THE DREAM OF PARIS
In a quiet granite house in an old Breton town, three women live as three shadows: an iron-willed spinster aunt who rebuilt the family’s fortune from scraps of stamped paper; a faded, colorless cousin; and Anne, young, devout, as delicate as a Fra Angelico angel, and stronger than any of them. Across the courtyard, in his dim notary’s office, Anne’s brother Hervé chafes at his fate. Handsome, brilliant, born with the profile of an eagle, he despises the provincial trade his aunt’s sacrifices bought for him, and he dreams of Paris.
When Hervé breaks free at last, Anne follows him, not to share his ascent, but to keep it from destroying him. What draws the eagle upward is exactly what blinds him: ambition, brilliance, the glitter of the capital, and its power to flatter and then to consume. Against it Anne has only patience, faith, and a love that asks nothing back. And when war comes to France and Paris burns, both brother and sister are tested past what anyone in the little house on the Rue du Château could have imagined.
Eagle and Dove is Zénaïde Fleuriot at her most ambitious. It is a novel of provincial Brittany and imperial Paris, of the pull between worldly aspiration and quiet fidelity, carried through the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. One of the most widely read French novelists of the nineteenth century, Fleuriot wrote the domestic moral novel with an unusually sharp eye for character and a deep tenderness for those who life overlooks.
This is the first-ever English translation by Summer Charrette; now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.
Excerpt
Mlle Colette mounted the granite steps slowly, made a sign to her sister to wait in a large dining room furnished with the antique luxury that would nowadays go by the name of simplicity, and entered solemnly, her green register under her arm and her red umbrella in hand, into a great library-study where she produced the effect of an absolute apparition.
“Mlle Colette!” cried a resonant, sonorous, vigorously timbred voice. “This cannot be!”
A man of about sixty, wearing a flat blue cap trimmed with gold braid, rose from behind the broad desk placed in the middle of the room, and, removing his cap with a quick gesture from his grey hair, came to greet Mlle Colette, who was advancing toward him with her shadow’s step.
“So it is really you!” he said, bowing courteously; “my eyes do not deceive me!”
“It is indeed I, Monsieur le Chevalier,” said Mlle Colette, taking the armchair he had rolled toward her; “I have come to ask the honor of a few moments’ conversation.”
“But of course, Mademoiselle! I am entirely at your service. I regret only that you have taken the trouble to come all the way to Koat-an-Abat. A word from you, and I would have come to find you.”
“Impossible, Monsieur le Chevalier; that would have been to invert the roles far too completely in the matter I have to discuss with you; it was for me to come to Koat-an-Abat, and I have come. It is not the first time I have done so. Our grandfathers esteemed and loved one another, Monsieur le Chevalier.”
“Very much so, from what I have heard, Mademoiselle Colette, and I hope it will always be so with their descendants.”
The cap of Hervé’s aunt inclined, and, lifting again with a vivacity quite foreign to her habits:
“It depends on you to see that wish fulfilled, Monsieur le Chevalier,” said the old spinster solemnly. “But first, kindly cast your eyes over this register.”
She extended the green register to the chevalier. He took it, opened it, and began to run his eyes over it.
“What is this, Mlle Colette?” he said. “A table of your fortune, it seems to me?”
“Precisely, Monsieur le Chevalier; leaf through it, I beg you, leaf through it.”
“Good Lord! But it is magnificent, and how far back it goes: 1813, 1822, 1830, 1847! Every year has its balance; the name of the farms, the acreage, the rent — it is all here. You have an excellent bookkeeper, Mlle Colette.”
Mlle Colette placed her hand on her breast by way of indication.
“Well, I compliment you, and you will be wise to remain your own accountant for as long as possible,” said M. de Kérouarn. “What is this?” he added, growing more and more cheerful. “Douzaine… douzaine, silver ladle, ragout spoons… I beg your pardon! But it seems to me I am committing an indiscretion, and that this part of the register concerns me even less than the other.”
“Kindly read everything, examine everything, Monsieur le Chevalier,” said Mlle Colette very gravely; “everything concerns you.”
The former naval officer smiled; but, not wishing to disoblige his venerable visitor, he complied with her curious request, and went through the columns of the register with the same gravity he had once brought to studying his own ship’s log.
“Is it clear, Monsieur le Chevalier?” asked Mlle Colette when he had reached the final page.
“Very clear, Mlle Colette, and you find me astonished — positively astonished! For, after all, all Quimperlé knows that at your father’s death you had not a foot of land that was not mortgaged beyond its value, and here I find you with a solid landed fortune. Playing dead has served you well, Mlle Colette.”
“It will serve the children, Monsieur le Chevalier. I have two heirs, Hervé and Anne — or rather I have only one, Hervé.”
“What will you do with your pretty Anne, Mlle Colette? You are not going to cloister her, I suppose?”
“Anne has little taste for housekeeping, Monsieur le Chevalier; Anne loves her brother very much, and she would remain unmarried solely to allow him to make a good match.”
“Such devotions are quite out of fashion, Mlle Colette; but I trust you to maintain their sound traditions.”
Mlle Colette silently inclined her cap, cleared her throat, and resumed:
“Thus Hervé may be regarded as our sole heir, and I come to solicit for him, Monsieur le Chevalier, the honor of your alliance.”
The chevalier started with astonishment and looked Mlle Colette full in the face, her mummified features now invested with solemnity.
“I know,” the old spinster continued majestically, “that Mademoiselle de Kérouarn finds more brilliant matches by the day; I know that even in Quimperlé she might marry more advantageously; but my great-nephew has told me it is a matter of his life’s happiness, and I have come. Hervé’s fortune is modest, but it will grow through his work, and —”
“It is not precisely the fortune that would be the obstacle, Mademoiselle,” the chevalier interrupted, rising and beginning to pace his study slowly.
“Would it be birth?” rejoined Mlle Colette, a faint color flushing, alas, her wrinkled cheekbones, so deeply rooted in us is the stock from which all pride springs.
She collected herself for a moment and resumed in a low but very firm voice:
“Our family has certainly declined, Monsieur le Chevalier; but if one must pass over several generations of bourgeois, of peasants, and of petty gentry in order to arrive at the true Darganecs, that proves only one thing, it seems to me: their antiquity.”
“The Darganecs. Old stock indeed, very old stock,” said the good chevalier, somewhat unseated by the old spinster’s audacious argument and not without a measure of embarrassment. “I confess to you frankly, Mlle Colette, that I do not like to see families fall; but after all it is well known that in Brittany the younger sons with headstrong ways are not rare, and that they readily found lines of their own. I have always heard your family spoken of with respect, Mlle Colette; we have known each other a long while, and it would be sufficient for Hervé to assert his rights one day to recover his place among us.”
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Then a name resurfaces. Their landlord mentions, almost in passing, that his brother is bringing an old acquaintance to visit — a man neither of them has spoken of in a decade. And nothing happens. Unable to face even the possibility of that meeting, Sōsuke travels alone to a Zen monastery in Kamakura, hoping a week of meditation might dissolve a guilt he has spent years refusing to admit.
First published in 1910 and named by Natsume Sōseki himself as his favorite among his own novels, The Gate is a novel that addresses the daily challenge of living life together in the knowledge of something that can’t ever be undone. This new translation by Kenji Weaver renders Sōseki’s spare, understated prose in a contemporary English voice, restoring the warmth and dry wit beneath its stillness.
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