Days of Anger E-Book

Sylvie Germain

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Days of Anger won the Prix Femina when it was first published in France in 1989."A murdered woman, lying buried in the forests of the Morvan, is the still beating heart of Days of Anger. A rich, eventful saga of blood, angels, obsession and revenge, this marvellous novel is a compulsive, magical read, passionate and spell binding."James Friel in Time OutSylvie Germain's novels will appeal to readers who like their fiction to engage both the heart and the mind.

Leseprobe

Books by Sylvie Germain Available from Dedalus:

Translated by Christine Donougher:

The Book of Nights

Night of Amber

Days of Anger

The Book of Tobias

Invitation to a Journey

The Song of False Lovers

Magnus

Translated by Liz Nash:

The Medusa Child

Infinite Possibilities

Translated by Mike Mitchell:

Hidden Lives

Translated by Judith Landry:

Prague Noir (The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague)

THE AUTHOR

Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993, she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Angouleme. Sylvie Germain is the author of thirteen works of fiction, eleven of which have been published by Dedalus, a study of the painter Vermeer and a religious meditation. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and has received worldwide acclaim.

THE TRANSLATOR

Christine Donougher was born in England in 1954. She read English at Cambridge University and after a career in publishing is now a freelance translator of French and Italian.

Her translation of The Book of Nights by Sylvie Germain won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and she has been shortlisted twice for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Night of Amber in 1996 and for Magnus in 2009 both by Sylvie Germain.

Contents

Books by Sylvie Germain available from Dedalus

The Author

The Translator

ANGER AND BEAUTY

A Small Village

One Morning and Evening Twilight

Green Eyes

An October Wedding

An April Wedding

HYMNS

The Brothers

Our-Lady-of-the-Beeches

The Circle of Angels

Dies Irae

The Will

ANGER AND LONELINESS

The Blue Yonder

The Gift

Wash-Days

The Smell of Mist

In the Attic

The Name of Rouzé

ENDURING LOVE

Psalm

Rouzé’s Body

The White Room

Rocking-Stone Abbey

Rains of May

A Song

NOT ENOUGH TIME

Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature in 2018 to 2028

Copyright

ANGER AND BEAUTY

A SMALL VILLAGE

Old folks’ madness bides its time. It remains poised, as still as the indistinct, pale shadow of a barn owl in the hollow of a dry tree, with an expression of unfathomable vacancy and amazement behind its blinking eyelids, once the creeping cold, tiredness, and hunger have beset it with a statue-like torpor. But before reaching this state of prostration, madness has to have stolen long before into the heart of the man or woman in whom it will mature, and long inhabited his or her thoughts, dreams, memory and senses, as either a dancing, softly singing undulation, or a stamping, shouting agitation – it all depends.

Madness had burst upon Ambroise Mauperthuis, progressed by leaps and bounds, and then tautened like a bow, with contained violence. A frenzied madness, like a flash of lightning frozen in the sky. A madness that had overtaken him at the sight of a woman he did not know, whom he had only seen dead, knifed in the throat, one spring morning on the banks of the Yonne. But in his memory he had confused the woman’s mouth, and those wonderful, parted lips, with the bleeding wound in her neck. He had confused mouth with wound, word with cry, saliva with blood. He had confused beauty with crime, love with anger – and desire with death.

In Edmée Verselay, by contrast, madness had insinuated itself little by little, its progress a gentle trickle, until eventually it came to a quiet halt. A gentle madness, like a patch of delicate blue in a corner of the sky, which no night could ever shroud or extinguish. A madness that had taken root in her heart, too, because of a woman. By grace of a woman – she who was blessed among all women. In her devotion to Our Lady, Edmée had gradually confused her life and her family’s with a perpetual miracle granted by the Virgin. She had confused mouth with smile, word with prayer, saliva with tears. She had confused beauty with the invisible, love with mercy – and death with the Assumption.

Both he and she lived to be very old – the madness remained endlessly poised, and did not allow them time to die. They had completely confused death with their lives. And they both spent the duration of this long pause in their madness living in the same hamlet, perched on granite heights, in the shadow of forests. One of them lived at the top of this small village, and the other at the bottom. The hamlet, called Oak-Wolf, was so tiny and so poor that there did not seem much sense in distinguishing a beginning and an end to it. Yet, short though the distance was between these two farms, it nevertheless represented a vast divide. Anything can occur in two different places, however close they might be. And depending on what happens there, either place may be isolated.

