The Earth Read online

  They nodded agreement and went down the Rue Grouaise, a few steps apart.

  Then, after Fouan and Rose had turned off into the Rue du Temple, towards the church, Fanny and Delhomme went away along the Rue Grande. Buteau had stopped in the Place Saint-Lubin, still wondering whether his father had a hidden nest-egg or not. Jesus Christ, left to his own devices, relit his cigar-end, and lurched into the Jolly Ploughman.

  Chapter 3

  FOUAN'S house in Rognes was the first one on the road from Cloyes to Bazoches-le-Doyen, which runs through the village. So at seven o'clock on the Monday morning, at daybreak, the old man was just leaving home to go to meet the others, as agreed, in front of the church, when in the doorway of the next house he caught sight of his sister, known as La Grande, already up and about despite her eighty years.

  The Fouans had been born and bred here for centuries, like a tough and hardy plant. Former serfs of the Rognes-Bouqueval family, of whom no trace remained except a few half-buried stones of a demolished castle, they must have been freed under Philippe le Bel; and from that time onwards they had become landowners of an acre, or perhaps two, which they bought from the lord of the manor when he was short of cash; and they sweated blood to pay for it at a price ten times its real value. Then the battle had begun, which was to last four long centuries, to defend and enlarge their property, a battle fought with a savage passion passed down from father to son as pieces of land were lost or recovered; a property of derisory proportions, constantly in jeopardy, an inheritance burdened by such onerous taxation that at times it threatened to melt away but whose meadows and arable slowly increased through the Fouans' irresistible hunger for land and their tenacity of purpose, which slowly achieved its goal. Whole generations died in pursuit of their task and the soil grew fat with the sacrifice of many a life; but when the Revolution of 1789 finally established his rights, Joseph-Casimir, the Fouan of the day, owned twenty-one acres wrested from the former manor lands over the space of four centuries.

  In 1793 Joseph-Casimir was twenty-seven years old; and on the day when the remainder of the estate was declared to be the property of the nation and sold by auction, he longed to buy more of it. The Rognes-Bouqueval family, having let the last of the castle towers fall down, themselves ruined and crippled by debt, had long since abandoned the tenancies of La Borderie to their creditors, and three-quarters of the land was lying fallow. Above all, adjoining one of the plots, there was a large piece of land which Joseph-Casimir, insatiably covetous like all his family, would have dearly loved to possess. But the harvests had been poor and his savings amounted to barely a hundred crowns hidden in an old jar behind the stove; and in addition, when he had for a moment toyed with the idea of borrowing from a moneylender in Cloyes, he had been seized by misgivings: he was scared at the thought of those properties formerly belonging to the nobility. Who could tell whether they wouldn't have to be returned later on? So, torn between desire and distrust, he had the mortification of seeing La Borderie bought up in the auction, lot by lot, by a rich townsman, Isidore Hourdequin, a former exciseman from Châteaudun, who acquired it for a fifth of its value.

  In his old age, Joseph-Casimir divided up his twenty-one acres between his eldest daughter, Marianne, and his two sons, Louis and Michel, seven acres apiece; a younger daughter, Laure, who had learned dressmaking and was employed in Châteaudun, received financial compensation instead. But marriage destroyed this equal distribution. Whereas Marianne Fouan, nicknamed La Grande, married Antoine Péchard, a neighbour who owned roughly eighteen acres, Michel Fouan, whom everyone called Mouche, found himself saddled with a girl whose father eventually left her only two acres of vine. For his part, Louis Fouan had married Rose Maliverne, who had inherited twelve acres, and he had thus finished by owning nineteen acres which he was now about to divide between his own three children.

