The Country Doctor

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THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by

Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell




"For a wounded heart--shadow and silence."



To my Mother



INTRODUCTION

In hardly any of his books, with the possible exception of /Eugenie
Grandet/, does Balzac seem to have taken a greater interest than in
/Le Medecin de Campagne/; and the fact of this interest, together with
the merit and intensity of the book in each case, is, let it be
repeated, a valid argument against those who would have it that there
was something essentially sinister both in his genius and his
character.

/Le Medecin de Campagne/ was an early book; it was published in 1833,
a date of which there is an interesting mark in the selection of the
name "Evelina," the name of Madame Hanska, whom Balzac had just met,
for the lost Jansenist love of Benassis; and it had been on the stocks
for a considerable time. It is also noteworthy, as lying almost
entirely outside the general scheme of the /Comedie Humaine/ as far as
personages go. Its chief characters in the remarkable, if not
absolutely impeccable, /repertoire/ of MM. Cerfberr and Christophe
(they have, a rare thing with them, missed Agathe the forsaken
mistress) have no references appended to their articles, except to the
book itself; and I cannot remember that any of the more generally
pervading /dramatis personae/ of the Comedy makes even an incidental
appearance here. The book is as isolated as its scene and subject--I
might have added, as its own beauty, which is singular and unique, nor
wholly easy to give a critical account of. The transformation of the
/cretin/-haunted desert into a happy valley is in itself a commonplace
of the preceding century; it may be found several times over in
Marmontel's /Contes Moraux/, as well as in other places. The extreme
minuteness of detail, effective as it is in the picture of the house
and elsewhere, becomes a little tedious even for well-tried and
well-affected readers, in reference to the exact number of cartwrights
and harness-makers, and so forth; while the modern reader pure and
simple, though schooled to endure detail, is schooled to endure it
only of the ugly. The minor characters and episodes, with the
exception of the wonderful story or legend of Napoleon by Private
Goguelat, and the private himself, are neither of the first interest,
nor always carefully worked out: La Fosseuse, for instance, is a very
tantalizingly unfinished study, of which it is nearly certain that
Balzac must at some time or other have meant to make much more than he
has made; Genestas, excellent as far as he goes, is not much more than
a type; and there is nobody else in the foreground at all except the
Doctor himself.

It is, however, beyond all doubt in the very subordination of these
other characters to Benassis, and in the skilful grouping of the whole
as background and adjunct to him, that the appeal of the book as art
consists. From that point of view there are grounds for regarding it
as the finest of the author's work in the simple style, the least
indebted to super-added ornament or to mere variety. The dangerous
expedient of a /recit/, of which the eighteenth-century novelists were
so fond, has never been employed with more successful effect than in
the confession of Benassis, at once the climax and the centre of the
story. And one thing which strikes us immediately about this
confession is the universality of its humanity and its strange freedom
from merely national limitations. To very few French novelists--to few
even of those who are generally credited with a much softer mould and
a much purer morality than Balzac is popularly supposed to have been
able to boast--would inconstancy to a mistress have seemed a fault
which could be reasonably punished, which could be even reasonably
represented as having been punished in fact, by the refusal of an
honest girl's love in the first place. Nor would many have conceived
as possible, or have been able to represent in lifelike colors, the
lifelong penance which Benassis imposes on himself. The tragic end,
indeed, is more in their general way, but they would seldom have known
how to lead up to it.