This village had no limits – it lay open to every wind, storm, snowfall and rainfall, and to every passion. The only boundaries were those of the forest, but these are moving boundaries, just as penetrable as they are intrusive – like the confines of the heart when madness encroaches upon love. The hamlet was not signposted. It was just a place whose name was known by word of mouth; a place whose force of being passed from one body to another, thriving in obscure glory in the flesh of its inhabitants.

Rarely did any stranger go up there. It was the people of Oak-Wolf that on Sundays and holidays, on market-days and when labour was being hired; came down into the nearest commune with a church, town hall, square, and bars. So rarely did any stranger venture up there that the villagers they descended on regarded these taciturn visitors as somewhat primitive beings, and the local priest even suspected that the Word of God had not quite managed to reach those semi-barbarians of the forests.

And yet it had travelled all the way up there, admittedly burdened by the mud along the paths – a mud steeped in the old beliefs, in ancient fears and obscure magic, and tangled with roots, branches, and tree-bark; wind-buffeted and rain-lashed, like the thick, dark, shadowy leaves.

Oak-Wolf had five farms: five squat, austere buildings with adjoining cowsheds and barns, strung out along the road that climbed up to Jalles Forest, overhanging the river Cure. Ambroise Mauperthuis and his two sons, Ephraim and Marceau, lived in the first house that one came to along this road. It was called Threshold Farm, because it stood right on the edge of the hamlet, like some doorstep leading to poverty and loneliness. This doorstep had been raised and enlarged when Ambroise Mauperthuis moved in, after he had become rich, but it still led to the same loneliness as before. After Threshold Farm came Follin Farm, named after its inhabitants, Firmin and Adolphine Follin, and their two children, Rose and Toinou. Then, by the wash-house, was Middle Farm, where Pierre and Lea Cordebulge lived with their son, Huguet. Next came Gravelle Farm, the home of Guillaume and Ninon Gravelle and their children. And finally, at the top of the road, even more isolated than the others, almost on the edge of the woods, was the farm where Edmée and Jousé Verselay lived with their daughter, Regina. It was called Upper Farm. All the menfolk were loggers, cowherds, and river-drivers during the season when the logs were thrown into the streams and rivers and floated down to be sorted at the ports of Vermenton or Clamecy. The women and children helped with the lopping and barking of trees, gathering sticks and bundling firewood. At certain times of the year, they lived more in the forests than in their houses, and some of them camped on the riverbanks when they were floating the logs downstream.

Their faith matched their lives: it was rude and simple, of few words, but firm and strong. Even on the harshest Sundays in winter, they would assemble at the back of the church, huddled together, with their heads bowed, having come more than three kilometres through the snow and ice to get down there. All the same, the priest and his village flock still regarded them with a stubborn sense of mistrust. Could you really keep your soul safe, living the way they did, closer to the trees, brushwood, and beasts than to other men? Didn’t you end up consorting one way or another with witches and the like that haunted the shadows of the forest?

Edmée Verselay’s faith differed from that of both the villagers and the rest of the hamlet. It had acquired a scope, intensity and imagination that was lacking in everyone else’s. It had even acquired a colour: blue – the light blue of the Virgin’s mantle on the painted wooden statue that kept vigil in the glimmer of candlelight near the holy-water basin at the entrance to the nave of the church. Above all, it had also acquired a bold fancifulness. There was nothing that did not evoke the Virgin for Edmée, nothing that she did not place under the miraculous protection of the Madonna’s blue cloak. For example, if it snowed on the first of May, Edmée’s beliefs on this subject went beyond those generally held. In the years when snow fell on this date, women in those parts would carefully collect it from the short grass, from the cracks and crevises in stones, tree-trunks and on the lips of wells, and keep it in glass phials, for the snow that fell on the first day of the month of Mary, so they said, had magical medicinal properties. Edmée went further: she claimed that snow from the first of May could not only cure bodily ills, but even more the ailments and languour of the soul, for this snow, according to her, was none other than the pure tears shed by the Holy Mother of God, suddenly moved to deep tenderness at the thought of the sinners and unhappy souls on earth.

