The Country Doctor | Page 3

Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following
each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual
(or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Carnegie-Mellon
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected]

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

"For a wounded heart--shadow and silence."

To my Mother.
CHAPTER I
THE COUNTRYSIDE AND THE MAN
On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty or
thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the mountain
road that leads to a large village near the Grande Chartreuse. This
village is the market town of a populous canton that lies within the
limits of a valley of some considerable length. The melting of the
snows had filled the boulder-strewn bed of the torrent (often dry) that
flows through this valley, which is closely shut in between two parallel
mountain barriers, above which the peaks of Savoy and of Dauphine
tower on every side.
All the scenery of the country that lies between the chain of the two
Mauriennes is very much alike; yet here in the district through which
the stranger was traveling there are soft undulations of the land, and
varying effects of light which might be sought for elsewhere in vain.
Sometimes the valley, suddenly widening, spreads out a soft
irregularly-shaped carpet of grass before the eyes; a meadow constantly
watered by the mountain streams that keep it fresh and green at all
seasons of the year. Sometimes a roughly-built sawmill appears in a
picturesque position, with its stacks of long pine trunks with the bark
peeled off, and its mill stream, brought from the bed of the torrent in
great square wooden pipes, with masses of dripping filament issuing
from every crack. Little cottages, scattered here and there, with their
gardens full of blossoming fruit trees, call up the ideas that are aroused
by the sight of industrious poverty; while the thought of ease, secured
after long years of toil, is suggested by some larger houses farther on,
with their red roofs of flat round tiles, shaped like the scales of a fish.
There is no door, moreover, that does not duly exhibit a basket in
which the cheeses are hung up to dry. Every roadside and every croft is
adorned with vines; which here, as in Italy, they train to grow about
dwarf elm trees, whose leaves are stripped off to feed the cattle.

Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on either side so
near together in some places, that there is no room for fields, or
buildings, or peasants' huts. Nothing lies between them but the torrent,
roaring over its waterfalls between two lofty walls of granite that rise
above it, their sides covered with the leafage of tall beeches and dark fir
trees to the height of a hundred feet. The trees, with their different
kinds of foliage, rise up straight and tall, fantastically colored by
patches of lichen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a line of
straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus above
and below the roadway at their feet. The subtle perfume of this
undergrowth was mingled just then with scents from the wild mountain
region and with the aromatic fragrance of young larch shoots, budding
poplars, and resinous pines.
Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights sometimes hid and
sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that seemed as dim and
vague as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed among them. The whole face
of the country changed every moment with the changing light in the
sky; the hues of the mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes, the
very shape of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of sunlight
through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the woods, or a
landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to make a contrast in the
foreground, made up an endless series of pictures delightful to see amid
the silence, at the time of year when all things grow young, and when
the sun fills a cloudless heaven with a blaze of light. In short, it was a
fair land--it was the land