La Maison de Claudine by Colette

Anyone who enjoys gardens will surely enjoy Colette.

Here is an extract that I've translated from Colette's La Maison de Claudine, Où sont les enfants ?

As usual, first the original text in French followed by my translation into English.

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OÙ SONT LES ENFANTS ?
La maison était grande, coiffée d'un grenier haut. La pente raide de la rue obligeait les écuries et les remises, les poulaillers, la buanderie, la laiterie, à se blottir en contre-bas tout autour d'une cour fermée.

Accoudée au mur du jardin, je pouvais gratter du doigt le toit du poulailler. Le Jardin-du-Haut commandait un Jardin-du-Bas, potager resserré et chaud, consacré à l'aubergine et au piment, où l'odeur du feuillage de la tomate se mêlait, en juillet, au parfum de l'abricot mûri sur espaliers. Dans le Jardin-du-Haut, deux sapins jumeaux, un noyer dont l'ombre intolérante tuait les fleurs, des roses, des gazons négligés, une tonnelle disloquée… Une forte grille de clôture, au fond, en bordure de la rue des Vignes, eût dû défendre les deux jardins ; mais je n'ai jamais connu cette grille que tordue, arrachée au ciment de son mur, emportée et brandie en l'air par les bras invincibles d'une glycine centenaire…

La façade principale, sur la rue de l'Hospice, était une façade à perron double, noircie, à grandes fenêtres et sans grâces, une maison bourgeoise de vieux village, mais la roide pente de la rue bousculait un peu sa gravité, et son perron boitait, six marches d'un côté, dix de l'autre.

Grande maison grave, revêche avec sa porte à clochette d'orphelinat, son entrée cochère à gros verrou de geôle ancienne, maison qui ne souriait que d'un côté. Son revers, invisible au passant, doré par le soleil, portait manteau de glycine et de bignonier mêlés, lourds à l'armature de fer fatiguée, creusée en son milieu comme un hamac, qui ombrageait une petite terrasse dallée et le seuil du salon… Le reste vaut-il la peine que je le peigne, à l'aide de pauvres mots ? Je n'aiderai personne à contempler ce qui s'attache de splendeur, dans mon souvenir, aux cordons rouges d'une vigne d'automne que ruinait son propre poids, cramponnée, au cours de sa chute, à quelques bras de pin. Ces lilas massifs dont la fleur compacte, bleue dans l'ombre, pourpre au soleil, pourrissait tôt, étouffée par sa propre exubérance, ces lilas morts depuis longtemps ne remonteront pas grâce à moi vers la lumière, ni le terrifiant clair de lune – argent, plomb gris, mercure, facettes d'améthystes coupantes, blessants saphirs aigus –, qui dépendait de certaine vitre bleue, dans le kiosque au fond du jardin.

Maison et jardin vivent encore, je le sais, mais qu'importe si la magie les a quittés, si le secret est perdu qui ouvrait – lumière, odeurs, harmonie d'arbres et d'oiseaux, murmure de voix humaines qu'a déjà suspendu la mort – un monde dont j'ai cessé d'être digne ?…

WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN?
Topped with a high attic, it was a big house with stables and outhouses, chicken coops, a washhouse and a dairy that because of the steep slope of the street were forced together in a huddle around an enclosed, lower courtyard.

Leaning against the garden wall, I could scratch the roof of the chicken house with my finger. The upper garden overlooked the lower garden: a narrow and warm kitchen garden set aside for growing aubergines and peppers, where, in July, the smell of tomato leaves mixed with the scent of the apricots ripening on their espaliers. In the upper garden: two twin pines, a walnut tree whose unforgiving shade killed off any flowers, roses, a neglected lawn, a dislocated tunnel… A sturdy iron fence at the bottom of the garden along the length of the rue des Vignes must have once protected the two gardens but I only ever saw the fence twisted and torn from its cement base and brandished in air by the invincible branches of a hundred year old wisteria…

Overlooking the rue de l’Hospice the front of the house was unattractive. Blackened with age, it was adorned with large windows and a stone stairway that led to the front entrance; an old, bourgeois, village house whose serious bearing was eased slightly by the steep slope of the road, which seemed to cause the perron, with 6 steps on one side and 10 on the other, to limp.

