Free The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett Page A

ofVirgil’s
Eclogues,
not exactly a marvel in the original. He has started on the
Koran
but despite its good sense he knows it will all lead sooner or later to the usual Oriental flatulence.
    But he knows that what she will most want is news of the theatre, what he is doing and the small events of life in Paris where he goes to buy the papers for critiques of her performances and to stroll in the Tuileries and to watch the pretty children and their staid nurses and enjoy the crisp autumn air. Autumn on a fine day is rather like Louis XIV in old age. He expects she’ll laugh at that idea. “Well, go on laughing to show your teeth.”
    Another day he goes to the woods at Ville d’Avray:
    L’impression que la nature fait sur l’homme est étrange. Il y a dans cette impression un fonds d’amertume fraîche comme tous les odeurs des champs, un peu de mélancholie sereine comme dans les chants d‘oiseaux
    and adds that he adores the reality, the changes, the dangers, the habits, the passing beauty of life. While he is rearranging Louis Viardot’s library the servant is polishing, washing, tidying, sweeping, waxing from morning to night. One night as he goes up to bed he hears two deep sighs that passed in a puff of air close to him. It froze him. Suppose the next moment a hand had touched him: he would have screamed like an eagle. (Question: Are the blind afraid of ghosts?) He lists the sounds he heard one night as he stood by the drawbridge: the throb of the blood in his ears, the rustle of leaves, the four crickets in the courtyard, fish rising in the moat, a dull sound from the road, the ping of a mosquito. He goes out to look at the stars and writes what will become one of the certainties of his life:
    Cette chose indifférente, impérieuse, vorace, égoiste, envahissante, c’est la vie, la nature …
    Still, tell Louis there are a lot of quail about and shooting begins on the 25th. There is a plague of orange tawneys (
rougets
). In an hour her aunt has caught
“cinquante, cincuenta, fünfzig,
fifty,” on her face and neck. He’s scratching himself with both hands. They’re all waiting for Mlle. Berthe’s arrival,
para dar a comer a los bichos
(“to give the bugs a meal”), as Don Pablo says, as a useful diversion. M.Fougeux arrives, the king of bores. Turgenev goes rowing and puffing around the moat with him. The moat needs dredging. Fougeux is a man who speaks only in clichés and quotations. Over and over again he says “Nature is only a vast garden.” God!
    One night he has a long fantastic flying dream. He is walking along a road lined with poplars and is obliged to sing the line
“A la voix de la mére”
a hundred times before he will be allowed to get home. He meets a white figure who calls himself his brother and who turns him into a bird. He finds he has a long beak like a pelican and off they fly:
    I can remember it still, not simply in the head,
but
if I can so express myself, with my whole body.
    They fly over the sea and below he sees enormous fish with black heads and he knows he has to dive for them because they are his food. A secret horror stops him. The sun suddenly rises and burns like a furnace. And so on. (Perhaps he was dreaming about his mother, his brother and the carp lying deep in the fish pond at Spasskoye. Many times in his later writings he evokes gross sinister fishes rising out of the deep water to threaten him. A great many years later, in a gloomy period of his life, he put this dream into a rhapsodic fantasy called
Phantoms:
it has little merit but suggests an erotic excitement or the frustration and fear of it.)
    From her exhausting tours and the applause of audiences in London, Germany and Austria, the singer and her husband returned at intervals to Courtavenel to rest. They had taken in the young Gounod and Turgenev was for a time a little jealous of Pauline’s interest in his