In almost all ways Balzac has saved himself from the dangers incident
to his plan in this book after a rather miraculous fashion. The
Goguelat myth may seem disconnected, and he did as a matter of fact
once publish it separately; yet it sets off (in the same sort of
felicitous manner of which Shakespeare's clown-scenes and others are
the capital examples in literature) both the slightly matter-of-fact
details of the beatification of the valley and the various minute
sketches of places and folk, and the almost superhuman goodness of
Benassis, and his intensely and piteously human suffering and remorse.
It is like the red cloak in a group; it lights, warms, inspirits the
whole picture.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way in which
Balzac in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion
(for if Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he
avows his orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in
practice), has almost entirely escaped the sentimentality /plus/
unorthodoxy of similar work in the eighteenth century, and the
sentimentality /plus/ orthodoxy of similar work in the nineteenth.
Benassis no doubt plays Providence in a manner and with a success
which it is rarely given to mortal man to achieve; but we do not feel
either the approach to sham, or the more than approach to gush, with
which similar handling on the part of Dickens too often affects some
of us. The sin and the punishment of the Doctor, the thoroughly human
figures of Genestas and the rest, save the situation from this and
other drawbacks. We are not in the Cockaigne of perfectibility, where
Marmontel and Godwin disport themselves; we are in a very practical
place, where time-bargains in barley are made, and you pay the
respectable, if not lavish board of ten francs per day for
entertainment to man and beast.

And yet, explain as we will, there will always remain something
inexplicable in the appeal of such a book as the /Medecin de
Campagne/. This helps, and that, and the other; we can see what change
might have damaged the effect, and what have endangered it altogether.
We must, of course, acknowledge that as it is there are /longueurs/,
intrusion of Saint Simonian jargon, passages of /galimatias/, and of
preaching. But of what in strictness produces the good effect we can
only say one thing, and that is, it was the genius of Balzac working
as it listed and as it knew how to work.

The book was originally published by Mme. Delaunay in September 1833
in two volumes and thirty-six chapters with headings. Next year it was
republished in four volumes by Werdet, and the last fifteen chapters
were thrown together into four. In 1836 it reappeared with dedication
and date, but with the divisions further reduced to seven; being those
which here appear, with the addition of two, "La Fosseuse" and "Propos
de Braves Gens" between "A Travers Champs" and "Le Napoleon du
Peuple." These two were removed in 1839, when it was published in a
single volume by Charpentier. In all these issues the book was
independent. It became a "Scene de la Vie de Campagne" in 1846, and
was then admitted into the /Comedie/. The separate issues of
Goguelat's story referred to above made their appearances first in
/L'Europe Litteraire/ for June 19, 1833 (/before/ the book form), and
then with the imprint of a sort of syndicate of publishers in 1842.

George Saintsbury



CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRYSIDE AND THE MAN

On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty or
thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the mountain road
that leads to a large village near the Grande Chartreuse. This village
is the market town of a populous canton that lies within the limits of
a valley of some considerable length. The melting of the snows had
filled the boulder-strewn bed of the torrent (often dry) that flows
through this valley, which is closely shut in between two parallel
mountain barriers, above which the peaks of Savoy and of Dauphine
tower on every side.

All the scenery of the country that lies between the chain of the two
Mauriennes is very much alike; yet here in the district through which
the stranger was traveling there are soft undulations of the land, and
varying effects of light which might be sought for elsewhere in vain.
Sometimes the valley, suddenly widening, spreads out a soft
irregularly-shaped carpet of grass before the eyes; a meadow
constantly watered by the mountain streams that keep it fresh and
green at all seasons of the year. Sometimes a roughly-built sawmill
appears in a picturesque position, with its stacks of long pine trunks
with the bark peeled off, and its mill stream, brought from the bed of
the torrent in great square wooden pipes, with masses of dripping
filament issuing from every crack. Little cottages, scattered here and
there, with their gardens full of blossoming fruit trees, call up the
ideas that are aroused by the sight of industrious poverty; while the
thought of ease, secured after long years of toil, is suggested by
some larger houses farther on, with their red roofs of flat round
tiles, shaped like the scales of a fish. There is no door, moreover,
that does not duly exhibit a basket in which the cheeses are hung up
to dry. Every roadside and every croft is adorned with vines; which
here, as in Italy, they train to grow about dwarf elm trees, whose
leaves are stripped off to feed the cattle.

Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on either side
so near together in some places, that there is no room for fields, or
buildings, or peasants' huts. Nothing lies between them but the
torrent, roaring over its waterfalls between two lofty walls of
granite that rise above it, their sides covered with the leafage of
tall beeches and dark fir trees to the height of a hundred feet. The
trees, with their different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and
tall, fantastically colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent
colonnades, with a line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar
rose, box and arbutus above and below the roadway at their feet. The
subtle perfume of this undergrowth was mingled just then with scents
from the wild mountain region and with the aromatic fragrance of young
larch shoots, budding poplars, and resinous pines.

Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights sometimes hid and
sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that seemed as dim and
vague as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed among them. The whole face
of the country changed every moment with the changing light in the
sky; the hues of the mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes,
the very shape of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of
sunlight through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the
woods, or a landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to make a
contrast in the foreground, made up an endless series of pictures
delightful to see amid the silence, at the time of year when all
things grow young, and when the sun fills a cloudless heaven with a
blaze of light. In short, it was a fair land--it was the land of
France!

The traveler was a tall man, dressed from head to foot in a suit of
blue cloth, which must have been brushed just as carefully every
morning as the glossy coat of his horse. He held himself firm and
erect in the saddle like an old cavalry officer. Even if his black
cravat and doeskin gloves, the pistols that filled his holsters, and
the valise securely fastened to the crupper behind him had not
combined to mark him out as a soldier, the air of unconcern that sat
on his face, his regular features (scarred though they were with the
smallpox), his determined manner, self-reliant expression, and the way
he held his head, all revealed the habits acquired through military
discipline, of which a soldier can never quite divest himself, even
after he has retired from service into private life.

Any other traveler would have been filled with wonder at the
loveliness of this Alpine region, which grows so bright and smiling as
it becomes merged in the great valley systems of southern France; but
the officer, who no doubt had previously traversed a country across
which the French armies had been drafted in the course of Napoleon's
wars, enjoyed the view before him without appearing to be surprised by
the many changes that swept across it. It would seem that Napoleon has
extinguished in his soldiers the sensation of wonder; for an impassive
face is a sure token by which you may know the men who served erewhile
under the short-lived yet deathless Eagles of the great Emperor. The
traveler was, in fact, one of those soldiers (seldom met with
nowadays) whom shot and shell have respected, although they have borne
their part on every battlefield where Napoleon commanded.

There had been nothing unusual in his life. He had fought valiantly in
the ranks as a simple and loyal soldier, doing his duty as faithfully
by night as by day, and whether in or out of his officer's sight. He
had never dealt a sabre stroke in vain, and was incapable of giving
one too many. If he wore at his buttonhole the rosette of an officer
of the Legion of Honor, it was because the unanimous voice of his
regiment had singled him out as the man who best deserved to receive
it after the battle of Borodino.

He belonged to that small minority of undemonstrative retiring
natures, who are always at peace with themselves, and who are
conscious of a feeling of humiliation at the mere thought of making a
request, no matter what its nature may be. So promotion had come to
him tardily, and by virtue of the slowly-working laws of seniority. He
had been made a sub-lieutenant in 1802, but it was not until 1829 that
he became a major, in spite of the grayness of his moustaches. His
life had been so blameless that no man in the army, not even the
general himself, could approach him without an involuntary feeling of
respect. It is possible that he was not forgiven for this indisputable
superiority by those who ranked above him; but, on the other hand,
there was not one of his men that did not feel for him something of
the affection of children for a good mother. For them he knew how to
be at once indulgent and severe. He himself had also once served in
the ranks, and knew the sorry joys and gaily-endured hardships of the
soldier's lot. He knew the errors that may be passed over and the
faults that must be punished in his men--"his children," as he always
called them--and when on campaign he readily gave them leave to forage
for provision for man and horse among the wealthier classes.

