Sappho by Alphonse Daudet

Author:Alphonse Daudet [Daudet, Alphonse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910213742
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

They settled at Chaville halfway up the slope between the high ground and the low ground, in a house standing on the old foresters’ road known as Keepers’ Causeway, an old hunting lodge at the entrance to the wood. It had three rooms hardly any bigger than Paris and contained the same furniture, the cane armchair, the painted wardrobe, and to enliven the terrible green paper in their bedroom, only the portrait of Fanny because the photograph of Castelet had had its frame broken in the move and was now fading away in the roof space.

They scarcely talked about poor Castelet any more, since uncle and niece had broken off their correspondence. ‘Fickle old rogue,’ she said, remembering his readiness to connive at their breaking-up. Only the little girls kept their brother abreast of the news; but Divonne no longer wrote. Perhaps she was still cross with her nephew; or else she guessed the wicked woman had returned and would read and pass comment on her poor motherly letters written in that large peasant hand.

At times they might have imagined themselves still in rue d’Amsterdam when they woke to the crooning of the Hettémas, their neighbours once more, and the whistle of trains continually passing on the other side of the road, visible through the branches of a large country park. But instead of the murky glazing of the gare de l’Ouest, its uncovered windows silhouetting the bent figures of clerks at work, and the rumble and roar from the sloping street, they could enjoy the silent green space beyond their small orchard, with other gardens all around and little houses amid clumps of trees scattered all the way down the hillside.

In the mornings, before setting off, Jean breakfasted in their little dining room, windows opened to the broad paved road overgrown by tufts of grass and lined with white-flowered, sharp-scented thorn hedges. His ten minute walk to the station took him along the side of the country park and all its stirrings and rustlings; and when he came back, the dusk seeped from the stands of trees and spread over the mossy green roadway, reddened by the setting sun, the sounds quietened and cuckoo calls from every corner of the wood came overlapping with the trill of nightingales in the ivy.

But once they had settled in and he had got over his surprise at finding all around him so peaceful, the lover could not prevent himself from starting on a fresh round of sterile, jealous questioning. The row between his mistress and Rosa and her departure from the boarding house had given rise to some highly ambiguous exchanges, reviving his suspicions, his most worrying troubles. And when he went off each day and saw from his train compartment their low house, its single storey topped by a round dormer window, his gaze searched the walls in penetrating fashion. He said to himself: ‘Who knows?’ and the thought pursued him even to his office and its piles of paper.

On his

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