But her great devotion to Mary had turned to total adoration at the birth of her daughter. For it was to the Blessed Virgin, and to Her alone, that she owed the arrival of her only child, her daughter Regina, her passion, her sole possession and progeny – her entire glory. She regarded as practically negligible the part that her husband, Jousé, had played in this pregnancy. All her gratitude went to the Virgin.

Regina was indeed the very remarkable fruit of her womb, which had long remained sterile. The splendid, late fruit that Edmée had persistently hoped for, and with which she had been rewarded for thousands of Hail Marys, counted off on a rosary of boxwood beads that had become like pearls of marble or obsidian through being polished by. her stubbornly fervent fingers. And it was in homage to the Virgin, by whose bounty her womb had been blessed with fecundity when she was more than forty years of age, that she had given her daughter the name of Regina. On the birth certificate she had actually inscribed a whole series of other names that followed like a litany of praise: REGINA, Honorée, Victoria, Gloria, Aimée, Grace, Désirée, Beatrix, Marie VERSELAY.

But this miraculous fecundity granted to her seemed to have further proliferated in the body of her daughter. It had run riot, reaching almost monstruous proportions. It was as though each of the other names that came after Regina, like some majestic train, claimed their own body. And instead of each getting a separate body, these names had taken an ample share of hers. The blessed fruit of old Edmée’s womb had turned into a veritable orchard, if not a jungle.

As the years passed, Regina had grown extremely fat. In adolescence she had swollen in size like a ripening fruit, an extraordinary, enormous, luminous fruit whose pulp was perpetually expanding, with a soft, smooth skin. Everyone called her Fat-Ginnie, except for Edmée, who used the noble name that she had given her daughter with such pride and joy. The colossal flourishing of her daughter’s body that so intrigued or amused other people never bothered her. On the contrary, it simply increased her admiration for her profuse offspring. Edmée did not at all regard Regina’s superabundance of flesh as a freak of nature, but as the Holy Mother of God’s continued munificence. And the more her daughter increased in size, the more she gave thanks to the Virgin.

What was most extraordinary about Fat-Ginnie was that it was only her body that swelled. Her face, hands, and feet remained unaffected by this too fruitful bounty. The perfect oval of a minute little face peered out from a mass of red hair and a fantastically bloated neck and throat; a miniature face, like a very delicate, graceful mask, that seemed to have been erroneously set on a gigantic figure. And her hands and feet were the same – finely-wrought marvels of exquisite delicacy, wonderful yet ridiculous appendages to her obese form.

Her eyes had a gentle, often vacant expression, and her eyelids always blinked incredibly slowly, like those of a porcelain doll. From her tiny, deep-red mouth came only babbling sounds and soft, tinkling laughter, and sometimes, too, barely discernible whimpers. She tripped along, rather than walked, quaintly bobbing her head and waving her pretty, little-girl’s hands about her plethoric bulk, as if always reaching out for invisible support to help shift her phenomenal weight. Her body was too vast and too heavy to be able to move through space easily, but of such vastness that it was in itself a space – a secret space, a labyrinth of flesh enclosed within her rosy-hued, pale skin, through which she was endlessly groping her way. Her own body was a world unto her: garden, forest, mountain plateau, river and sky.

She dwelt solely within her body, where she reigned supreme, inhabiting her dream-crowded flesh in silence, solitude and slowness. For time passed differently in her body from the way it did outside: it went extremely slowly. And she lived ensconced in her huge palace of flesh, a murmuring pile of pink and golden blubber.

But her inward reign was unhappy. Her body-kingdom was a torment and distress to her, for although she always ate in fantastic quantities, daintily consuming in endless little mouthfuls enormous platters of food prepared by her mother, she never succeeded in assuaging her hunger. Hunger haunted her body. And it was the secret of this persistent famine that she sought in her continual interior wanderings. But she could never catch up with her hunger. It fled in all directions, like some small fearless animal, much too swift for the slow drift of time through the pinguid paths of her being; a little wild animal for ever burrowing deep into her flesh, gouging chasms that she had to keep filling as they opened, so as not to collapse in a faint. A cruel, voracious little creature that gnawed right through to her soul, and with piercing cries from every nook and cranny of her body was always demanding more and more food – those cries smothered by mounds of flesh, and perfidiously transformed in her throat into little purls of laughter.

