The Martian: A Novel. Du Maurier George
Paris or London, enter Barty Josselin, idle school-boy, or dandy dissipated guardsman, and fashionable man about town, or bohemian art student; and Bach, lebewohl! good‐bye, Beethoven! bonsoir le bon Mozart! all was changed: and welcome, instead, the last comic song from the Château des Fleurs, or Evans's in Covent Garden; the latest patriotic or sentimental ditty by Loïsa Puget, or Frédéric Bérat, or Eliza Cook, or Mr. Henry Russell.
And then, what would Barty like for breakfast, dinner, supper after the play, and which of all those burgundies would do Barty good without giving him a headache next morning? and where was Barty to have his smoke? – in the library, of course. "Light the fire in the library, Mary; and Mr. Bob [that was me] can smoke there, too, instead of going outside," etc., etc., etc. It is small wonder that he grew a bit selfish at times.
Though I was a little joyous now and then, it is quite without a shadow of bitterness or envy that I write all this. I have lived for fifty years under the charm of that genial, unconscious, irresistible tyranny; and, unlike my dear parents, I have lived to read and know Barty Josselin, nor merely to see and hear and love him for himself alone.
Indeed, it was quite impossible to know Barty at all intimately and not do whatever he wanted you to do. Whatever he wanted, he wanted so intensely, and at once; and he had such a droll and engaging way of expressing that hurry and intensity, and especially of expressing his gratitude and delight when what he wanted was what he got – that you could not for the life of you hold your own! Tout vient à qui ne sait pas attendre!
Besides which, every now and then, if things didn't go quite as he wished, he would fly into comic rages, and become quite violent and intractable for at least five minutes, and for quite five minutes more he would silently sulk. And then, just as suddenly, he would forget all about it, and become once more the genial, affectionate, and caressing creature he always was.
But this is going ahead too fast! revenons. At the examinations this year Barty was almost brilliant, and I was hopeless as usual; my only consolation being that after the holidays we should at last be in the same class together, en quatrième, and all through this hopelessness of mine!
Laferté was told by his father that he might invite two of his school‐fellows to their country‐house for the vacation, so he asked Josselin and Bussy‐Rabutin. But Bussy couldn't go – and, to my delight, I went instead.
That ride all through the sweet August night, the three of us on the impériale of the five‐horsed diligence, just behind the conductor and the driver – and freedom, and a full moon, or nearly so – and a tremendous saucisson de Lyon (à l'ail, bound in silver paper) – and petits pains – and six bottles of bière de Mars – and cigarettes ad libitum, which of course we made ourselves!
The Lafertés lived in the Department of La Sarthe, in a delightful country‐house, with a large garden sloping down to a transparent stream, which had willows and alders and poplars all along its both banks, and a beautiful country beyond.
Outside the grounds (where there were the old brick walls, all overgrown with peaches and pears and apricots, of some forgotten mediæval convent) was a large farm; and close by, a water‐mill that never stopped.
A road, with thick hedge‐rows on either side, led to a small and very pretty town called La Tremblaye, three miles off. And hard by the garden gates began the big forest of that name: one heard the stags calling, and the owls hooting, and the fox giving tongue as it hunted the hares at night. There might have been wolves and wild‐boars. I like to think so very much.
M. Laferté was a man of about fifty – entre les deux âges; a retired maître de forges, or iron‐master, or else the son of one: I forget which. He had a charming wife and two pretty little daughters, Jeanne et Marie, aged fourteen and twelve.
He seldom moved from his country home, which was called "Le Gué des Aulnes," except to go shooting in the forest; for he was a great sportsman and cared for little else. He was of gigantic stature – six foot six or seven, and looked taller still, as he had a very small head and high shoulders. He was not an Adonis, and could only see out of one eye – the other (the left one, fortunately) was fixed as if it were made of glass – perhaps it was – and this gave him a stern and rather forbidding expression of face.
He had just been elected Mayor of La Tremblaye, beating the Comte de la Tremblaye by many votes. The Comte was a royalist and not popular. The republican M. Laferté (who was immensely charitable and very just) was very popular indeed, in spite of a morose and gloomy manner. He could even be violent at times, and then he was terrible to see and hear. Of course his wife and daughters were gentleness itself, and so was his son, and everybody who came into contact with him. Si vis pacem, para bellum, as Père Brossard used to impress upon us.
It was the strangest country household I have ever seen, in France or anywhere else. They were evidently very well off, yet they preferred to eat their mid‐day meal in the kitchen, which was immense; and so was the mid-day meal – and of a succulency!..
An old wolf‐hound always lay by the huge log fire; often with two or three fidgety cats fighting for the soft places on him and making him growl; five or six other dogs, non‐sporting, were always about at meal‐time.
The servants – three or four peasant women who waited on us – talked all the time; and were tutoyées by the family. Farm‐laborers came in and discussed agricultural matters, manures, etc., quite informally, squeezing their bonnets de coton in their hands. The postman sat by the fire and drank a glass of cider and smoked his pipe up the chimney while the letters were read – most of them out loud – and were commented upon by everybody in the most friendly spirit. All this made the meal last a long time.
M. Laferté always wore his blouse – except in the evening, and then he wore a brown woollen vareuse, or jersey; unless there were guests, when he wore his Sunday morning best. He nearly always spoke like a peasant, although he was really a decently educated man – or should have been.
His old mother, who was of good family and eighty years of age, lived in a quite humble cottage in a small street in La Tremblaye, with two little peasant girls to wait on her; and the La Tremblayes, with whom M. Laferté was not on speaking terms, were always coming into the village to see her and bring her fruit and flowers and game. She was a most accomplished old lady, and an excellent musician, and had known Monsieur de Lafayette.
We breakfasted with her when we alighted from the diligence at six in the morning; and she took such a fancy to Barty that her own grandson was almost forgotten. He sang to her, and she sang to him, and showed him autograph letters of Lafayette, and a lock of her hair when she was seventeen, and old‐fashioned miniatures of her father and mother, Monsieur and Madame de something I've quite forgotten.
M. Laferté kept a pack of bassets (a kind of bow‐legged beagle), and went shooting with them every day in the forest, wet or dry; sometimes we three boys with him. He lent us guns – an old single‐barrelled flint‐lock cavalry musket or carbine fell to my share; and I knew happiness such as I had never known yet.
Barty was evidently not meant for a sportsman. On a very warm August morning, as he and I squatted "à l'affût" at the end of a long straight ditch outside a thicket which the bassets were hunting, we saw a hare running full tilt at us along the ditch, and we both fired together. The hare shrieked, and turned a big somersault and fell on its back and kicked convulsively – its legs still galloping – and its face and neck were covered with blood; and, to my astonishment, Barty became quite hysterical with grief at what we had done. It's the only time I ever saw him cry.
"Caïn! Caïn! qu'as‐tu fait de ton frère?" he shrieked again and again, in a high voice, like a small child's – like the hare's.
I calmed him down and promised I wouldn't tell, and he recovered himself and bagged the game – but he never came out shooting with us again! So I inherited his gun, which was double‐barrelled.
Barty's accomplishments soon became the principal recreation of the Laferté ladies; and even M. Laferté himself would start for the forest an hour or two later or come back an hour sooner to make Barty go through his bag of tricks. He would have an arm‐chair brought out on the lawn after breakfast and light his short black pipe and settle the programme