Large and austere-looking, with a porch and carriage gate with an enormous old prison latch, it was a house that smiled on one side only: the back where, out of sight of the passer-by, bathed in sunlight, it sported a cloak of wisteria and bignonia that shaded a small, tiled terrace and the door to the living room, a cloak that weighed heavy on the tired iron framework, which had sunk like a hammock in the middle… Is there any point in continuing my description when words alone are not enough? I wont be able to help anyone envisage the splendour that endures in my memory of the red ribbons of the autumn vines collapsing under their own weight, clinging as they fall to some conifer branches. I cannot make the clumps of lilacs - whose compact flowers, blue in the shade, purple in sunlight, quickly fade, suffocated by their own exuberance – I cannot make lilacs that died years ago reach again out towards either the sunlight or the terrifying light of the moon which, as it passed through the blue window lights of the kiosk at the bottom of the garden could turn from silver, lead-grey mercury, to sharp facets of amethysts and sapphir.

The house and garden are still there, I know, so does it matter if the secret ingredient that brought to life a harmony of trees and birds, a murmur of human voices that have already put death on hold, the magic that opened a world of light and smell of which I am no longer worthy, does it matter if this has gone?

A return to the Garden of Eden and the age of innocence

Orchard

A lithograph from Dapnis and Chloé

by Marc Chagall

The extract from L’Immoraliste that I have translated (below) describes a pivotal moment in Gide’s novel, evoking as it does the narrator’s increasing awareness of the reawakening of his senses after his long and disabling illness.

Michel describes his explorations of the palm groves that he and his wife discover after erring from the path that they have been following during a walk through the town in north Africa where they are staying. A break in the high wall that flanks the path, and the glimpse it offers of the luxuriant landscape of the gardens enclosed and hidden by this same wall, is enough to tempt the couple to deviate from their course. Who can blame them? The lush greenery brings into sharp contrast the sterility of the parched mud floor and high mud walls that confine the usual path; the palm grove is a true oasis – a place of beauty that offers respite and resuscitation for the senses otherwise withered by the mundane.

The garden is surely the eternal symbol of rebirth and regeneration and enclosed as it is here by a high wall that shields it from any harsh, intrusive and censorial gaze, this garden seems symbolic of the womb itself. Michel takes retreat and, closing his eyes, withdraws further from the external world to an inner place where he finds he can just listen to his senses. He quickly becomes intoxicated by the soothing sounds of the doves cooing, the rippling stream, the breeze rustling through the tops of the trees, which echoes the stirrings that he feels as his senses are roused from their somnolence. Disarmed by his repose and contemplation, he is further seduced by the dulcet tones of a flute that the goatherd boy is playing: as his inhibitions are anaesthetized, he succumbs to the delight of his physical arousal.

Later Michel deliberately returns alone to the oasis where he listens as the boy enchants him further with his explanations of how he knowingly watches over his charges, carefully ensuring that their needs are satisfied but only when necessary. The boy, it seems, both arouses and assuages desires. It’s not difficult to see why, despite the obvious lyricism of his prose, the representation that Michel makes of a paradise where young boys enchant and stand ready to meet the needs of those in their care, provoked some controversy amongst Gide’s peers. The inferences suggest more questions than they answer. Moreover, the seductive and sensual figure of a boy playing a flute in a fertile landscape is surely a further evocation of the notion of temptation and transgression. Is Gide really casting the goatherd boy in the role of serpent in this Garden of Eden?

Leaving the ambiguities to one side, this passage is, for me, very evocative of some of Chagall work - no doubt because of their lyrical treatment of pastoral imagery. The series of lithographs on the story of Daphnis and Chloé, the foundling shepherd children that, in their innocence, are troubled as their friendship turns to love, particularly comes to mind.

To see more images of Marc Chagall's work, go to :

http://www.weinstein.com/chagall/marc-chagall.html

Bright colours on a damp, grey November day

The computer has been repaired, which means I have access once more to my image files, to all my photographs and scans. I don't mean to sound paranoid but I thought I'd upload some pickies before the computer dies on me again, which it surely will one day. All the images on this blog are my handiwork : my photographs of my garden (remember : the camera can lie - it's only a little garden !), of the bathroom (or virtual aviary) and scans of my art work. Nothing like some bright colours to lift the soul on a damp, grey November day.