A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

Author:Sebastian Faulks
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, War & Military, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781409038337
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-12T23:00:00+00:00

PART IV – A DOOR INTO HEAVEN

1822

JEANNE WAS SAID to be the most ignorant person in the Limousin village where she had lived most of her life.

The house she lived in belonged to Monsieur and Madame Lagarde; she had been there since she was a young woman, though no one had known her exact age when she arrived. The place was built of local stone with a tile roof and grey shutters; it stood on a bend where the road began to go uphill. On one side there was a path that led down to a few remote houses and then to the river where the local youths went to fish; on the other side there was an orchard that fell to a deep ditch as the road curved and carried on downhill.

The village was spread out, having started life as no more than a farm with some outbuildings and cottages; it was only in the last fifty years that it had gained an inn for coaches, a baker’s and then a weekly market. With them had come some newer houses further down the hill, and these had been built round a square with cobbles. The Lagardes’ house was of the ‘old’ village and the rooms inside were panelled with dark oak; they were connected by dingy corridors and single steps of stone to allow for its different levels.

Jeanne’s room was on the ground floor at the back, overlooking the fields. It had a grey stone chimneypiece and a wooden prie-dieu as well as the bed, washstand and cupboard. The cost of logs for burning in the fireplace was taken from her wages, though there was no shortage of wood in the oak-covered countryside. Her job in the house was to clean and cook and look after the place as well as an old woman could; for mending fences or heavier work Monsieur Lagarde reluctantly brought in Faucher, the local handyman.

Lagarde himself had been bedridden for ten years following a stroke. He spent most of his time looking at his accounts and working out ways of making his savings go further. His wife brought him books, papers and pens each morning with his bowl of coffee and some bread and butter. The Lagarde family came from Ussel and had once owned several farms, but had lost most of its money during the Revolution. While he was little more than a second-generation bourgeois, Lagarde had cultivated a dislike of the ‘rabble’ – a term that for him took in anyone from a tax collector to the new mayor, and always included the village youth.

Partly as a compensation for his family’s loss of property, Monsieur Lagarde had as a newly married man turned himself into a philosopher. He had boxes full of books delivered from sales in Limoges and Brive with impressive titles such as On the Understanding of Human Nature or Essays on the Principles of Reason. The bookcase in the parlour held leather-bound editions of the works of Montaigne, Pascal and Descartes, while in his bedroom there were translations of Seneca and the Greeks.

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