Such was the life that Fat-Ginnie lived – as sovereign in her own magnificent palace of flesh, in thrall to the whims of a ferocious little beast: her hunger. And that is why there were moments when she would sob in despair and helplessness. But her sobs never reached her eyes: just like the strident cries of hunger, they would lose their way inside all that fat, and come rippling through the golden ooze of her palatial body in a slow, unctuous murmur, causing a very gentle wobbling of her flesh. The gaze behind those doll-like eyelids would then become even more vacant. That look of placid bemusement was her way of expressing the frustration of never being able to seize hold of her enemy, hunger, and wring its neck.

Edmée had no more inkling than anyone else of her daughter’s desperation. She was blinded by the stupendousness of that quiescent body, a real goddess of fertility’s body, which she took pleasure in feeding and adorning. All day long Edmée slaved for her daughter, who spent her whole time enveloped in the torpor of her being, vainly trying to hunt down her hunger. Every morning Edmée prepared a bath for Fat-Ginnie in a huge wooden tub filled with warm water scented with sweet-smelling roots. Then she would help her to dress, arrange her hair, and beautify her. She would wrap her in big shawls, embroidered with brightly coloured flowers, and pin up her heavy, copper-red hair into a chignon, and slip on to her tiny fingers rings made of deal wood polished until it gleamed like amber. She also wound around her neck long strings of glass beads of translucid blue, like so many clinking rosaries. Then, filled with admiration for this living statue of an obese Virgin, she proudly led her into the kitchen and installed her on a bench by the hearth. And Regina would stay there until evening, quietly bubbling now and then with her pretty, sad laughter, her tiny face bent over some piece of needlework to which she absently applied herself. And so she spent her days, sitting by the fire or at the window overlooking the garden, depending on the season, her graceful fingers daintily embroidering and sewing, while Edmée busied herself with the housework in the kitchen, as well as with the various chores in the garden and the farmyard.

Jousé’s feelings towards his daughter were more troubled than those that Edmée experienced and solemnly displayed. Fat-Ginnie inspired him with an obscure mixture of amazement, fascination, and dread. What was to become of their colossal offspring, who devoured more food than ten woodcutters without ever seeming satisfied, and who could do nothing but languidly and dreamily draw a needle? Jousé felt old age weigh increasingly heavily upon his body day by day, and he knew that soon he would no longer be fit to work in the neighbouring forests, or to descend the banks of the Cure when the logs were floated downstream. Who would provide for them then? What man would dare take for his wife this doleful mountain of pink and white flesh with no other dowry but her insatiable hunger? And thus he dwelt on his anxiety, not even able to discuss it with Edmée, who would have been outraged by such remarks – and old age weighed only the more heavily on his weary frame.

ONE MORNING AND EVENING TWILIGHT

And yet there was a man who desired Fat-Ginnie and wanted to take her for his wife. He was the eldest son of Ambroise Mauperthuis, who owned the forests of Saulches, Jalles, and Failly. No one knew how Mauperthuis, the illegitimate son of a local peasant woman, had managed to make his fortune, and by what obscure deviousness he had succeeded in appropriating Vincent Corvol’s timber forests. This inexplicable change of fortune had given rise to a great deal of rumourmongering among the people of the forest communities, but there was also a certain pride that emerged from all this gossip, for it was rare that one of their own, a man of the uplands, should lay hands on the property of a man from the valley. The men of the uplands were as poor as their soil, that granite base covered with dark forests, breached by springs and ponds, and scattered with fields and meadows, enclosed by quickset hedges, and with hamlets nestling among the brambles and nettles. Some uplanders even lived in the middle of the forests, in cabins made of logs plastered with a mixture of clay, moss and straw. And Ambroise Mauperthuis had lived among these men of the forests in his childhood. He was one of them – and even more lowly, for he was only a bastard – but his cunning and ruthlessness had made him their master, the owner of the forests where they hired out their labour. And for this reason they both admired and hated him.

