The Sin of Abbé Mouret by Émile Zola

Author:Émile Zola
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Literary Collections, General
ISBN: 9780191056345
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

They were in the former orchard of the park. A hawthorn hedge, a wall of greenery, with some gaps in it, cut it off from the rest of the garden. It was a forest of fruit trees that no scythe had trimmed for a century. Some, twisted out of shape, battered and bent by storms, were growing quite askew; while others, covered with enormous lumpy knots and deep holes, seemed only to hold to the ground by the huge remnants of their bark. The high branches, weighed down with fruit each season, spread out their vast sprays far and wide, while some, the most heavily laden, had even broken and now rested on the ground, while still continuing to bear fruit, sustained by their rich reserves of sap. The trees were propping each other up; they had become twisted pillars, holding up a vaulted roof of leaves that plunged into long arcades, soared suddenly into airy halls, and flattened out almost along the ground, like collapsed rafters. Around each of these giants, wild offshoots formed a thicket, adding the dense tangle of young stalks, whose berries had a delicious sharpness. In the greenish light that flowed like clear running water over the great silence of the moss, the only sound that could be heard was the thud of fruit being gathered by the wind.

There were patriarchal apricot trees, bearing their great age with fortitude, already paralysed on one side, with a forest of dead wood like the scaffolding of a cathedral, but so lively on the other side, so youthful, that tender shoots were everywhere breaking out through the rough bark. Some venerable plum trees, all hoary with moss, were still stretching up to drink in the blazing sun, without one leaf losing colour. Cherry trees were building whole townships with multistorey houses, flights of stairs, and floors made of branches, big enough to house ten families. Then there were broken-down apple trees like great invalids, their limbs twisted, their gnarled skin stained with patches of green rust; there were smooth pear trees, raising lofty masts of slender branches, like the opening of a port, cutting the horizon with dark stripes; and rosy peach trees, getting space made for them, even in the crush of their neighbours, with a friendly laugh and a gentle push, like pretty girls caught in a crowd. Some trees, formerly espaliered, had pushed through the low walls that supported them, and now were simply having the time of their life, free of the trellises, torn-off strips of which still hung on their arms; they grew just as they pleased, having kept of their former particular shape only the vague look of once well-brought-up trees now dragging the rags of their party clothes into a vagabond life. And vines ran everywhere with wild abandon, round every trunk and every branch from tree to tree. They climbed unstoppable, like fits of wild giggles, hooked themselves for a moment on to some lofty knot, then darted off again

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