We recognise him at once and love him from his very entrance on the twelfth page, when he comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistling the air of a country reel, and greeting, with kind, quizzical observant eyes, the two young girls mending the linen in his parlour.
‘Il avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, coloré, couperosé aux pommettes, les cheveux gris, l’œil bleu saillant, le nez aquilin, la mâchoire solide sous une longue moustache dédorée. Comme il inclinait la tête, on voyait l’attache puissante du cou, et cette forme du crâne qui s’unit à la nuque par une ligne droite, caractéristique chez les gens du Plateau central. Les épaules étaient carrées, le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquées devaient peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne—sans finesse mais non pas sans noblesse—d’Étienne Cayrol, révélait l’origine paysanne. Elle exprimait la force, une force stable, lente, réfléchie, sûre d’elle même.’
And yet (an observation admirably in accordance with the history of the type) some secret defect of judgment condemns the dearest schemes of the doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their working out, so noble and yet practical in their aim), but destined none the less, to miscarry and ‘gang aft agley.’ His unfinished sanatorium scars the hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of uncompleted work; and the consumptive youth, whom he takes into his own home to nurse back to health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor’s only daughter: the girl who was the pride of his heart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his mind.
Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom. Denise attracts the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of her health. When the doctor suspects the secret engagement that binds his daughter to his patient, he is both jealous and indignant (for he cannot conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), and he sends Jean away into a sanatorium. But Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his death-bed, and then and there (in a wild pitiful desire to pour out all the best of life, in one moment, while there is time) she yields to his fevered desire; she succumbs.
There were two girls seated in the red-paved parlour, that smelt of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples, when the doctor strode in from the dark night outside, on the winterly evening which opens the novel. The second is Fortunade Brandou, the little village dressmaker, the mystic; an ill-judged pity lures her, too, to her undoing. When Veydrenne, the poacher, the outlaw, breaks his leg, Fortunade tends the village miscreant in his illness and strives to save his soul:—
‘Ce serait si beau de sauver cette âme!’
Alas, when did the wolf listen to the voice of Little Red Riding Hood? The sweet, the mystical, the charitable Fortunade fell prey to a wild beast, and the deep gorges of the mountain torrent received the soiled, childish body that dared no longer affront the light of the sun.
‘Morte, morte! non par le hasard d’un faux pas, non par un chagrin d’amour, elle n’avait jamais aimé que Dieu, la chaste fille: Dieu et ses pauvres! morte pour être allée vers celui que tous haïssaient; morte pour avoir tenté l’entreprise folle de sauver une âme perdue!... Perdue elle-même sans doute, brutalement outragée, deux fois victime, elle avait payé de sa pudeur et de sa vie l’imprudence sublime de sa pitié.’
These characters are conceived with the sure and intimate reality that comes of kinship; we feel that Madame Tinayre is of their race and their habitation. Here, her foot is on her native heath, and she compels our interest far more powerfully than when she writes of Paris (her Paris is always a little too ‘Rive gauche’); when she pictures her Corrèze, when she evokes the mountain scenery round Brives or Tulle, I think no French novelist since George Sand has possessed so masterly a touch in peopling a living landscape with living beings. Indeed, remembering the pastoral novels of Our Lady of Nohant, recalling ‘Marie Claire,’ comparing them and this book of Madame Tinayre’s with The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, it seems to me possible that one of the greatest gifts of woman as a novelist may lie in her singular power of rendering country life in all the variety of its personages, its customs, and its natural background.