  In the family La Grande was respected and feared, not for her age but for her wealth. Still very erect, very tall, lean, tough and big-boned, she had a long, withered, blood-red neck topped by a gaunt face like that of a bird of prey, in which the family nose had become a terrifying curved beak. Her eyes were round and staring; under her headscarf she was completely hairless but on the other hand she had kept all her teeth and her jaws would have made light work of a diet of stones. She always walked with her stick poised in the air, and never left home without it – a hawthorn stick reserved exclusively for cudgelling animals and people. She had been widowed when still young and had one daughter whom she had turned out of her house because the wretched girl had persisted in marrying, against her mother's wishes, a penniless young man called Vincent Bouteroue; and even now that this son-in-law and her daughter had died in poverty, leaving behind a granddaughter and grandson, Palmyre and Hilarion, already thirty-two and twenty-four years old, she had never relented; she refused to recognize their existence and was letting them starve. Ever since her man's death, she had personally taken over the farming of his land – she had three cows, a pig and a hired hand, whom she fed out of the common feeding trough. Everyone went in deadly terror of her, and nobody would ever dare to disobey her.

  Seeing her standing in her doorway, Fouan went over to speak to her and pay his respects. She was ten years older than he and he shared the general deference and admiration which the whole village felt for her hardness, her greed, her zest for living and her single-minded devotion to material possessions.

  ‘I was wanting to see you, La Grande,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you that I've finally made up my mind and I'm on my way up to work out the various lots.’

  She made no reply and held on to her stick more tightly in order to brandish it.

  ‘The other evening I wanted to ask your advice but no one answered when I knocked.’

  Her harsh voice exploded:

  ‘You're an idiot! I gave you my advice! You're a stupid coward to give up your property as long as you're alive and kicking… Wild horses wouldn't have dragged that sort of decision out of me. Seeing other people own what belongs to you, leaving your house and home for the benefit of those wretched children of yours, not on your life!’

  ‘But suppose you're no longer able to farm the land,’ Fouan objected, ‘and the land is suffering as a result.’

  ‘Well, let it suffer! I'd sooner go along every day and watch the thistles growing than give up one square inch of it!’

  She straightened up with her wild look that made her seem like an old vulture which has lost its feathers. Then, tapping him on the shoulder with her stick to emphasize her words, she said:

  ‘Listen to me… When you've got nothing left and they've got the lot, your children will push you into the gutter and you'll end up like a tramp with a begging bowl… And when that happens, don't think you can come and knock at my door, because I've given you plenty of warning and it'll be your fault… Do you know what I'll do then? Would you like to know?’

  He stood there meekly, waiting with the deferential air of a younger son as she turned and went back into her house and slammed the door violently behind her.

  ‘That's what I'll do… You can die in the gutter!’

  For a second, Fouan remained motionless in front of the slammed door. Then, with a gesture of resignation, he went up the pathway leading to the square in front of the church. It was here, in fact, that the Fouans' ancestral home stood; it had been given to Michel, or Mouche as he was called, at the time his father had shared out the estate, whereas Louis's house, down below on the road, had come to him from his wife Rose. Mouche, a widower of long standing, lived alone with his two daughters Lise and Françoise. Soured by his bad luck and smarting even now under the humiliation of having married a poor girl, he was still, forty years later, accusing his brother and sister of having cheated him when drawing the lots; and he never tired of telling how the worst lot had been reserved for him at the bottom of the hat, a story which seemed in the end to have turned out to be true, because he was so argumentative and such a slacker that in his hands his shar
e had diminished by half. The man makes the land, as they say in Beauce.

  That morning, Mouche was also standing in his doorway on the look-out when his brother came in at one corner of the square. He was fascinated at the thought that his brother should be dividing up his property, although he had nothing to gain from it; and it stirred old grievances. But in order to pretend that he was totally indifferent, he, too, brusquely turned his back on him and slammed the door.

  Fouan had at once caught sight of Delhomme and Jesus Christ, who were standing waiting, twenty paces apart. He went up to the farmer and the latter then came up. Without speaking to each other, all three directed their gaze towards the path which ran along the edge of the plateau.

