Maltaverne by Francois Mauriac

Author:Francois Mauriac [Mauriac, Francois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

But first I must let Donzac know what Simon had told me that evening, when he came to the Rue de Cheverus. He had learnt the secret from his brother Prudent, when the latter paid his one and only visit to Talence. My mother was not as convinced as I had believed of my submission and of her final victory. At twenty-one I was liable to fall a prey to the first-comer of either sex. The risk was that some fortune-hunter might get hold of me. My aversion to marriage no longer reassured her, because she realized that marriage was my only certain defence against the Louse. The dangerous years, she thought, were those of my student life at Bordeaux. She knew that I was no easy prey. She was aware of the vis inertiae with which I met any attempt to seduce me. But a chance encounter might well bring out another side of me: a man like other men, worse than other men. So long as I had not come back to Maltaverne, come back to stay, nothing would have been won. When she had finally got me back, when I should have cast anchor there for ever, then all that she had planned could be achieved.

The important thing, as she explained to old Duberc (it was from him that Prudent had learnt the secret that he told his brother) was not to let oneself be taken by surprise. ‘He’s slipped my grasp,’ she kept on saying. ‘I’ve lost control over him.’ If I decided to marry, the worst thing, in Mother’s view, would be that I should make a conventionally acceptable choice which no one could criticize. But even then she would be able to raise insuperable objections: they are always to be found. I should have to submit to her veto, which would be absolute. She derived all her strength from my incapacity to manage my own affairs or even give serious thought to them. In spite of my success at school, in which she gloried on prize-giving day, she judged me according to that scale of values which was current in her family: it was identical with that of Père Grandet. Nothing has changed in France since Balzac’s day. ‘A poor creature’, that’s what I was for Mother, in spite of all my book-learning.

If I proved obstinate, she would retire to her estate at Noaillan, and leave me to cope with my two thousand hectares by myself. Worse still, in order to foil me completely she had secured the Dubercs’ promise to follow her to Noaillan, so that I should have no alternative but to submit, being unable to do without my bailiff as well as my mother. It would be for my own good, she would save me in spite of myself. I could imagine her saying it: ‘I’ve looked after you and I shall go on looking after you to the end of my days.’

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