Act of Passion Read Online Free PDF Page A

been forgotten, smelling of wax and the country, of ripening fruit, new-mown hay, and things simmering on the kitchen stove.
    This house was formerly, in the time of my grandparents, a manor house, which some people called the chateau, and it constituted the centre of four farms of over a hundred acres each.
    In my father's day there were only two farms. Then later, but long before I was born, only one, and the manor house, in its turn, became a farm; my father began to till the soil himself and to breed animals.
    He was a taller, broader and much stronger man than I am. I have been told that at the fairs, when he had been drinking, he was always ready to bet that he could hold a horse on his back, and the old men of the region affirm that he would actually win his wager.
    He married late, when he was past forty. He was a good-looking man and still owned enough property to aspire to a rich marriage and so recover his former position.
    If you knew Fontenay-le-Comte, about thirty miles from us, you would certainly have heard of the Lanoue girls. There were five of them and an old mother who had been a widow for many years. They had been rich before the death of their father, who had lost his fortune in foolish speculations.
    In my father's time the Lanoues, mother and five daughters, still lived in the big house on the Rue Rabelais and even today there are two old-maid sisters, the last of them, still living there.
    I truly believe that it would be impossible to find a more absolute or a more dignified poverty than that which existed for years in that household. Their income was so meagre that it allowed hardly more than the shadow of one meal a day, yet this did not prevent the young Lanoue ladies, always accompanied by their mother, from appearing at Mass and at Vespers formally attired in gloves and their Sunday best hats, or from marching home afterwards along the Rue de la République, holding their heads high.
    The youngest must have been twenty-five, but it was the thirty-year-old sister whom, one fine day, my father married.
    That is my mother. You can understand, your Honour, that the words 'to be happy' have a different meaning for this woman than for the gentlemen of the law.
    When she arrived at Bourgneuf she was so anaemic that for several months the stimulating air of the country gave her fits of dizziness. She had a difficult confinement and was not expected to live, hardly surprising considering the fact that I weighed over twelve pounds. I have told you that my father himself cultivated a portion of his land, which is true and yet not altogether true. A large part of the work of our farms consists in 'doing' all the country fairs, and there are fairs in all the market towns of the county as well as in the neighbouring counties.
    That was my father's job, as well as organizing rabbit and wild boar hunts when these animals were playing havoc in the region.
    My father was, so to speak, born with a gun in his hand. He carried it on his back when he went into the fields. At the tavern he held it between his legs, and I have never seen him when there was not a dog lying at his feet with its muzzle on his boots.
    You see that I was not exaggerating when I said that I am closer to the soil than you.
    I went to the village school. I fished in the brooks and I climbed the trees like my playmates.
    Did I notice at that time that my mother was sad? As a matter of fact, I didn't. For me that gravity which never left her was simply the characteristic of mothers, as well as that gentleness and that smile which seemed always slightly veiled.
    As for my father, he would pick me up and swing me on to the back of the work horses or the oxen, would play with me or tease me in language so crude that it would make my mother wince, and his moustache, which I had never known to be anything but grey, always, even in the early morning, reeked of wine or spirits.
    My father drank, your Honour. Isn't there invariably one drunkard in every