‘No,’ says Violaine, ‘I do not think of marrying.’
‘Then, in that case, you may as well give me your half of the farm! What use would it be to you, if you do not live with us, and if you do not marry? Come, sign! Here is the pen!’
And then, while Violaine signs away her birthright, Mara seeks in the hearth a handful of wood ashes to pounce the signature, and having dried the writing, flings the remainder of the hot, stifling dust in her sister’s face. And she laughs, coarse and gay; but the ashes set up an inflammation that ends by blinding Violaine for life.
When the third act begins, several years have passed. Violaine, an outcast and a beggar, a sort of pious wise-woman, lives alone in a wood. The peasants revere her as a saint, and indeed her virtues are acceptable in the sight of Heaven, so that she performs many miracles. (This situation in a modern play appears less far-fetched than it would in England among the fields of France, where the wise-woman and the sorcerer, the ‘meije’ and the ‘rebouteux’ and the ‘jetteuse de sorts,’ with their herbs and their charms and their clever massage, still play so large a part in the life of the remoter villages.) The art of Violaine is much esteemed by the simple rustics that know neither her name nor her birthplace. And so one day, in order to consult the wise woman of the wood, Mara sets out with her first-born, blind from birth. She knows not whom she goes out in the wilderness to see, as she joins company with a poor woman bent on the same quest. They track the healer for some while vainly, through a wood, in the snow:—
La Femme: Si c’est pas un malheur de courir les bois comme ça à mon âge! Pour sûr que ça me fera pas de bien!
Mara: Alors on ne sait pas où elle gîte?
La Femme: Un jour ici, l’autre ailleurs. Et puis des mois sans qu’on la voie. Faut la traquer comme une bête.
Et comme ça, votre petit est aveugle?
Mara: Oui.
La Femme: Moi, j’ai mal dans le corps. (Silence. Il neige.)