VI
Strange how sharp and detailed will some of our very early memories remain in after life, when even important scenes of our later years are so easily forgotten! That old farm of Mesnil-le-Roy is still a clear picture, vignetted, so to speak, upon grey pages of oblivion.... I can yet see the orchard, strewn with myriad fallen apples—the byres, whereto at sundown returned the slow-pacing, dreamy, placid-eyed milch cows; the giant walnut-tree, with one of its main branches blasted by lightning—blasted on the stormy night, during which “thunder had fallen” freely ‹as the little boy heard the labourers say, awe-struck, in the morning; but during which he had slept under the brown-tiled roof without the slightest disturbance›.... I can see the Four Banal, that co-operative bread-oven, a relic of mediæval institutions, which was still common enough in those days; where you could have such an entrancing view of lambent blue flames lined with yellow when the door stood open to receive the unbaked loaves; and where the air smelt so divinely of hot wheaten crust when they were removed on completion....
It was, by the way, on that alluring spot—the boy used to find his way there regularly on the days when on cuisait—that he heard a certain remark, which to his child ears had no special meaning, but which remained on memory’s tablets to assume later an interesting significance. The country folk were very kind. The little English boy, left for the good of his health at the farm of père Pelletier, was known to everybody; was accepted and treated as one of the community. Rarely did he stroll, as might any roaming puppy dog, into an open door of the village without being supplied with a generous sup of milk, or a tartine de raisiné; or again, in season, with a pomme cuite. The roasted apple, be it said, browning and lusciously oozing caramel, was a standing affair in that old-world village. There was, however, on that day, a benighted wayfarer who obviously could not reconcile with these rustic surroundings the yellow-haired, barelegged little boy gravely gazing at the glowing oven.
“D’ousqui sort, ce gosse-là?” ‹for which barbarous lingo I take leave to give as an equivalent: Who’s the kid?› asked the man. And the answer came: “Ça?—ca, mais le p’tit godem, donc.” ‹That—why, that’s the little “goddam.”›
THE LITTLE GODEM
Le petit godem!... Such was the name under which that young innocent was known at Mesnil-le-Roy, and, be it understood, in all cordiality and benevolence! Of a certainty not one of those excellent people had the remotest idea of the meaning of their “godem:” with them it was only the established equivalent for English.
The term is a noun, not an expletive, which has come down through five centuries—from the days, in fact, of the English occupation of France. Among the written records of those stirring times we come across many a passage in which a Duguesclin, a Maid of Orleans, or a Dunois is heard to mention hatefully “les godems,” or “les godons d’Angleterre.” Now, all that fertile country of the Vexin, the Ile-de-France and the Beauce, of which the fat farm land of my old père Pelletier was so fair a sample, was obstinately fought for by the English for the best part of a century. Mantes-la-Jolie—now mainly famed for its river terraces, its sweet water grapes and its savoury matelottes or eel stews—was once a fortified place of note, taken and retaken by French and English more than once; but finally captured ‹in 1418› by the noble Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Achilles of England, as the French themselves dubbed him, and firmly held by the “godems” for more than thirty years. To have heard that mispleasing word used dispassionately, merely as a substantive, is indeed a link with the past.
Strange paths of the musing thought, winding from Wisteria Sinensis to the days of our conquering English archer!