The Pastoral Symphony Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Title Page

  Thank You Page

  About the Author/Translator's Preface

  About the Translator/Publisher

  First Notebook

  10 February 189-

  27 February

  28 February

  29 February

  8 March

  10 March

  12 March

  Second Notebook

  25 April

  3 May

  8 May

  10 May

  18 May

  19 May

  The Night of 19 May

  21 May

  22 May

  24 May

  27 May

  28 May

  28 May Evening

  29 May

  30 May

  Title Page

  The Pastoral Symphony

  A Novel by André Gide

  English Translation by Walter Ballenberger

  © Copyright 2013 Walter Ballenberger All Rights Reserved

  PO Box 2153, Monument, CO 80132

  [email protected]

  The cover image is a photo of an original oil painting by Walter Ballenberger

  Thank You Page

  Thank You For Downloading My Book. Please Be So Kind As to Review This Book On Amazon. This Would Be Most Appreciated.

  About the Author/Translator's Preface

  André Gide is a very famous French author. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. The Pastoral Symphony (in French, La Symphonie Pastorale) was one of his more famous novels and was originally published in 1919. While translating this novel I thought it would make an excellent subject for a movie. I subsequently looked it up, and sure enough, a film was produced with the same name in France in 1946. This film won the top prize, Le Grand Prix (equivalent to the Palme d’Or) in that year at the Cannes Film Festival. I look forward to seeing it one day.

  This is my fourth translation of a classic French novel. The first three I did were by François Mauriac, who was also the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both authors write in a formal French literary style, but Mauriac is more formal than Gide with almost every sentence written in the subjunctive. This style occurs with Gide as well, but to a lesser extent. That alone would make me prefer Gide over Mauriac, but I also prefer Gide’s characters and story line, at least in his books that I have read so far. Some of Mauriac’s main characters are somewhat dark, and through them he was able to stir the cultural pot in his day. Gide’s characters can also have serious flaws in their personalities and behavior, however. Gide was also known for challenging the cultural norms of the time (the two were contemporaries, but Gide was older than Mauriac).

  It would be fun to see a modern film rendition of this story.

  Walter Ballenberger

  07/14/2013

  About the Translator/Publisher

  Walt Ballenberger originally grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, but for the past 25 years he has resided in Colorado.

  He graduated from West Point and is a Vietnam veteran.

  He subsequently worked in engineering and in marketing for a leading semiconductor company. That company sent him and his family to live in Toulouse, France, for two years in the 1980s. During that time he learned to speak French fluently, building upon his high school French and Latin classes.

  After taking early retirement, he founded Beaux Voyages, Inc. along with his son, and they spent the next 10 years leading bicycle tours all over France, including the Provence, Normandy, Loire, Dordogne, Burgundy, Alsace and Bordeaux regions. He still watches the French national news every day on the French language channel TV5. Walt says that living in a foreign country was a life-altering experience for himself and his family. He is fond of the Rudyard Kipling line: “And what should they know of England who only England know?”

  This is the fourth classical French novel that Walt has translated into English and the first by André Gide. The first three were written by François Mauriac who was also a Nobel Prize winner in literature. Walt plans to translate other books by Gide in the near future.

  First Notebook

  10 February 189-

  The snow, which has not stopped falling for three days, is blocking the roads. I was not able to travel to R… where twice each month for the past 15 years we have held a religious celebration. This morning only 30 of the faithful assembled in the chapel of La Brévine.

  I will take advantage of the leisure provided by this forced confinement to step back and recount how it was that I came to take care of Gertrude.

  I had planned to write here everything concerning the training and development of this pious soul whom I only led out of the darkness because of adoration and love. Blessed be God for having confided this task to me.

  Two years and six months ago, as I was returning to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a young girl whom I did not know came looking for me in all haste to take me seven kilometers from there because a poor old woman was dying. The horse was not uncoupled. I put the child in the carriage after obtaining a lantern, because I thought that I would not be able to return before nightfall.

  I thought I knew the area around the community rather well, but after passing the farm at la Saudraie, the child made me take a road that until then I had never adventured upon. Two kilometers from there, however, I noticed on the left a little mysterious lake where as a young man I had sometimes gone to ice skate. I had not seen it for 15 years because none of my pastoral duties had called me in this direction. I would no longer be able to say where it was, and I had at this point stopped thinking about it. Then it seemed to me, when I recognized it suddenly in the pink and gold enchantment of the evening, that I had only seen it previously in a dream.

