At evening there were dances, and there were songs, in which Flower o' the Wheat excelled. She knew every song of that region, and would sing in a nasal, untutored voice, delicious to the rustic ear, ingenuous poems, in which "The King's Son," the "Nightingale," and the "Rose" appeared in fantastic splendours, joyful or sad. A local bard had even made about Flower o' the Wheat, a somewhat free and outspoken song in dialect, the refrain of which said that the flower of the wheat surrenders its grain under the harvester's flail. Flower o' the Wheat without false shame celebrated herself in song, and there were fine jostlings if some young fellow jokingly made believe to put the refrain into action.
Sooner or later, Flower o' the Wheat was bound to come under the harvester's flail. And here I call the reader's attention to this story, whose merit is that it is the story of everyone. I know of no greater error than to suppose that extraordinary adventures are what make life interesting. If one looks closely, one finds that the truly marvellous things are those which happen to us every day, and that duels, dagger thrusts, even automobile accidents, with accompanying hatred, jealousy, betrayed love, and treachery, are in reality the vulgar incidents in the enormous drama of our common life from birth to death.
To bring, without any will of our own, our ego to the consciousness of this world, be subject to a fatal concatenation of joys and sorrows dealt by the hazard of fortune, and end in the slow decay which brings us back to the condition preceding our existence, is not this the supreme adventure? What more is needed to make us marvel? Some, who are called pessimists, accept it with a certain amount of grumbling. Others, regarded as optimists, consider their misfortune so great that they eagerly add to it, by way of consolation, the dream of a celestial adventure which everyone is free to embellish as much as he pleases.
Flower o' the Wheat did not bother her head with any of this. She was twenty, a more engrossing fact. She listened to the voice of her youth, like the women gone before her, as well as those who will follow her on this earth. In the fields, nature being so close, people are very little hampered by the more or less fantastic social conventions, which undertake to regulate the human relations between two young creatures hungering and thirsting for each other.
A special sort of cake called "échaudé" is the chief industrial product of my village: a cake made of flour and eggs, very delectable when fresh from the oven, but heavy, and cause of a formidable thirstiness, by the time it has travelled through the bracken as far as Niort, La Rochelle, or Fontenay. Its transportation is carried on by night, in long carts drawn by a horse whose slow and steady gait rocks the slumbers of the driver and of the woman who accompanies him to preside over the sale of the cakes. These carts are terrible go-betweens. The scent of fern is full of danger. The two lie down to sleep, side by side, under the open sky. They do not always sleep, even after a long day's labour. The market town is far away. The unkindly disposed and censorious are shut within their own four walls. Temptation is increased by the jolts that throw people one against the other. Wherefore resist, since one must finally surrender?
Flower o' the Wheat, who was in the service of a rich dealer in échaudés, one fine day married her "master," after having given him, to the surprise of no one, two unequivocal proofs of her aptitude for the joys as well as duties of maternity. Her neighbours in the country will tell you that there was nothing out of the ordinary in her life. Her husband beat her only on Sundays, after vespers, when he had been drinking too much, and she took no more revenge upon him than was necessary to show outsiders that he did not have the last word.
I saw her again, at that time, after a fairly long period of absence. The handful of flour and bran was still there. Her eyes had kept their lustre, and her hair still blazed under the fluttering white wings of her coif. But her glance seemed to me sharper, and already the curve of her lips betrayed weariness of life. Her pretty name still clung to her, but the flower had lost its bloom. She still laughed, but she no longer sang. Fortune had come to her, as rings and brooches and gold chains attested. On Sundays she wore a silk skirt and apron to church, and carried a gilded book, a thing found useful even by those who cannot read, since it gives them the satisfaction of exciting their neighbours' envy.
My visits to the village had become brief and far spaced. We had lived very far apart, when I met her one day, in one of our deep road cuts, leading her cow to pasture. An old, wrinkled, broken, worn-out woman. We stopped to chat. Her husband was dead and had left her with "property," but the children were pressing her to make over everything to them. They would have an allowance settled on her "at the notary's," they said.
"I shall have to make up my mind to do it," she ended with a sigh. "Will you believe that my son came near beating me yesterday, because I would not say yes or no?"
Ten more years passed. One day, as I was going through a neighbouring hamlet, a tumble-down hovel was pointed out to me and I was told that "the Barbotte" was ending her days there. Flower o' the Wheat was no more. She was now "the Barbotte," from her husband's name, Barbot.