THE NOVEL OF CHILDHOOD
Edmond Jaloux, André Lafon, G. des Voisins, Marcel Proust, etc.
Two of the pastoral novels we have just considered, Charles Blanchard and Marie-Claire, are novels of childhood; and the first two volumes (the most beautiful) of Jean-Christophe come into the same category; when we examined the works of René Boylesve, we found that the hero of two of his most touching stories is a little boy; Anatole France is even now writing the history of ‘Petit Pierre’; Francis Jammes has consecrated a whole volume to the observation of his baby daughter; and there is Mæterlinck’s exquisite Oiseau Bleu. And here are several other writers who, in the last half-dozen years, have written novels of conspicuous beauty and reputation concerned with little children.
When I came to live in France, some thirty years ago, the novel of childhood was supposed to be a product of English manufacture, almost exclusively. It was much admired, for the French are a nation of child-lovers and a people of psychologists; but it was generally supposed that Anglo-Saxon blood was needed to relate the youth of a Maggie Tulliver or a David Copperfield. In those days the French yellowback, in six cases out of ten, was a love story; in the other four it was a social novel.
Is it the philosophy of Bergson, his glorification of instinct, sensibility, intuition, that has changed all that? The novel of childhood is now one of the most frequent, the most admired of French romances. Not the mere observation of childhood; not the sole charm of reminiscence, always popular because it aureoles our faded foreheads with the light of other days: ‘Ah! so I used to think! Even so was I!’ It is rather a careful reconstruction of the point of view of a young boy—except Marie-Claire, I remember no girls in the novel of childhood!—and his first impressions of the mysteries of life: love, sin, pain, madness, death. These novels of childhood are, in fact, studies in psychology.
Dickens perhaps began it—Dickens always so beloved in France. Yet Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, if they suffer from the world’s oppression, suffer rather than reflect or observe. The theme was really inaugurated, I think, by Mr Henry James, some fifteen years ago, in What Maisie Knew, the impression made on a child by the mysterious iniquity of its elders.
M. René Boylesve was the first: L’Enfant à la Balustrade appeared, if I remember right, in 1903. We have considered in another chapter the provincial studies of this exquisite author; here I will only draw attention to his childish hero. Riquet Nadaud, the narrator of La Becquée and L’Enfant à la Balustrade,[3] is a little boy who has been sent, on the death of his mother, to live with his maternal grandparents in their old-fashioned house in the country near La Haye-Descartes. How charming his descriptions of the child’s walks in the fields with brusque and capable Tante Félicie I have had occasion to declare elsewhere. For the moment my concern is with little Nadaud when, after his father’s re-marriage, he goes back to live with his parents at Loches.
The stepmother is a gentle, languid, gracious creature, born in America though French by race, a beautiful Creole from Louisiana. Needless to say, she is bored to death at Loches—not quite at first, when her young loveliness, her position as bride, her gift for music, ensure her a certain social importance and consideration. But her husband, the notary, cribbed and confined in his narrow house—mindful, too, that his first wife’s death had been in some degree attributed to that house’s sunlessness—secures the reversion of the handsomest building in the town, after the actual owner’s death. Unfortunately, M. Nadaud was not the only man who had set his heart on that comely residence! Soon the town is up in arms against the lawyer for stealing his march on others, and poor Tantine, the foreign wife, is left alone in her dull parlour with Riquet for her sole society.
Riquet—and young Dr Troufleau, faithful to his friends. Excellent Troufleau, awkwardest, honestest of men! Charming Tantine, without an evil thought in her feather-head! Alas, opportunity, thy guilt is great! Out of sheer boredom on her part and simple pity on his, they are drawn quite close to the edge of the abyss—close enough to feel its attraction, its dizzy, strange, reluctant fascination—under the sensitive eyes of the child who knows nothing of passion or of sin. Doubtless that innocent presence it is that saves them; they recoil in time.
M. Nadaud at last realises that his wife is being enervated by solitude, demoralised by idleness, deprived of energy to resist the simplest temptations. She needs social intercourse. A few visitors, a little appreciation of her music and her beauty, and Troufleau would soon occupy his proper place in her regard—that of a kind, friendly young man, smothered in an absurd frock-coat and honestly in love with another woman.