  ‘There he is,’ said Jesus Christ at last. It was Grosbois, the official surveyor, a farmer from the neighbouring little village of Magnolles. His skill at reading and writing had been his downfall. Called upon to undertake surveys over an area from Orgères to as far away as Beaugency, he had let his wife look after his own property and, since he was continually on the move, he had developed such drunken habits that he was now never sober. Very stout and hearty, despite his fifty years, he had a broad, ruddy face, spotted with grog blossoms, and although it was still early he was very badly the worse for drink through having spent the previous night carousing with some wine-growers of Montigny to celebrate the conclusion of a partition of some property amongst the next-of-kin. But this was of no importance; the drunker he was, the clearer his sight became; he had never been known to make a mistake in his measurements or calculations. People listened to him and showed him consideration, for he had the reputation of being a very spiteful customer.

  ‘All right, everybody here?’ he said. ‘Let's get going.’

  He was followed by a dirty, ragged, twelve-year-old urchin carrying the chain under one arm and the stand and the poles over his shoulder, while in his free hand he was swinging the cross-staff in a tattered old cardboard box.

  They all set off without waiting for Buteau, whom they had just spied standing motionless beside one field, the largest of all, at the place known as Les Cornailles. This field of roughly five acres adjoined the one where Coliche had dragged Françoise along the ground a few days ago. Thinking there was no point in coming any further, Buteau had stopped here, absorbed in a brown study. As the others came up, they saw him bend down, pick up a handful of soil and then let it slip slowly through his fingers, as though sizing it up and seeing how it smelt.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Grosbois, pulling a greasy notebook out of his pocket. ‘I've already drawn up a little detailed plan of each bit of land, just as you asked me, Monsieur Fouan. Now we have to divide the whole lot into three parts, and that's what we're going to do together. That's right, isn't it? Now tell me what your ideas are on the subject.’

  The light was better now and large masses of cloud went scudding across the livid sky, driven before the icy wind which scourged the sad and dreary plain of Beauce. However, not one of the men seemed aware of these blasts of ocean air which were filling out their smocks like sails and threatening to blow away their hats. All five of them, dressed in their Sunday best in view of the solemnity of the occasion, had now fallen silent. As they stood beside the field set in the middle of this boundless plain, their faces took on the fixed, dreamy look of sailors idly musing on their lonely life spent among the vast expanses of the sea. This flat, fertile plain, easy to cultivate but requiring continuous care, has made its inhabitants cold and reflective; their only passion is for the earth.

  ‘We must split everything into three,’ said Buteau in the end.

  Grosbois shook his head and an argument ensued. Through his contact with the larger farms, he had been won over by progressive ideas and he sometimes took the liberty of disagreeing with his smallholder clients over the policy of dividing land into excessively small holdings. When you had plots of land no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, didn't it make movement and transport ruinously expensive? Was it proper farming when you had little garden-sized plots where you couldn't use the right rotation or machines? The only sensible thing was to come to some agreement, not cut up a field like a piece of cake; it was sheer murder. If one person was prepared to accept the arable land, the other could take the pasture; and then you could arrange so that every share was equal and the final allocation would be made by drawing lots.

  Buteau was still young enough to have kept a sense of humour: he took Grosbois's remarks as a joke:

  ‘And suppose I end up with nothing but pasture, what am I going to eat, grass? That's not good enough, I want a bit of everything, hay for my cow and my horse, wheat and vine for me.’

  Fouan nodded approvingly. Successive generations had always split up the land like that; and then each holding would be built up afresh through the acquisition of other land through purchase or marriage.

  As the prosperous owner of more than sixty acres, Delhomme could afford to take a broader view, but he did not want to create trouble, he had come along on his wife's behalf merely to ensure that the survey was fairly done. And as for Jesus Christ, he had gone off in pursuit of a flock of larks, his hands full of stones. As soon as one of them remained fluttering for a couple of seconds motionless against the wind, he would bring it down as skilfully as any primitive savage. He knocked down three of them and stuffed them into his pocket, all bloody as they were.