They admired and hated him all the more, because, having become rich, he had returned to Oak-Wolf, to live in the village where he was born. He might never have come back to the place he had left as a boy. He might have chosen to stay in Clamecy, where he had settled a long time ago. He might have moved from the shabby Bethlehem district, where he dwelt among the log-drivers and their families, into the old town centre, and bought himself a fine house with windows overlooking the street, and a big garden. Yet this was not what he wanted. He was satisfied with the farm at Oak-Wolf. And people wondered whether it was nostalgia that had brought him back, or a spirit of revenge.

In the past, Threshold Farm belonged to the Mourrault family, and his mother, Jeanne Mauperthuis, had been their servant. It was there that he was born, and there that he had grown up. Very soon, he was working with the loggers in Jalles Forest, doing all the minor tasks associated with logging. After the death of Francois Mourrault, his wife Margot had dismissed her servant. Jeanne Mauperthuis had set off with her son to find work on other farms, in the villages of the Yonne valley. But the boy missed the forests. He did not want to become a farm-hand. His love was neither for the land, nor for animals, but for trees. Since he now lived far from the forests but close to the river, he became a log-driver. And so he was reunited with the trees – as they came downstream, dismembered, without roots or branches or leaves, but trees nevertheless. For a while he even worked as a raftsman’s mate, in the days when the logs were still rafted down from Clamecy to Paris. He had descended the Yonne and the Seine on the huge log rafts that doubled, or even tripled, in size as they continued downstream. He had entered the port of Charenton, standing barefoot on these giant rafts, holding the long steering pole that resembled a shepherd’s tall crook. For days, from sunrise to sunset, he had helped the raftsman drive his fabulous herd of logs between the riverbanks, negotiating perilous currents, narrow channels, and bridges, and bringing it to safety. But he did not have time to become a raftsman in his own right, before the days of the great timber rafts were over. Now the logs were simply thrown into the river and left to themselves to float downstream.

So he stayed in Clamecy, by the banks of the Yonne, and lived in the Bethlehem district, among all the other log-drivers. He married and had sons there, the last of whom survived only long enough to be christened Nicholas, in honour of the patron saint of riverfolk. The infant was buried with his mother, who died of fever a few days after the birth. Ambroise Mauperthuis was left on his own with his two boys, Ephraim and Marceau, then aged fourteen and twelve. But the following year, he had moved away from Bethlehem, leaving behind the town, the valley, the river and the riverfolk, and returning to live among the woodlanders. He had gone back up into the forests, to the trees that rose straight out of the granite rock. He had chosen to come back to where he was born. Threshold Farm was empty. Margot Mourrault was long dead, with no heirs to inherit the house that was beginning to fall into ruin. Since the line of succession to it was broken, he was able to buy the farm. He had repaired and enlarged it, had new barns and cowsheds built, and acquired the surrounding land. And there he had settled as master.

St Nicholas, patron of the riverfolk, had not deigned to lend his protection either to Ambroise Mauperthuis’ last-born son, who had been named after him, or to the mother who had chosen this name for her child. St Nicholas had turned away from Mauperthuis, and reminded him that he was not a riverman. But what did Ambroise Mauperthuis care, since this disfavour was outmatched by sorcery? In the weeks following his bereavement, he found other protection, offered not by a saint but by some necromantic spirit of the forest encountered on the riverbank. He encountered beauty, and found wealth. Just a brief and terrible glimpse of beauty, as though caught in a flash of lightning. And from that moment, something had grafted itself on to his heart, sinking rugged roots into it, and ensnaring it like some pungent and heady-smelling ivy. He encountered beauty – it had the tang of anger. And this tang of anger had haunted his life ever since.

He did not remarry. He had absolutely no desire to take another wife. He dismissed every proposition put to him. His choice of wife and lover had been made, once and for all, a choice as unique, final, and imperative as it was impossible. It had been made, suddenly, on a day of beauty, anger and blood. It had been imposed upon him, and it was madness that imposed it.

After he became rich, he engaged an old woman to take care of the house – people called her the Wagger, because she was always wagging her head like a pendulum. All his matrimonial designs became focused on his sons. It was his intention that his elder son Ephraim should marry Corvol’s daughter, Claude. He was waiting until they were both old enough to wed. This would be in less than two years’ time. As for his younger son, Marceau, he would choose for him a wife worthy of his new circumstances. But it was the marriage between Ephraim and Claude Corvol that mattered most to him. Indeed, it mattered to him more than anything else.

