Free The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson

chase some hunters from the neighboring canton out of the municipal territory. Due to a penury of game these neighbors had come to poach from our hills, where they had found an abundance of hare and pheasant, and even a few deer, which they sniped at like savages, their rough laughter disgusting the villagers, who reacted in kind by pelting them with lead shot. But the worst of it was that this time their ploy did not elicit the virile vainglory which was ultimately its true purpose, because our men felt somehow defiled, a defilement which one of them (Marcelot, appropriately) summed up very eloquently once they got back to the farms after they’d chased out all the ruffians and checked every corner of the woods:
bloody miscreants, they’ve no respect for work.
Whence the father’s remark; but Maria could tell that the conclusions he had drawn from the day’s events surpassed indignation.
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    Maria did not suffer from any lack of affection, however, for the women in the village were as generous in lavishing it as they were in dispensing the Lord’s Prayer and helpings of milk in their relentless efforts to strengthen the little girl, who was too thin (but so pretty): she could not remember ever coming back to the farm without being met with a serving of
rillettes
. But what Maria liked best of all was the cheese from their cows, and to Jeannette’s everlasting despair, she who was the best cook in the six cantons, Maria was not fond of stews or anything that was prepared by mixing ingredients together. She would go up to the stove and help herself to her share of dinner in the form of separate products: she would nibble on a carrot, and they would grill a little piece of meat for her that she ate on its own with a pinch of salt and a sprig of savory.
    The only exception she made to this diet of wild rabbit and twigs was for Eugénie’s marvels, for Eugénie was mistress thereabouts where jams and decoctions of fine flowers were concerned. But who, indeed, could have resisted her masterworks? Her quince jam was brought to holy communion and even spousals; her very infusions seemed to be imbued with magic; how else could one explain the sighs of contentment that were uttered at the end of each meal? What’s more, Eugénie was gifted with a knowledge of simples, and the priest often consulted her and respected her greatly, for she had a way with an impressive number of plants and therapeutic applications whose origins could be traced back to remote antiquity, an epoch about which Eugénie, in splendid indifference, knew nothing. She tended, however, to favor those plants that grew abundantly in the region, and that had proved their effectiveness over the years, and she had settled on a successful triad that seemed, at least on the farm, to have demonstrated its virtues: thyme, garlic, and hawthorn (which she referred to as the noble thorn or the thornapple, names which the priest had verified and which were, indeed, the most popular designations of the shrub among the common folk). Maria passionately loved hawthorns. She loved the shrub’s silvery gray bark, which only turned brown and gnarly with age, and the light flowers of a white so delicately tinged with pink it could make you sob, and she loved to go picking them with Eugénie in the first days of May, taking care not to crush them, then putting them to dry in the shade of a cellar now bedecked like a bride. Last of all, she loved the infusions they made every evening by dropping a spoonful of flowers into a cup of boiling water. Eugénie swore that this fortified the soul and the heart (which has been proven by modern medicine) and that it also conferred a new flush of youth (something which has not been demonstrated in books).
    In short, while Eugénie might not have been the same age or had the same eye of the Lord as Angèle, she was nevertheless a granny whom you could not try to hoodwink with impunity. And while