The house

by Henry Bordeaux

I wondered at his raptures over so common a thing, which I had so often enjoyed, not considering how seldom he had an opportunity for such enjoyment. But he went on:

“It is terrible to be so busy! Not to have time to enjoy the sunshine and the wide spaces, nor to talk with one’s sons as often as one would wish. Do you remember the old times, Francis, when I used to tell you about the wars in the Iliad and the return to Ithaca?”

I had not forgotten, but those epic stories seemed to me to belong to a far-away and outgrown childhood. They dated from before that convalescence which had changed my heart. They dated from before my walks with grandfather, from before liberty and Nazzarena, from before love. So I cared for them no longer. Hector had fought to guard his home, and Ulysses had braved tempests to return to his, the smoke from which he had seen afar, from the sea; but I was looking forward to my individual future, when I should not be dependent upon any person or anything.

We soon made our way through the cover of the trees and reached the top of the hill. It was crowned by the ruins of an ancient fortress, which, to judge by the broken and crumbling fragments of walls, and by the height of the still upright and loop-holed towers, must have been of considerable extent. Brambles and ivy were growing among the ruins, which seemed to be standing out against the last assault, that of vegetable growth, greedy to overwhelm them.

“I do not care much for ruins,” observed my father. “They are poetic, but they weaken the desire for action. They remind us of the end of things, and the object of life is to build up. Still, they have their part to play, evoking the memory of a past of conflict and glory. This was once the fortified château of Malpas. It commanded the road to the frontier. What attacks and sieges it has endured! In 1814, when France was assailed by three armies, though it was then entirely dismantled, cannon were set upon the walls to resist the Austrians.”

I might have known that we were going there. The place is celebrated through the entire province. For what it was celebrated I only vaguely knew. Grandfather had never taken me there; he detested places that every one visited, “where,” he used to say, “whole families go on Sundays, places full of memories, great men, battles and greasy papers.”

Father grew animated when he talked of battles. Had not he too defended the house against our enemies, against Aunt Deen’s they, so fiercely bent upon its overthrow? Won to him for a moment, I had almost asked, “And where were you during the war, father?” I knew that he had entered the army and braved the snow with his company during a bitter winter. But the question did not pass my lips. To have asked it would have been to own that I was yielding to his influence, and I braced myself to resist him. I would have given all this forest of oaks, birches and beeches, all those ruins, so picturesque against the sky-line, for the chestnut tree under which Nazzarena had passed.

He led me to the edge of the terrace that had once been the court of the château, the wall of which had been thrown down. From here one dominated the whole country; there was the lake with its indented shores, its graceful little gulfs, its green promontories, the town rising in terraces above it, easy to trace by its open squares and public gardens; there were the villages of the plain, half hidden in greenery, like flocks of sheep at rest, those on the hillsides grouped around their sentry-like churches; and closing in the view, the mountains, here clothed with forests, there rocky and bare. The pure afternoon light, shimmering over all, sharpened their outlines. Here and there a slate roof reflected back its arrows of gold. The various crops could be distinguished by their different colours, by the various shades of green, and all the boundaries of the indefinitely divided properties, hedges, walls or fences, and the little white cemeteries with their square plots, near the groups of houses, stood out clear.

Father named over all the inhabited places, and then the hills and valleys. His way was not in the least like grandfather’s. Where grandfather and I would have looked for such traces of nature as we could find still surviving in its pristine simplicity between the havoc wrought by plough and axe, the changes brought about by agricultural toil, he, on the contrary, was pointing out the constant intervention of man, the results of the toil of generations. Instead of the free earth, it was the earth disciplined, constrained to serve, obey, produce,—the earth that in the past had been watered by blood, traversed by armed troops, protected by force against the foreigner, as was meet for a frontier province of France, blessed by prayer. For a very saint, a popular saint who had brought miracles into every-day life, our Saint François de Sales had knelt upon this earth and offered it to God. It was feeding the living; it was giving repose to the dead.

Glorious, fruitful, sacred earth, the eulogy of its threefold greatness fell from his lips with such lucidity that in spite of myself I was moved with him.