It was not enough that he had enriched himself, and extorted Vincent Corvol’s three forests from him. He wanted to take his daughter as well, and uproot her from her home on the banks of the Yonne, and keep her here, in the seclusion of the forests. He wanted to swallow up even Corvol’s name, assimilating it into his own. Corvol also had a son, Leger, but he was such a weak and sickly child that there was certainly no danger of his being able to produce any offspring. So when Ephraim announced his decision to take as his wife not the one who had been chosen for him, but that enormous, indolent girl from Upper Farm, Ambroise Mauperthuis was extremely angry. For this was much worse than an act of disobedience, it was a betrayal, an outrage – a theft that robbed him of Corvol’s name, losing him the prey that he had been stalking for almost five years. He raged against Ephraim’s decision. He threatened to disinherit and disown him. And yet that was what happened.

It happened with remarkable simplicity and speed. They made bread in the village twice a month. Ephraim fell in love with Fat-Ginnie on the first baking-day in October, and he married her the day after the second baking-day of the same month.

He had gone to Upper Farm because Edmée was famous for her expert knowledge of medicinal herbs and the preparation of salves. The previous evening, Marceau had seriously burned his foot, trying to kick back into the hearth a log that had rolled out. His sock had caught fire and the flames had left the sole of his foot raw. The pain had kept him awake all night long. In the morning, not wanting to leave Marceau’s bedside, the Wagger had sent Ephraim to fetch a remedy from Edmée. Ephraim had arrived at Upper Farm very early. The sun had not yet risen, but there was already a red glow at the kitchen window. Edmée was preparing the oven to bake the bread, having kneaded the dough at dawn. When Ephraim entered the kitchen, he was struck by the heat inside and by the rosy reflections rippling on the surface of the walls. Edmée had just lit the broom and dry wood filling the oven. The wood snapped and crackled and curled up, the twigs turning from bright red to translucent yellow, then bursting into tiny fragments, like pink and gold salt crystals. With her sleeves rolled up almost to her shoulders, Edmée was streaming with sweat, as she busied herself at the mouth of the roaring oven. The big kitchen table was covered with wicker baskets containing the dough. Fat-Ginnie lay stretched out on a long bench very close to the oven, with her bust slightly raised. Her little face was turned to the fire, her gaze fixed upon the flames. In fact her gaze was more rapt than fixed. Her pretty, pale-blue eyes, like those of a porcelain doll, stared into the flames, whose brightness made them glisten with the transparency of tears – but tears devoid of any emotion, that neither welled nor trickled from her eyes. Still, gentle tears, like pools of rain-water in the hollow of a rock. Doll’s tears.

She had got up early to watch the bread being baked, an oral ritual that enchanted her more than any other. This glowing-red, crackling, blazing oven yawned before her entranced eyes like some magic mouth. A mouth equal to her hunger, where the dough, thrust in on a broad shovel, began to swell and crust and acquire flavour and consistency. Her own mouth became one with the scarlet mouth of the oven and her tongue with the shovel that was soon to slide the dough into it. Saliva came rushing to her lips. And the hunger in her body was excited.

She was still in her night-shirt and had not yet pinned up her hair, which lay spread over her shoulders and tumbled down her back, a long, coruscating wave of copper-brown, with red and honey-coloured glints. Her hair was indistinguishable from the flames of the oven, with the same flickering movement on hair and flames, the same tremulousness, the same blaze of light. Her hair seemed a molten substance, a flow of lava, bronze, and gold. A flow of flesh and earth combined, of saliva and blood streaming from the jaws of some fabulous creature. A flow of mud, sap and sunshine pouring from a tree-god’s flanks.

Oven and hair – one same hunger protested itself, writhing and murmuring, in both. A hunger in no way related to want, but to superabundance. A joyous, festive hunger. And Fat-Ginnie’s enormous body, clothed in a simple, white linen shirt and langourously stretched out on the bench, was like the balls of dough in the wicker breadbaskets. A soft, white dough, all risen with the fermentation of the yeast. A soft, white skin, all distended with the infinite expansion of flesh. And suddenly Ephraim saw Fat-Ginnie as he had never seen her before. It was no longer the obese girl from Upper Farm that he beheld, but a radiant goddess of flesh and desire.

