The Last Fay by Honoré de Balzac

Author:Honoré de Balzac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter X

Catherine

While these things were happening at the chemist’s cottage, the village was in revolution, and one can only give the reader a complete image of it by introducing the reader into the house of Monsieur Grandvani, the father of the lovely Catherine.

Our painters often make interiors seductive in their admirable canvases; why should humble prose not be able to approach the effect the effect produced by the brush, and trace lines that the eye of the soul can color with the most vivid hues? The Muses are sisters, and hence rivals.

Picture, then, that village, with only one street, and that not very straight, and thus obedient to the law that wants all human things to go awry. The cottages each had their little garden, their courtyard full of straw, the humble dwelling of a donkey or fecund chickens, and containing laborious inhabitants, poor but having a sum of happiness and unhappiness similar to that of city-dwellers, except that their affections were directed toward simpler objects.

Half way along the street stood the house of the Lord, little different from those of the peasants, but endowed with a harmonious bell, a veridical historian that presided over life and death as well as all the occupations of the inhabitants. In front of the church, the God of which was simple and devoid of ostentation, a square surrounded by large elms saw every Sunday the frolics of a young troop of dancers, and heard the coarse laughter excited by wine, the sole amour of old men; and there, renown and public opinion set up their stalls, exactly as elsewhere, except that they were made of wood that still had its bark.

On that square there was one house slightly less humble than the others; it had a first floor ornamented by three casements with green shutters; the door was painted with a very particular care, and the local Girodet had been able to find two shades of gray to depict the moldings. Finally, above the door he had written Mairie, without any spelling mistakes, because he had painted the sacramental word with the aid of the Bulletin des lois. To either side of the door lived a rose-bush surrounded by a little green trellis, and those bushes bore tufts at their head garnished with roses, all the way to the shutters of the first floor room inhabited by the charming Catherine—for that house is her father’s. It is the only one, except for the curé’s, to be covered with red tiles, and which has a grain-loft where the cambric that lifted Catherine’s bosom can be laid out and dried, along with the cravat from which the Maire had made his sash.

On entering the house, one recognizes immediately the presence of a daughter, for the most careful cleanliness is the only thing that decorates the antique staircase that is offered to the gaze.

To one side is the kitchen, with a large fireplace, terracotta ovens with tiles always brown but clean: the bread-bin, the food cupboard

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