A Very French Christmas by Guy de Maupassant

Author:Guy de Maupassant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931559
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

1872

A MIRACLE

Guy de Maupassant

Doctor Bonenfant was searching his memory, saying, half aloud: “A Christmas story—some remembrance of Christmas?”

Suddenly he cried: “Yes, I have one, and a strange one too; it is a fantastic story. I have seen a miracle! Yes, ladies, a miracle, and on Christmas night.”

“It astonishes you to hear me speak thus, a man who believes scarcely anything. Nevertheless, I have seen a miracle! I have seen it, I tell you, seen, with my own eyes, that is what I call seeing. Was I very much surprised, you ask? Not at all; because if I do not believe from your viewpoint, I believe in faith, and I know that it can remove mountains. I could cite many examples, but I might make you indignant, and I should risk diminishing the effect of my story.

“In the first place, I must confess that if I have not been convinced and converted by what I have seen, I have at least been strongly moved; and I am going to strive to tell it to you naively, as if I had the credulity of an Auvergnat.

“I was then a country doctor, living in the town of Rolleville, on the plains of Normandy. The winter that year was terrible. By the end of November the snow came after a week of heavy frosts. One could see from afar the great snow clouds coming from the north, and then the descent of the white flakes commenced. In one night the whole plain was in its winding sheet. Farms, isolated in their square incisures, behind their curtains of great trees powdered with hoarfrost, seemed to sleep under the accumulation of this thick, light-colored covering.

“No noise could reach this dead country. The crows alone in large flocks outlined long festoons in the sky, living their lives to no purpose, swooping down upon the livid fields and picking at the snow with their great beaks. There was nothing to be heard but the vague, continued whisper of this white powder as it persistently fell. This lasted for eight days and then stopped. The earth had on its back a mantle five feet in thickness. And during the next three weeks, a sky spread itself out over this smooth, white mass, hard and glistening with frost, which was clear as blue crystal by day, and at night all studded with stars, as if the hoarfrost grew by their light.

“The plain, the hedges, the elms of the enclosures, all seemed dead, killed by the cold. Neither man nor beast went out. Only the chimneys of the cottages, clothed in white linen, revealed concealed life by the fine threads of smoke which mounted straight into the frosty air. From time to time one heard the trees crack, as if their wooden limbs were breaking under the bark. And sometimes a great branch would detach itself and fall, the resistless cold petrifying the sap and breaking the fibers. Dwellings set here and there in fields seemed a hundred miles away from one another.

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