His own personal history lay buried beneath the deepest reserve. Like
almost every military man in Europe, he had only seen the world
through cannon smoke, or in the brief intervals of peace that occurred
so seldom during the Emperor's continual wars with the rest of Europe.
Had he or had he not thought of marriage? The question remained
unsettled. Although no one doubted that Commandant Genestas had made
conquests during his sojourn in town after town and country after
country where he had taken part in the festivities given and received
by the officers, yet no one knew this for a certainty. There was no
prudery about him; he would not decline to join a pleasure party; he
in no way offended against military standards; but when questioned as
to his affairs of the heart, he either kept silence or answered with a
jest. To the words, "How are you, commandant?" addressed to him by an
officer over the wine, his reply was, "Pass the bottle, gentlemen."

M. Pierre Joseph Genestas was an unostentatious kind of Bayard. There
was nothing romantic nor picturesque about him--he was too thoroughly
commonplace. His ways of living were those of a well-to-do man.
Although he had nothing beside his pay, and his pension was all that
he had to look to in the future, the major always kept two years' pay
untouched, and never spent his allowances, like some shrewd old men of
business with whom cautious prudence has almost become a mania. He was
so little of a gambler that if, when in company, some one was wanted
to cut in or to take a bet at ecarte, he usually fixed his eyes on his
boots; but though he did not allow himself any extravagances, he
conformed in every way to custom.

His uniforms lasted longer than those of any other officer in his
regiment, as a consequence of the sedulously careful habits that
somewhat straitened means had so instilled into him, that they had
come to be like a second nature. Perhaps he might have been suspected
of meannesss if it had not been for the fact that with wonderful
disinterestedness and all a comrade's readiness, his purse would be
opened for some harebrained boy who had ruined himself at cards or by
some other folly. He did a service of this kind with such thoughtful
tact, that it seemed as though he himself had at one time lost heavy
sums at play; he never considered that he had any right to control the
actions of his debtor; he never made mention of the loan. He was the
child of his company; he was alone in the world, so he had adopted the
army for his fatherland, and the regiment for his family. Very rarely,
therefore, did any one seek the motives underlying his praiseworthy
turn for thrift; for it pleased others, for the most part, to set it
down to a not unnatural wish to increase the amount of the savings
that were to render his old age comfortable. Till the eve of his
promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel of cavalry it was fair to
suppose that it was his ambition to retire in the course of some
campaign with a colonel's epaulettes and pension.

If Genestas' name came up when the officers gossiped after drill, they
were wont to classify him among the men who begin with taking the
good-conduct prize at school, and who, throughout the term of their
natural lives, continue to be punctilious, conscientious, and
passionless--as good as white bread, and just as insipid. Thoughtful
minds, however, regarded him very differently. Not seldom it would
happen that a glance, or an expression as full of significance as the
utterance of a savage, would drop from him and bear witness to past
storms in his soul; and a careful study of his placid brow revealed a
power of stifling down and repressing his passions into inner depths,
that had been dearly bought by a lengthy acquaintance with the perils
and disastrous hazards of war. An officer who had only just joined the
regiment, the son of a peer of France, had said one day of Genestas,
that he would have made one of the most conscientious of priests, or
the most upright of tradesmen.

"Add, the least of a courtier among marquises," put in Genestas,
scanning the young puppy, who did not know that his commandant could
overhear him.

There was a burst of laughter at the words, for the lieutenant's
father cringed to all the powers that be; he was a man of supple
intellect, accustomed to jump with every change of government, and his
son took after him.

Men like Genestas are met with now and again in the French army;
natures that show themselves to be wholly great at need, and relapse
into their ordinary simplicity when the action is over; men that are
little mindful of fame and reputation, and utterly forgetful of
danger. Perhaps there are many more of them than the shortcomings of
our own characters will allow us to imagine. Yet, for all that, any
one who believed that Genestas was perfect would be strangely
deceiving himself. The major was suspicious, given to violent
outbursts of anger, and apt to be tiresome in argument; he was full of
national prejudices, and above all things, would insist that he was in
the right, when he was, as a matter of fact, in the wrong. He retained
the liking for good wine that he had acquired in the ranks. If he rose
from a banquet with all the gravity befitting his position, he seemed
serious and pensive, and had no mind at such times to admit any one
into his confidence.