  ‘That's enough blather,’ said Buteau, addressing the surveyor with cheerful familiarity. ‘Just you cut it up into three parts. And take care it's not six, because it seems to me that you've got one eye on Chartres and the other on Orléans this morning!’

  Offended by this remark, Grosbois drew himself up and retorted with some hauteur:

  ‘Young man, see if you can be as drunk as me and keep your eyes open… Is there any clever person here who would like to use my cross-staff instead of me?’

  As nobody took up the challenge, with a triumphant air he sharply called out to his boy, who was lost in admiration at Jesus Christ's skill at killing birds; the cross was set up on its stand but as the stakes were being thrust into the ground another dispute arose over the way to divide the field up. The surveyor, supported by Fouan and Delhomme, wanted to divide it up into three strips parallel to the valley of the Aigre, whereas Buteau was demanding that the strips should run at right angles to the valley, on the objection that the soil became progressively shallower going down the slope. In that way, everyone would have a fair share of the poor soil, whilst otherwise the third strip would consist of nothing but poor quality land. But Fouan was becoming annoyed: he insisted that the topsoil was the same all over and pointed out that the previous division of the land between him, Mouche and La Grande had been conducted on the same basis, as was proved by the fact that the third strip would be bordering Mouche's own five-acre plot. For his part, Delhomme made the very valid point that even if that strip were less good, its owner would benefit as soon as they opened up the road which was going to run along the edge of the field, at that very spot.

  ‘Oh yes!’ Buteau cried. ‘That famous direct route from Rognes to Châteaudun via La Borderie. That's something you'll not see for donkey's years.’

  And when they persisted despite his objection, he went on protesting through clenched teeth. Even Jesus Christ had joined them and they all became absorbed in observing Grosbois draw the dividing lines, watching him like hawks as though they suspected him of wanting to cheat by giving one of the strips an extra inch or two. Three times Delhomme went over to put his eye at the slit in the cross-staff head to be quite sure that the wire cut the pole cleanly. Jesus Christ swore at the wretched little boy for not holding the chain properly taut. But Buteau in particular followed the operation step by step, counting every yard and redoing the sums in his own way, mumbling with his lips. And though filled with desire to own the land and with joy at the prospect of finally laying hands on it, another feeling was welling up within him, a dull, bitter rage at not being able to possess the lot:
what a lovely field it was – five acres of it all in one piece! He had insisted on its being carved up so that if he could not be the sole owner, it should at least not belong to anyone else – yet now he felt appalled at such butchery.

  Fouan had stood silently watching his property being divided up, his arms dangling at his side.

  ‘That's that,’ said Grosbois. ‘And between this bit and those over there, you couldn't squeeze ten francs difference out of any of 'em!’

  On the plateau there still remained some ten acres of land under the plough but divided into ten fields or more, none of them larger than an acre; one was even less than half an acre and when the surveyor asked sardonically whether he was to split that one up, too, another argument arose. Once more Buteau repeated his instinctive gesture of bending down, taking a handful of earth and holding it up to his face, as if intending to taste it. Then, blissfully wrinkling his nose, he seemed to be suggesting that this was the best of the lot; and letting the soil slip gently through his fingers he said that he would be agreeable if the plot of land could be allotted to him; otherwise, it would have to be split up… Annoyed by this, Delhomme and Jesus Christ both refused and demanded their share. ‘All right then, an eighth of an acre each, that was the only fair thing to do.’ And so all the fields were divided up, so that everyone was certain that none of the three would have any more than the other two.

  ‘Let's go over to the vineyards,’ said Fouan.

  But as they were going back to the church, he cast one last glance over the immense plain and, as his eye settled for a second on the farm buildings of La Borderie in the distance, he uttered an exclamation of inconsolable grief at the thought of the opportunity they had let slip when the national estates had been sold, so long ago.

  ‘Ah, if only my father had been prepared to go ahead, Grosbois, you'd've been measuring all that!’