  The road followed the course of a stream, cutting through the extremity of the forest, and then ran alongside a peat bog. Certainly I had never been there before.

  The sun was setting, and we were walking for a long time in the shadows. Finally my young guide pointed with her finger to a thatched cottage on the side of a hill that one would have thought to be uninhabited except for a thin line of smoke that was escaping from it which was blue in the shadows and then became blonde in the gold of the sky. I tied the horse to a nearby apple tree and then rejoined the child in the obscure room where the old woman had just died.

  The silence and the solemnity of the countryside at that moment made me numb. A young woman was genuflecting next to the bed. The child, whom I had taken to be the grandchild of the dead woman but who was actually only her servant, lit a smoky candle and then stood motionless at the foot of the bed.

  During the long ride I had tried to engage her in conversation, but she said almost nothing.

  The kneeling woman stood up. She was not a relative, as I had first supposed, but simply a neighbor, a friend that the servant had asked to come when she saw that her mistress was weakening. This woman had offered to watch over the body. The old woman, she told me, had passed away without suffering. We discussed together what dispositions to take for the burial and funeral ceremony. As was often the case in this lost countryside, it was up to me to decide everything. I was a bit bothered, I confess, to leave this poor house, which had such a poor appearance, in the care of just this neighbor and this servant child. It did not appear probable that there was some sort of hidden treasure in some corner of
this miserable place. But what was there for me to do? In any case I asked if the old woman had any heirs.

  The neighbor then took the candle and led me towards a corner of the foyer, and there I could distinguish, crouched in front of the hearth, an uncertain being who appeared to be asleep. The thick mass of her hair almost completely hid her face.

  This blind child, a niece, according to the servant, is what the family has been reduced to, it appeared. She would have to be placed in a hospice. Otherwise, I did not know what would become of her.

  I did not want to say anything about this in front of her, worried about the chagrin these words might cause her.

  “Do not wake her,” I said softly, implying that the neighbor should lower her voice.

  “Oh! I do not think that she is sleeping. But she is an idiot, she does not talk and understands nothing of what people say. Since this morning when I came into this room, she has hardly budged. At first I thought that she was deaf. The servant says that she is not, but simply that the old woman, who was deaf herself, never said a word to her or to anyone else. For a long time she had only opened her mouth to eat and drink.”

  “How old is she?”

  “About 15 years old, I suppose. Beyond that I know nothing more than you.”

  It did not immediately come to my mind to take care of this poor abandoned girl myself. But after I had prayed, or more exactly during the prayer that I did along with the neighbor and the young servant who were both kneeling at the bedside and where I was kneeling myself, it suddenly appeared to me that God had placed in my path a sort of obligation and that I could not avoid it without showing cowardice. When I stood back up my decision was made to take the child that same evening, even though I had not clearly asked myself what I was going to do with her subsequently, or to whom I would entrust her. I remained several moments longer to contemplate the sleeping face of the old woman, whose wrinkled and sunken mouth seemed to be pulled by cords, trying to make sure that I wasn’t forgetting anything. Then returning to the side of the blind girl, I told the neighbor of my intentions.

  “It would be better if she is not here tomorrow when they come to take the body,” she said. And that was all.

  Everything was very simple and without the fanciful objections that people sometimes are pleased to invent. Since childhood, how many times have we been prevented from doing this or that, simply because we heard repeated around us, “That should not be done.”

  The blind girl allowed herself to be led like an involuntary mass. The features of her face were regular and attractive enough, but they were perfectly inexpressive. I had taken a blanket from the straw mattress on which she normally rested in a corner of the room underneath an interior staircase that led to the attic.

  The neighbor was complacent and helped me to wrap her up carefully, because the clear night was cool. After having lit the lantern of the carriage, I left, carrying this package of flesh without a soul snuggled up against me and from which I only perceived life by the communication of a dark heat. All along the route I was thinking, “Is she sleeping? And what kind of dark sleep is it? And how does the sleep of the old woman differ from this? Hosted in this opaque body, an immured soul is without doubt waiting to finally touch some ray of your grace, Father! Would you permit my love, perhaps, to help her escape from this horrible night?”

  I knew very well that I could expect an angry welcome upon my return home. My wife is a garden of virtue, and even in those difficult moments that we sometimes go through, I never doubted for an instant the quality of her heart. But her natural charity does not like being surprised. This is an orderly person who holds that one should neither go beyond one’s duties nor fall short of them. Her charity is regulated as if love was an exhaustible treasure. This is our only point of disagreement.

