The Art of Hiding Art

Blanquette is as pretty as a picture, prettier than any of Monsieur Seguin’s previous goats. Her eyes are as soft as a doe’s and her beard resembles that of an army corporal. Her hooves are black and glossy, her horns are beautifully striped, her fleece is as white as mountain snow. She lets Monsieur Seguin milk her without making any fuss. She is adorable, but she is not happy. She does not wish to spend her life tethered to a stake in a paddock. When she tells Monsieur Seguin of her yearning to be set free and to go gambolling in the mountains, he claps his hand to his forehead and says, ‘Oh no, Blanquette, not you as well! Don’t you know there’s a wolf up there who’ll eat you like all my goats before?’

My sister, brother and I, all well below the age of 10, were seated on the sofa, riveted by this take on Little Red Riding Hood which our French mother was reading us, in French of course. La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, one of the best-known of Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Windmill), was so compelling that we didn’t move a muscle until we’d heard it right through to the end, even though the denouement wouldn’t come as a surprise. The heart-breaking tale of Blanquette had been our book at bedtime more than once before. Had we known any of the other stories in Daudet’s book, we might well have asked for the one about the mule who with one mighty kick sends his vicious tormentor to kingdom come; or the one about the priest who on Christmas Day dispatches his three obligatory Masses at the rate of knots, the quicker to get stuck into the turkey and truffles, peacock and pheasant, the pyramids of fruit and the flagons of ruby-red wine awaiting him. The tale of Monsieur Seguin’s goat is the fourth of the stories written, supposedly, in a windmill at the western edge of Provence not far from Arles and under twenty miles from Nîmes, the town where in 1840 Daudet was born. In his mid-twenties, he was offered the chance to acquire the mill, which stood on a hill outside the village of Fontvieille and was no longer grinding corn. In the preface to the later editions of the Lettres, first published in 1869, Daudet describes it as overgrown to the tips of its tattered sails with wild vine, moss and rosemary. Whatever the reason, he didn’t buy the mill, but he did have the run of it for a time. He spent many happy days there, and with the lovely family in the farmhouse further down the hill where he lodged whenever he needed to escape feverish Paris and be back in the warmth of Provence, hearing more of its stories and fables and legends. Despite the title, the Lettres in fact were not written in the windmill but in Clamart, a suburb south of Paris where Daudet was then living with a few friends. He’d arrived in the capital at the age of 17, having for unexplained reasons abandoned his short-lived position as Maître d’Études – grander than it sounds, little more than glorified monitor – at a school in Alès, twenty-five miles north of Nîmes. He wanted to make a name for himself in the literary world, an ambition which quite early in his relatively short life he realized, thanks to the Lettres de mon moulin and two or three novels which as well as fame brought him considerable wealth. (He died aged 57, felled by an agonizing venereal disease, whose stages he describes in forensic detail in La Doulou, the Occitan noun meaning ‘pain’.) Once my siblings and I had grown out of bedtime stories and had forgotten about Monsieur Seguin’s goat, our mother’s copy of the Lettres was returned to the bookshelf, and I paid it no further attention until my grammar-school days. Then, like hundreds of A-level students up and down the land setting out to scale the heights of French literature, the collection was recommended as the ideal nursery slope, to borrow Julian Barnes’s metaphor, on which to practise. And so I retrieved our copy and got stuck in. It was indeed an excellent training ground. There’s plenty of variety in those twenty-four Lettres, a spread of realistic stories, morality tales, fables, legends and essays. A few examples: the morality tale of Father Gaucher who rescues his fellow monks from penury by concocting and selling the most glorious liqueur, making the monastery solvent again but in the process turning himself into a helpless drunk who lives in fear of eternal damnation; or the equally moral fable of the man with the brain of gold which he excavates and lavishes first on himself and then on his frivolous wife and greedy acquaintances until the gold is exhausted and he’s left hollowed-out and abandoned. There are the more down-to-earth stories: an account of the weird life of customs officers; another of a ship taken apart bit by bit in a storm; and a third telling of the lonely existence of lighthouse men. Then there’s the poignant story of the celebrated satirist Bixiou who jeers at everything, including his daughter, whom he derides as a monster of ugliness while all the time he’s secretly treasuring the lock of her hair which was cut on the day she entered a convent. There’s the enchanting tale of the shepherd boy and the squire’s pretty daughter sitting the night out together looking at the stars, she resting her head on his shoulder; and a lyrical essay about the oranges Daudet remembers from his travels in Algeria and Corsica . . . and fifteen more stories. Henry James called Daudet the most charming storyteller of his day. Yes, and I’d add what our sixth-form teacher told us, that we shouldn’t be fooled by the apparent simplicity of his style; the Lettres were classic examples of the art of hiding art. To prove his point, every now and then he’d challenge us to render one or other of the Lettres into English with equal elegance, which, with the exception of the most gifted member of our group, we signally failed to do. At university, slowly ascending the heights of French literature, once again I forgot Daudet. And that’s how it stayed until recently something prompted me to remember him. I was listening to a radio feature about James Joyce, and when the final page of The Dead was discussed, L’Arlésienne, the sixth of the Lettres de mon moulin, suddenly came back to me because of the similarity between the tragedies at the heart of the stories: two young men hardly more than boys – Michael Furey in snow-covered Galway, and Jan (no surname) in a sun-baked village near Arles – each unable to go on living for love of a woman beyond his reach. I felt the need to revisit L’Arlésienne. In my loft, I found the Nelson edition of the Lettres, which against the odds had survived from my childhood. I read L’Arlésienne. And then I went on, first to the story of the two inns on opposite sides of the street, one bright and bustling, the other dark and unfrequented; then the tale of old Cornille, the out-of-work miller pretending to the world that he’s still busy by filling his corn sacks with earth and plaster; next, the fable of the dignitary who, on his way to an agricultural show, lies down in a wood to concoct the speech he has to deliver, but instead starts eating the flowers and writing poetry. Over the next few days, I rediscovered all twenty-four of the Lettres, following no particular order – except, that is, that I chose to end where I’d begun, in Monsieur Seguin’s paddock, the hope still alive in some corner of my brain that this time Blanquette would outsmart captor and predator, free to lead the life she chose.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 82 © Martin Sorrell 2024