But the book did not need these protectors, for its success was immediate, popular, immense, and by no means purely literary; readers, who had barely heard of Philippe himself, of André Gide, of any of Madame Audoux’s literary clan, opened her volume in their thousands. The story has been translated into several languages—into English, I think. No doubt it owed something to Mirbeau’s eloquent preface, revealing the author’s personality. The public is sentimental; it was touched by the picture of the poor little dressmaker—not a princess of tape and scissors, but one of those little snips who go out to ladies’ houses, working for half a crown a day. The account of this poor woman, no longer quite young, suddenly threatened with blindness if she pursue her trade; turning then, for a consolation, as much as for a means of livelihood, to literature, and with her first venture discovering herself a great artist; this poignant history seemed to the public a novel before the novel began.
Will Marguerite Audoux, intimidated by this rare success, remain the woman of one book? I hope not! If she dare not again attack the pastoral novel, let her write the touching life of her friend and master, Philippe. Or let her turn from the fields of France to the moving story of a woman alone in Paris, earning the right to live as she draws an interminable thread.
Marie-Claire is the history of an orphan girl, brought up in an orphanage, placed out at thirteen years of age as little shepherdess on a farm; some five years later—after the merest sketch of a love-story with her mistress’s brother—dismissed; again received at the orphanage as cook or kitchen-maid, until, on the last page of all—not yet twenty years of age, she takes the train for Paris. Can one imagine anything flatter, staler, more unprofitable? Such stories must be written by the thousand in the simple annals of the poor. And yet Marie-Claire is a sequence of images of unforgettable loveliness.
The story is divided into three parts; and if the beginning and the end—the convent and the love-story—have their rare merits, the middle section, the life of the little shepherdess on the farm, seems to me in all sincerity equal to the loveliest pastoral novels of George Sand—to François le Champi or Le petite Fadette. The shepherdess and her flock lost in the mist, and that winter scene, when a ‘great yellow dog’ pounces on a sheep and drags it away while the collie howls plaintively, crouching at the shepherdess’s feet:—
‘Aussitôt je devinai que c’était un loup. Il emportait le mouton à pleine gueule, par le milieu du corps. Il grimpa sans effort sur le talus et quand il sauta le large fossé qui le séparait du bois, ses pattes de derrière me firent penser à des ailes. À ce moment je n’aurais pas trouvé extraordinaire qu’il se fut envolé pardessus les arbres.’
And the personages of the farm: Maître Sylvain, the kind Pauline, the friendly delicate-minded Eugène, are drawn not only with an artist’s sense of beauty, but with a marvellous and mysterious sense of life. In France to-day there are many women writers of great talent and success: Madame Marcelle Tinayre, with her Maison du Péché; Madame de Noailles, with her wonderful poems; Mlle Marie Lenéru, with her plays; I admire them all with my heart, but I think I would as soon have written Marie-Claire!
Madame Audoux is not the only pupil of Charles-Louis Philippe: Émile Guillaumin is also of his following, or at least he resembles him in his birthplace and his profession. Guillaumin is a farmer who lives on his farm, about ten miles from Cérilly; he works the land with his brother; and, in the intervals of seedtime and harvest he, too, writes pastoral novels about the pleasant country round the Allier river.
But seek not there for the keen, anxious psychology of Philippe, nor for the large poetry of Madame Audoux; nothing could be more matter-of-fact, more terre-à-terre (as we say in France), than La Vie d’un Simple or Rose et sa Parisienne. For that very reason these books, and others from the same pen, are valuable to the inquirer who desires to know, without any alloy of poetry, the real conditions of the farmer’s and field-labourer’s life in France; but they are not admirable to the artist like the novels of Jules Renard or Marguerite Audoux. Obstinate, precise, Guillaumin delves his style as a peasant tills his land—not (like Philippe or Madame Audoux, who are equally fastidious and minute) in order to produce a certain effect of beauty or impression of sensibility, but in the effort to render a just, exact account of what he has seen.
His best book is La Vie d’un Simple. Regarded as art it is dull, monotonous, and bare; and yet, considered as life, it is singularly touching and ample, like one of those vast plains of France, traversed by interminable, poplar-bordered roads, whose great sweeping lines melt, far off, into long, low horizons.
La Vie d’un Simple is the life of a peasant from the time when, a child of seven years old, he pastures his sheep among the stubble and the heather until, an old, bent man, too feeble to work on the land, he again minds the herds at pasture, as they use in France. Tiennou has lived all his life in front of the same horizon; he has no book-learning; he knows nothing but the land; but he knows it well. Like his father before him, he has been a métayer, that is to say, a tenant-farmer who combines with the landlord to stock a farm, tills it, and manages the live-stock, and pays his rent on a system of half-profits.