Oven and hair, dough and flesh, bread and woman, hunger and desire – these all came together in Ephraim’s eyes, and in his mouth, all blending and crying aloud within his body. Shimmering gleams danced all around him. Her hair gathered him up like a huge wave. The wood crackled in his muscles, sputtering along his veins and nerves. The heat flared in his stomach and in his back, and the young girl’s ample, placid flesh kept rising inside him like a miraculous dough. But what riveted Ephraim’s attention more than anything else were Fat-Ginnie’s bare feet – her tiny, delicate, white feet that showed beneath her long night-shirt and gently dangled in the air from the end of the bench. Those graceful little feet seemed independent of that heavy, corpulent body; so much so that Ephraim thought he could feel their gentle pressure on his torso, as though they had detached themselves from her body, and were gaily tripping about in space. They drummed on his chest, and he felt his racing heart inside his ribcage beating to the same rhythm as the tapping of those unattached, playful little feet. And he was so flustered that when he announced the purpose of his visit, instead of telling how his brother Marceau had burned his foot on a blazing log, he said that two little feet were burning his heart. He recovered himself, and finally explained his presence.

Since Edmée had started to clear and clean out the oven, which was now at the right temperature for baking, and could not interrupt her work, she told Fat-Ginnie to go and fetch from the greenhouse a pot containing lily petals steeped in camomile oil. And as she dusted the bread shovel with a little flour and tipped on to it the contents of one of the bread baskets, she described to Ephraim how this ointment should be used. But Ephraim was not listening; he barely heard her. He noticed only the sound of Fat-Ginnie’s feet lightly touching the ground. She rocked slightly as she walked, an almost indiscernible roll causing the massive body beneath her night-shirt, and her abundant, flowing hair, to sway, while her tiny feet seemed to feel their way forward with the smallest, bobbing steps.

It was not just upon his heart that Fat-Ginnie’s little feet now drummed, but also on his back, his stomach, and in the hollow of his groin. Her feet rapped him repeatedly, marking him with invisible, fleeting signs, just as loggers mark the trees destined for felling. And at that moment his whole body yearned for nothing else but to let his entire weight fall upon Fat-Ginnie’s wonderfully extravagant body, and to give full vent to the cry of desire soaring inside him until it culminated in a gasp of pleasure. Then, as Edmée quickly closed the oven door, having just slipped the dough inside, Ephraim made a second request. Without any further thought, he asked for Regina’s hand in marriage. His desire had suddenly become so profound, so intense, that it vastly exceeded any capacity for thought. His desire had imposed itself as law, fact and necessity.

Her face all shiny with sweat and rosy from the heat, Edmée turned to Ephraim and gave him a piercing look that threw out more sparks than the mouth of the oven. She was sizing him up. For all that he was Mauperthuis’ elder son, was this ordinary mortal worthy of taking as his wife her unique and truly wondrous daughter? Admittedly, marriage was in the order of things, and Regina was now seventeen – but was Regina, whose glorious advent into this world was due solely to the grace of the Most Holy Mother of God, subject to the common order of things?

‘Have to think about it,’ she said eventually, wiping her brow. At that moment Fat-Ginnie reappeared in the kitchen, with little dancing steps, holding the pot of lily petals in her hands. She set it down on the table and immediately resumed her position on the bench, without paying any further attention to the visitor, quite delighted by the sweet smell of the bread cooking.

‘Have to think about it,’ Edmée said again. ‘Come back this evening, when Jousé will be home. We need to discuss it.’

Ephraim returned to Threshold Farm with the pot, which he gave to the Wagger. The ointment soothed Marceau’s pain. Then Ephraim went off to meet his father in Saulches Forest. The timber market held at Château-Chinon on All Saints’ Day was approaching, and Ambroise Mauperthuis was carrying out a thorough inspection of his trees before deciding on the felling to be done during the winter, bearing in mind what the sales would be. For though he had become a property owner, he still remained a logger at heart – it was in his blood – and he did not rely on any intermediary to value his trees.