A Life by Guy de Maupassant Read Free Book Online

dreaming, was afraid that her father might hesitate to set out if the weather did not clear; and for the hundredth time that morning she scanned the horizon.
    Then she noticed that she had forgotten to pack her calendar in her travelling-bag. She took it down from the wall, a small piece of card divided into months and bearing the date of the current year 1819 in gilt numbering surrounded by an intricate pattern, and proceeded to cross out the first four columns with a pencil, putting a line through each saint's name as far as 2 May, the day she had left the convent.
    A voice outside the door called:
    'Jeannette!'
    'Come in, Papa,' Jeanne answered.
    And her father appeared.
    Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman out of the previous century, at once an eccentric and a kindly soul. As an enthusiastic disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau * he loved nature with a lover's passion, its fields, its woods, its animals.
    As an aristocrat by birth, he instinctively abhorred what had  happened in '93; * but being philosophical by temperament and liberal by education, he denounced tyranny with a mild and vociferous hatred.
    His great strength, and also his great weakness, was his kindliness, a kindliness that had not arms enough to caress or to give or to embrace, the kindliness of a creator, undiscriminating, unresisting, as though some sinew of his will were paralysed, as though his motor-force lacked some essential element. It was almost a vice.
    Being of a theoretical cast of mind, he had planned his daughter's education in every particular, with the intention of rendering her at once happy, good-natured, honest, and loving.
    She had remained at home until the age of twelve, and then, despite her mother's tears, she had been sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
    There he had kept her firmly shut away, cloistered, unknown and unknowing, ignorant of human things. It was his wish that she should be returned to him a virgin at the age of seventeen so that he himself might imbue her with a kind of poetry of reason and thereby, out in the countryside, in the midst of the fecundated land, unlock her soul and dispel her ignorance with the spectacle of natural love, of the simple courtship of animals, of the serene laws of existence.
    And now she was leaving the convent, radiant, full of youthful sap and a hunger for happiness, primed for all the joyful experiences, all the charming chance occurrences, that she had already mentally rehearsed in solitary anticipation throughout her idle daylight moments and the long hours of the night.
    She resembled a portrait by Veronese, * with hair so blonde that its sheen seemed to have been transferred to her skin, an aristocrat's skin barely tinged with pink and dappled with the faintest down, a sort of pale velvet that became just perceptible when caressed by the rays of the sun. And her eyes were blue, of that opaque blue to be found on Delft figurines.
    She had a mole on the left side of her nose, and another to the right, on her chin, which bore one or two curly hairs of such a colour as to be scarcely distinguishable from her skin. She was  tall, with a well-developed bosom and a shapely figure. Her clear voice seemed at times too shrill; but her generous laugh made those around her feel joyful. Frequently, in a familiar gesture, she would raise her two hands to her temples as though to smooth her hair.
    She ran to her father and gave him a hug as she kissed him:
    'Well, are we leaving?'
    He smiled, shaking his head covered in hair that was already white and which he wore rather long; and he gestured towards the window:
    'How do you expect us to travel in such weather?'
    But she implored him with playful, wheedling affection:
    'Oh please, Papa, do let's be off. It will be fine by the afternoon.'
    'But your mother will never agree to it.'
    'Yes, she will. I'll see that she does.'
    'Well, if you can manage to persuade your mother, I shall have no objection myself.'
    And away she