A Life by Guy de Maupassant Read Free Book Online Page B

streaming rain, Jeanne felt as though she were coming back to life, like some indoor plant which has been returned out of doors; and the fullness of her joy sheltered her, like foliage, from despondency. Although she said nothing, she felt like singing, like putting her hand out of the window to fill it with water and drink; and she delighted to be thus borne away at the trot, to see the desolation of the countryside and to feel surrounded and protected in the midst of this deluge.
    And beneath the relentless rain a cloud of steam rose from the gleaming hindquarters of the two horses.
    Gradually the Baroness dropped off to sleep. Her face, framed by six dangling corkscrew curls of hair, grew progressively slack, gently propped upon the three great billows of her neck whose nethermost ripples merged into the broad ocean of her bosom. Her head rose and sagged with each breath; the cheeks filled, and then a rasping snore would issue from between her parted lips. Her husband leaned towards her and gently placed a small leather wallet in her hands where they lay crossed upon the amplitude of her stomach.
    This contact woke her; and she considered the object with a misty gaze, in the dazed stupor that follows upon the interruption of sleep. The wallet fell to the floor and came open.
    Banknotes and gold coins scattered through the carriage. She awoke completely; and her daughter's gaiety exploded in a burst of laughter.
    The Baron picked up the money and placed it on her lap:
    'There, my dear, that's all that's left of my farm at Életot. * I sold it to pay for the repairs at Les Peuples. We'll be spending a good deal of time there from now on.'
    She counted out six thousand four hundred francs * and calmly put them in her pocket.
    This was the ninth farm sold out of the thirty-one which they had been left by their parents. Nevertheless they still owned enough land to bring in twenty thousand francs a year, and which could easily have brought in thirty thousand if it had been well managed.
    As they lived simply, this income would have sufficed if their household had not contained a bottomless well upon which they never ceased to draw: generosity. It made the money evaporate off the palm of their hands as surely as the sun removes the water from a marsh. It simply flowed away, leaked from them, vanished. How? Nobody quite knew. Time and again one or other of them would say: 'I just don't know how it's happened. I've spent a hundred francs today, just on little things.'
    Moreover, this readiness to give was one of the great joys of their life; and they were magnificently, touchingly, of one mind on the subject.
    'And is my house beautiful now?' asked Jeanne.
    'You'll soon see, my child', replied the Baron cheerfully.
    Slowly, however, the violence of the downpour began to abate; and eventually it was no more than a sort of misty drizzle, the finest spray of rain dancing in the air. The vault of cloud seemed to be lifting and paling; and suddenly, through some invisible gap, a long, slanting ray of sunlight fell upon the pastures.
    The clouds having now parted, the azure reaches of the sky appeared. The gap grew bigger, like a veil being rent in two, and a beautiful, pure sky of clear, deep, blue, covered the world.
    A cool, gentle breeze wafted by, like a happy sigh from off the land; and whenever they drove along the edge of a garden or a  wood, they could hear the brisk song of a bird drying its feathers.
    Evening was approaching. Everyone in the carriage was asleep now, except Jeanne. Twice they stopped at wayside inns to allow the horses to rest and be given some oats and water.
    The sun had set; church bells tolled in the distance. In one little village they were lighting the lamps; and the sky began to shine with a swarm of stars. Here and there the lights from a house would pierce the darkness like pinpricks of fire; and all at once, from behind a hillside, through branches of fir, the moon rose, red and huge, like a bleary