Thérèse
Dessqueyroux, a novel written by Francois Mauriac and published
in 1927, is set in the depths of the Landais forest. Although the story
is rather emotional and dark, the descriptions of the forest and heath
landscapes, forest fires and life relating to being in an industrial forest
provide useful and interesting glimpses into this world different to that
in which most people now live.
Here we offer various excerpts from the translation by Gerard Manley
Hopkins ( the page numbers refer edition listed in end
note 1).
p.21 DESCRIPTION
… she saw in imagination bicycling through those mornings of the
long ago upon the road that led from Saint-Clair to Argelouse, about nine
o’clock, before the heat of the day had grown intolerable: not him,
but his sister Anne. She had a vision of the girl with her face aglow,
while all around the cicadas were kindling into little flickers of flame
on each successive pine, and the great furnace of the heath was beginning
to roar beneath the sky. Millions of flies rose in a cloud above the blazing
ling. "Put on your coat before you come indoors; it's like an ice-house."
Aunt Clara would say, adding, "Wait till you've cooled down before
you have a drink." …
p.22 - 23 Even at dusk, when the sun had come so near its setting that
only the very lowest sections of the pine trunks were reddened with its
light, and a belated cicada was still scraping away for dear life almost
at ground-level, there was still an airless heat beneath the oaks.
When September came they could venture out after luncheon and wander
through the parched land. No tiniest stream of water flowed at Argelouse.
Only by walking a long way over the sandy heath could they hope to reach
the head-waters of the rivulet which went by the name of La Hure. It carved
a myriad courses through low-lying meadows laced with alder-roots. Their
feet turned numb in the ice-cold current, and then, no sooner dry, were
burning hot again. They would seek the shelter of one of the huts set
up in October for the guns who went out after duck. It served them as
the shuttered drawing-room had done earlier in the year. They had nothing
to say to one another. No word passed. The minutes flew as they lay there
innocently resting. They were as still and motionless as the sportsman
who, spying a flight of birds, imposes silence with a movement of the
hand. To have stirred so much as a finger, so it seemed to them, would
have set scurrying in fright their chaste, their formless happiness. It
was Anne, always, who moved first-eager to be at the business of killing
larks at sundown, and Thérèse, though she hated the sport,
would follow, so hungry was she for the other's company. In the hall Anne
would take down the rook-rifle which fired so light a charge that there
was no recoi1. Her friend, standing on a bank, would watch her in the
field of rye, aiming at the sun as though in readiness to shoot it from
the sky.
p.26 BUSINESS
…. she had stayed behind with the men, held there by the talk of
farm matters and pit-props, of mineral deposits and turpentine. She took
a passionate delight in estimating the value of land. There could be little
doubt that the idea of controlling so great a stretch of forest territory
had exercised over her an irresistible fascination. ‘He, too, was
in love with my trees ...’
… they had once walked together down the sandy track which led from
Argelouse to Vilméja. The shrivelled oak-leaves were still showing
as dirty patches against the blue. The dried tangle of last year' s bracken
was thick upon the ground, the tender stalks of new growth striking a
note of bright and acid green. Bernard said: "Be careful of your
cigarette. Even at this time of year it might start a fire. The heath
is already without water."
p.36 UNSALUBRIOUSNESS OF LES LANDES
"The Azévédos were somebody when our ancestors were
a miserable lot of shepherds shaking with fever in the marshes."
p.51 PROPERTY
The tragedy of the class war was never really forced on her attention
in a countryside where even the poorest have some property, and are for
ever striving to amass more; where a common love of the soil, of shooting,
of food and of drink, creates between all-middle and labouring class alike-a
close bond of brotherhood. But Bernard had, in addition, some degree of
education. The neighbours said of him that he had got out of his rut,
and even Thérèse took pleasure in the thought that he was
the kind of man with whom it was possible to carry on some sort of rational
conversation, a man who had "risen superior to his environment ."
or so she regarded him until she met Jean Azévédo.
