The Wing by Jean Richepin

Author:Jean Richepin [Richepin, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

XXII

All things considered, Yvernaux’s absence and complete abandonment had been a great boon to Geneviève at that time, and very probably the conclusive salvation of her genius, which was in a critical phase. Likewise for the mental denseness of her father, who was to go for some time yet without observing the end of the eclipse, and would become more impatient in the meantime, and sometimes press the harshness of hat impatience to a veritable brutality, of which the poor girl was the victim. Had Yvernaux been present, of even in continued epistolary contact with them, and Gasguin endowed with a more sensitive touch with which to take the pulse of genius, that genius might perhaps have risked resembling one of those unhealthily hasty trees which only grow leaves without producing fruit.

Who can tell, moreover, whether Aunt Line, in her habitual fashion, might not have been brushed in an occult manner by the effluvial “aura” of that double peril of the godfather’s premature return and the father’s premature realization? So many things she said at the time authorized the belief, their apparent simplicity concealing an underside of profound meaning relevant, if one were able to pay any heed to it, to the situation in question.

Why, in fact, did no one pay any heed, given the intonation with which the aged Sibyl was able to emphasize her words, and the sly winks or profound gazes with which she illuminated them, like zigzag lightning-flashes or sheets of flame?

One day, when her father had been particularly brutal to her, by means of the kind of brutality that horrified her more than any other—which is to say, coarse jokes and vulgar acidity—Geneviève had baulked like a racehorse, with a pooh of disgust, and had then come to seek consolation from Aunt Line, saying to her:

“I’ve had enough of swallowing his acid iniquities. I’m going to leave his house, to earn my bread somewhere else, as best I can.”

“Let it be,” the old woman had replied, sententiously. “It’s the acids of the leaven that made the dough rise. The dough has yet to rise.” Then, in a low, mysterious voice, her eyes heavy with thought, recalling a Thiérachian distich or some ancient ballad, or perhaps improvising, she sang:

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