
Then we had dinner. It was a