Finally, although he was sufficiently acquainted with the customs of
society and with the laws of politeness, to which he conformed as
rigidly as if they had been military regulations; though he had real
mental power, both natural and acquired; and although he had mastered
the art of handling men, the science of tactics, the theory of sabre
play, and the mysteries of the farrier's craft, his learning had been
prodigiously neglected. He knew in a hazy kind of way that Caesar was
a Roman Consul, or an Emperor, and that Alexander was either a Greek
or a Macedonian; he would have conceded either quality or origin in
both cases without discussion. If the conversation turned on science
or history, he was wont to become thoughtful, and to confine his share
in it to little approving nods, like a man who by dint of profound
thought has arrived at scepticism.

When, at Schonbrunn, on May 13, 1809, Napoleon wrote the bulletin
addressed to the Grand Army, then the masters of Vienna, in which he
said that /like Medea, the Austrian princes had slain their children
with their own hands/; Genestas, who had been recently made a captain,
did not wish to compromise his newly conferred dignity by asking who
Medea was; he relied upon Napoleon's character, and felt quite sure
that the Emperor was incapable of making any announcement not in
proper form to the Grand Army and the House of Austria. So he thought
that Medea was some archduchess whose conduct was open to criticism.
Still, as the matter might have some bearing on the art of war, he
felt uneasy about the Medea of the bulletin until a day arrived when
Mlle. Raucourt revived the tragedy of Medea. The captain saw the
placard, and did not fail to repair to the Theatre Francais that
evening, to see the celebrated actress in her mythological role,
concerning which he gained some information from his neighbors.

A man, however, who as a private soldier had possessed sufficient
force of character to learn to read, write, and cipher, could clearly
understand that as a captain he ought to continue his education. So
from this time forth he read new books and romances with avidity, in
this way gaining a half-knowledge, of which he made a very fair use.
He went so far in his gratitude to his teachers as to undertake the
defence of Pigault-Lebrun, remarking that in his opinion he was
instructive and not seldom profound.

This officer, whose acquired practical wisdom did not allow him to
make any journey in vain, had just come from Grenoble, and was on his
way to the Grande Chartreuse, after obtaining on the previous evening
a week's leave of absence from his colonel. He had not expected that
the journey would be a long one; but when, league after league, he had
been misled as to the distance by the lying statements of the
peasants, he thought it would be prudent not to venture any farther
without fortifying the inner man. Small as were his chances of finding
any housewife in her dwelling at a time when every one was hard at
work in the fields, he stopped before a little cluster of cottages
that stood about a piece of land common to all of them, more or less
describing a square, which was open to all comers.

The surface of the soil thus held in conjoint ownership was hard and
carefully swept, but intersected by open drains. Roses, ivy, and tall
grasses grew over the cracked and disjointed walls. Some rags were
drying on a miserable currant bush that stood at the entrance of the
square. A pig wallowing in a heap of straw was the first inhabitant
encountered by Genestas. At the sound of horse hoofs the creature
grunted, raised its head, and put a great black cat to flight. A young
peasant girl, who was carrying a bundle of grass on her head, suddenly
appeared, followed at a distance by four little brats, clad in rags,
it is true, but vigorous, sunburned, picturesque, bold-eyed, and
riotous; thorough little imps, looking like angels. The sun shone down
with an indescribable purifying influence upon the air, the wretched
cottages, the heaps of refuse, and the unkempt little crew.

The soldier asked whether it was possible to obtain a cup of milk. All
the answer the girl made him was a hoarse cry. An old woman suddenly
appeared on the threshold of one of the cabins, and the young peasant
girl passed on into a cowshed, with a gesture that pointed out the
aforesaid old woman, towards whom Genestas went; taking care at the
same time to keep a tight hold on his horse, lest the children who
were already running about under his hoofs should be hurt. He repeated
his request, with which the housewife flatly refused to comply. She
would not, she said, disturb the cream on the pans full of milk from
which butter was to be made. The officer overcame this objection by
undertaking to repay her amply for the wasted cream, and then tied up
his horse at the door, and went inside the cottage.