  When she saw me that evening returning with the little girl, her first thoughts escaped in this cry, “What have you taken charge of this time?”

  As with each time when an explanation was required between us, I asked the children who were there to leave the room. They were open mouthed, full of questions and of surprise. Ah! How this welcome was so far from what I would have wished for. Only my dear little Charlotte began to dance and clap her hands when she understood that something new, something living, was going to get out of the carriage. But the others, who were already styled after their mother, quickly became cold and walked away from her.

  There was a moment of great confusion. And since my wife and the children did not yet know that the girl was blind, they could not understand the extreme attention that I was taking to guide her steps. I myself was all upset by the bizarre groans that the poor sick child began to make, so much so that my hand abandoned hers which I had been holding since she got out of the carriage. Her cries were not human. One could say they sounded like plaintive yaps from a little dog. Having been pulled out of the tight circle of customary sensations that formed her entire universe for the first time, her knees yielded underneath her. But when I brought a chair for her to sit on, she let herself collapse to the ground like someone who did not know how to sit. Then I led her into the house, and she calmed down a little bit when she could cuddle up near the fireplace in the same position she had taken in the home of the old woman. In the carriage she had already slipped to the bottom of the seat and had made the entire trip snuggled up against my feet. My wife made an instinctive movement to help me, which I appreciated, but it is true that her logic was always battling and often won out against her heart.

  “What do you intend to do with that?” she said after the young girl was in the house.

  My soul shivered upon hearing those words employed in such a way, and I had difficulty controlling a movement of indignation. However, still imbibed in my long and peaceful meditation in the carriage, I restrained myself and turned towards all of those who had once again formed a circle, and with my hand posed on the forehead of the blind girl, I said with as much solemnity as I could,

  “I am bringing back the lost sheep.”

  Amélie would not admit that there could be anything unreasonable about the teachings of the gospel. But I saw that she was going to protest, and it was then that I made a sign to Jacques and to Sarah who, being accustomed to our small conjugal differences, and for the rest hardly curious of their nature (a bit too insufficiently in my opinion), led the two small children out of the room. Then, since I sensed that my wife seemed closed and exasperated in the presence of the intruder, I said,

  “You can speak in front of her. The poor child understands nothing.”

  Then Amélie started protesting that she certainly had nothing to say to me. This was the habitual prelude to the very longest of explications. She said that there was nothing for her to do but to submit to my impractical and nonsensical inventions as she always did. I have already written that I had hardly thought about what I intended to do with this child. I had only vaguely, if at all, considered the possibility of having her stay in our house, and I can almost say that it was Amélie who gave me the idea when she asked me if I didn’t think that “There were already enough people in the house.” Then she declared that I was always moving ahead without ever bothering to think of the consequences to the rest of the family, that in her opinion five children were enough, that since the birth of Claude (who precisely at that moment, having heard his name, began to scream in his crib) she has “Had enough” and was at the end of her rope.

  From the first sentences she spoke, several words of Christ came from my heart to my lips, but I held them in, for it always appeared improper to me to hide my behavior behind the authority of the holy book. But when she began to speak about her fatigue, I remained sheepish because I recognized that more than once I had left my wife to bear the burden and the consequences of my thoughtless zeal. However, these recriminations had educated me about my duty. I therefore very
softly begged Amélie to examine if she would not have acted the same way if she had been in my place, and if she thought it was proper to leave in distress a being who clearly had no one else to lean upon. I added that I had no illusions about the amount of new fatigue and worry that caring for this sick child would cause the household and that I regretted very much not being able to help her more often. Finally, I did my best to appease her, and I also begged her not to create resentment for the innocent child that she did not deserve. I then observed that Sarah has reached an age where she could help more, and that Jacques was able to take care of his own needs. In short, God had put into my mouth the words that were necessary to help her accept what I was sure she would have voluntarily accepted if the events had unraveled in such a way that there was enough time to think about them and if she had not been so surprised.

  I had the feeling that I had changed her mind, and already my dear Amélie was approaching Gertrude with a kind look. But suddenly she was even more irritated than ever after having taken the lamp to look at the child and realizing the extent of her indescribable filth.

  “But this is an infection,” she cried. “Brush yourself, brush yourself quickly. No, not here. Go outside and do it. Ah! My God! The children are going to be covered with it. There is nothing in the world that I fear as much as vermin.”