53 WALKING
… I had decided to go to the lonely hut where Anne and 1 used to
eat our little snacks, and where 1 knew she had later loved to meet young
Azévédo. 1 didn't regard it in the light of a sentimental
pilgrimage. What took me there was the knowledge mat the trees had grown
too big to make bird-watching easy, and that, consequently, 1 ran little
risk of disturbing the guns. The hut was no longer used for shooting because
the forest all around blotted out the horizon. There were no long, open
drives in which it was possible to follow the movement of the coveys.
The October sun was still hot. The sandy path hurt my feet, the flies
plagued me.
61 SILENCE
All around us was the silence: the silence of Argelouse! People who have
never lived in that lost corner of the heath-country can have no idea
what silence means. It stands like a wall about the house, and the ho
use itself seems as though it were set solid in the dense mass of the
forest, whence comes no sign of life, save occasionally the hooting of
an owl. (At night I could almost believe that I heard the sob I was at
such pains to stifle.)
'It was after Azévédo had gone that 1 got to know that silence.
So long as 1 was sure that he would come to me with the new day the thought
of his presence robbed the smothering dark of ail its terrors. The fact
that he was lying asleep nearby gave me a feeling that the night and all
the sweep of moorland was rich with life…. I have an impression
that, being a bred-in-the-bone Parisian, he could not bear the silence,
the particular silence of Argelouse, any longer,
70 LOVE OF PINES/ FIRE
Week followed week without so much as a drop of rain.
Bernard lived in constant terror of fire. He was suffering from his heart
again. More than a thousand acres had been burned over at Louchats. "If
the wind had been from the north l should have lost my Balisac pines."
Thérèse was in a state of waiting for she knew not what
to fall from the immutable sky. It would never rain again. One day the
whole surrounding forest would crackle into flame, even the town itself
would not be spared. Why was it that the heath villages never caught fire?
It seemed to her unjust that it should always be the trees that the flames
chose, never the human beings. In the family circle there was a never-ending
discussion about what caused these disasters. Was it a discarded cigarette,
or was it deliberate mischief? Thérèse liked to imagine
that one of these nights she would get up, leave the house, reach the
most inflammable part of the forest, throw away her cigarette, and watch
the great column of smoke stain the dawn sky . . . But she drove the thought
from her, for the love of pine-trees was in her blood. It was not them
that she hated.
91 TORMENTED TREE TOPS
On the last night of October a wild wind from the Atlantic tossed the
tormented tree-tops for hours together. In a half-sleep, Thérèse
lay and listened to the thunder of the sea. But when she woke at dawn
it was to a different sound. She opened the shutters, but the darkness
of the room was unrelieved. A thin, dense rain was falling on the cobbles
of the yard and pattering between the still thick foliage of the oaks.
97 DEEP MURMUR
A gust of wind blew it open, and the chill night air filled the room.
Thérèse could not muster sufficient energy to throw back
the bedclothes, to get up and cross the room on bare feet to shut it.
She lay curled in the bed, the sheet drawn halfway over her face, so that
only on her eyes and forehead did she feel the icy blast. The deep murmur
of the pines filled Argelouse, but, despite this sound, as of a fretting
sea, the silence of the place was there. If she were really in love with
suffering (she thought) she would not lie huddled thus beneath the bedclothes.
She tried to throw them off a little, but could not long endure the cold.
109
She played in imagination with the idea of going back to the sad and secret
land-of spending a lifetime of meditation and self-discipline in the silence
of Argelouse, there to set forth on the great adventure of the human soul,
the search for God ....
FIRE
·"There was-it was on the day of the great fire at Mano."
…. She found it odd to conjure up the picture of that oppressive
afternoon with its pall of smoke through which the blue looked dimmed
and sooty, to smell again the acrid scent as of torches which comes from
burning pines.
115 LOVE OF PLACE / MOANING PINES
… she had been longing to drive with Bernard along the road to Villandraut
in the evening light between the ominous pines! What did it matter-the
sort of country one was fond of, pines or maples, sea or plain? Life alone
was interesting, people of flesh and blood. 'It is not the bricks and
mortar that I love, nor even the lectures and museums, but the living
human forest that fills the streets, the creatures tom by passions more
violent than any storm. The moaning of the pines at Argelouse in the darkness
of the night thrilled me only because it had an almost human sound!'
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