The will to live (Les Roquevillard) — Key Ideas to Explore

ving eye all the fine land that stretched about him: the disburdened vines, whose purple and gold would live for him again in his joyful wines, the fields twice tilled, the orchards, the little nameless stream beyond them that separated the cantons of Coquin and Saint Cassin, the woods of oak and beeches, red and white, their colours shaded off by autumn into a pale bouquet. In these lands and the varied cultivation of them he read in this quiet hour a history not of the seasons, but of his own family. Such and such an ancestor had bought this field here, another had planted that vineyard; and he himself, had he not passed the boundaries of the canton when he acquired those woods that were so crowded now they called for cutting? Turning toward the farm buildings, he could see the first primitive cabin, changed now into a stable, which the first Roquevillards, honest peasants, had built. He contrasted it with the present large and substantial dwelling blazing with Virginia creeper. It was the same race, abiding in the same place, fortified by a past of honest labour and economy. He paid homage to it, recalling the words of old Fauchois:

“It’s always the fault of the family.”

His own race, moreover, had given the country men capable of serving the republic, as useful there as they had been in the administering of their own affairs. Thus the generations helped each other to a common prosperity. Had not the earliest of them all prepared his work for him? This land that he was treading on they had coveted and earned before him. This wide view had thrilled and exalted them as it thrilled him. With some difficulty he detached his gaze from his own domain and prefigured things as they must have seen it, the combination of lines and tints that made up the landscape, and on which their sense of it, like his own, must have depended. For though cultivatism may modify the immediate appearance of the land, men’s hands change nothing of its splendour and extent: they add only certain human marks, a roof with smoke above it, telling of the sweetness of a hearth, a path or hedge, memorials of the social life, a bell tower that speaks of prayer.

Alone on the hillside he joined to the beauty of the evening the pleasure of communion with his race. He felt that the obscure past had given an importance to this corner of the earth. Opposite to him, the chain of Lepine, its monotony broken by the summit of the Signal, was edged with red. His gaze descended to the plain, followed a moment the graceful, flowing range of the Echelles, to which the last spurs of the mountains seemed to act as escorts on either side, then rose again to the indentations of the Corbelet, Joigny and Granier, and returned again to the hills nearer by, to the storeyed valleys and their more harmonious curves. In this bit of broken nature, hard and soft by turns, he retraced the characters of his parentage--the audacity of his grandfather, who bore arms during the Revolution, the nonchalance of his father, lapsing into mere philosophy and contemplation, and letting his sacred patrimony become compromised almost unawares.

“Not one of them,” he was thinking, “but could thus behold the spectacle of the setting sun from this place. One day, when I am no more, one of my children will take up these comparisons again--my children, who will continue our work, people of means and worth.”

From the past that buttressed him he made out the future in security.

Absorbed in these reflections, he did not see the woman’s form that had left the house and was now coming toward him. It was a woman already aged, with a dark shawl thrown over her shoulders, and using a cane as she walked, with an air of great lassitude and exhaustion. Her face, as you saw it in the evening light, must once have been beautiful. The years had chastened it without taking from it a certain expression of purity, which surprised one at first and then attracted. It was the visible imprint of an upright soul, purged of all evil, even a little mystical.

“Are they not coming yet?” asked Mrs. Roquevillard of her husband.

“Yes, Valentine; there they are.”

Both understood that they were speaking of their children. He pointed but for her at the foot of the declivity, on the upward path, a numerous group. At the head of it came two babies, whom their grandmother recognised at once:

“Peter and Adrienne. They are taking the short cut. I don’t see little Julian.”