Talk:Nêne

Reviews

 * Literary Digest, 13 May 1922:

A poor peasant girl in the south of France comes to take  charge of the house and the two little children, one a mere baby, belonging to a widower, Michel Corbier. She remains there four years, giving to her work a devotion so wholehearted, so beautiful and so unconscious of self that it touches whatever there is of the divine in human nature. Simple and ignorant, she is none the less great, and to know her is to walk with the angels.

When a story impresses you as not so much a record of life as life itself, it belongs in a category by itself. Such a book was "The Story of an African Farm"; such was "Marie Claire," and such, too, is "Nêne" by Ernest Pérochon (George H. Doran, $1.75) which won the Goncourt Prize in 1920.

Not that Nêne is faultless. But her faults are those that come from love of others, not of self. She knows only how to give, never how to take. Chaste she is, and she can defend herself if need be, but yet she sets no value on herself. She is as humble as a field flower, and as sweet.

The farm is in the Vendee, a part of France with a curious history that has resulted in dividing the people there into three sects, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Dissenters, who once were Catholics, but who, during the Revolution followed their priests and rose for the King. And when, after all the fighting was over, and most of the priests were reconciled and had taken the oath to the Republic, a few remained who retained the bitterness of the war in their hearts and who refused any terms. The devoted peasants followed these into a fierce isolation, disdaining the threats of excommunication, forming small communities scattered over the Vendee, and gradually dying out. But some still remained, fairly strong and numerous. They were backed by the Protestants, who rejoiced in the break in the Catholic ranks. It was a disgrace for a girl or boy of the Dissenters to marry a Catholic, and seldom did one of the maidens violate this law of the cult. But with the young men it was different. They went afield and fell in love with Catholic girls, and then they got married, and usually the children became Catholics. But the Dissenter side of the family cast them out, fierce and unforgiving. So that there were enmities in the country, feuds that passed on from one generation to another. Still, Protestant and Catholic and Dissenter worked together in the harvest season, as need came. And if fights broke out, they rarely became sanguinary.

Naturally such a people are passionate and poetical, loving their land with ardor, feeling history as something vital and present.

Corbier has lost his wife only a year ago. He had loved her and he mourned her—mourned her so that as he followed his plow the day that Madeleine came to his house for the first time, to take up the work for which he had hired her, the tears ran down his cheeks for the woman he had lost, whose children must be brought up by a stranger, who would stand no more with welcoming eyes in the doorway as he came in from the fields. Lovely she had been, with soft hands, and they had had joy of each other. Why had she gone so soon to God's house, and left his house desolate?

He resents the presence of Madeleine, Nêne as the baby calls her, without being conscious that he does so. He is compelled to admire the way she takes hold, bringing order and sweetness into the whole place, keeping the children fresh as pinks, always at work, always cheerful, ready, self-effacing. But he says nothing in the way of thanks and encouragement.

Nêne does not expect either. She grows to love the two small ones immediately, and this love gradually dominates her whole life. Corbier is young, fine-looking, the father of the two babies. She dreams a little in regard to him, wondering if perhaps some day they may not marry, and she become truly the mother of the young ones. But once, as she plays with the baby boy, he gurgles out "Maman," and this Michel overhears. He flies into a rage, tells her that she is sacrilegious, forbids her ever to allow the child to say the word again.

Mortal sin, he called it. And Madeleine is hurt so badly that it seems to her she can not stay on. For three days the two do not speak to each other—Corbier does not so much as look at her, and the insult bites into her heart. After all, it is no sin to love the children. Yes, she will leave.

But she does not leave. Does a mother leave her children because she is insulted or unjustly used? And no mother ever loved her children better, than Madeleine loved the children of the dead wife of Corbier.

The misunderstanding is gradually forgotten, work goes on, and what work! Nêne is up by three every morning, and rarely in bed before ten, often later. It is a big farm, with many hands,, and Nêne has everything to do, no help at all. The children use up much time, there are the clothes to wash and mend and make, spinning to do, cleaning, the goats and cows and fowl to care for, the cooking—it is endless.

Let those who know only the luxury of France read this book. Here is France herself, the France that is rebuilding her ruined towns, that is finding somehow the labor and the money to do what must be done while Germany whines that she can not fear to be taxed, can not meet, her obligations. Here is the courage, the devotion, the energy of a great race exprest quite simply in the person of a peasant girl.

Nêne's story is a story of sacrifice. She loses everything, because she has never learned to ask, to take. Corbier accepts her labor as a due, does not even notice how perfect it is. Does not know that his children look so dainty and have their little treats and toys because Nêne buys them pretty things with her own poor wages. Does not realize the blessing she is to them and to his house. He falls in love with another woman, a scheming, pretty, selfish little beast, cruel and clever, and that is the end of Madeleine. The tragedy develops swiftly and sweeps poor None away on its tide.

The book is written with consummate art and extraordinary insight and sympathy. Here is no touch of sentimentality to mar the truth. Each character is drawn with entire comprehension, full and round.

Each scene is painted as it is. You feel behind the special men and women, the actual farm or road or village or house, the whole neighborhood, the entire countryside. Yet this book was hawked about from publisher to publisher in France without finding any taker. When the author took it finally in its manuscript form to the Académie, its worth was recognized, and the Prix Goncourt of 1920 was the reward. Since then the story has met with steady success and the most distinguished praise. It has sold over a hundred thousand copies in France, and made its author, a poor school-teacher, famous.


 * The Nation, 12 July 1922:

"Nêne" is one of those books in which the French have succeeded in giving their peasant life a sort of epic dignity like that which Hardy has given the English rustic, but which no group of contemporary Americans has bestowed upon their own people—perhaps because the literary American is prone to be ashamed of his origins or perhaps because the American scene is too transitory for dignity. Every custom of Bretagne or Gascony is a thing of centuries, and to tell the story of some peasant's joys and sorrows is to tell the story not of a single individual but of generations. Nêne herself, so simple and so strong, becomes a sort of symbol of the deep unchanging goodness of the peasant type. Her story, though told with the minute realism which made the book a suitable recipient of the Goncourt Prize, nevertheless succeeds in making provincialism at its best not mean but noble. The figure of the heroine is very close to the elementary pathos of life, to that dumb suffering of the animal which is doubly pathetic because it is inarticulate and uncomprehending.

Yet Ernest Pérochon is too thoroughly a naturalist to write a story which should be wholly epic or idyl. His tale has a simple nobility not because it is idealized but because that nobility is inherent in the life described. Though he is fully cognizant of the rich dignity of life so fixed and so close to fundamental needs as to seem almost a part of nature itself, yet he is cognizant also of the darker side—the unceasing drudgery of the simple life and the presence of evil in the most idyllic surroundings. Even Nêne is too much a part of the unending tasks for full and effectual flowering and so identified with the simple machinery of existence as to seem almost as much a part of it as a tree or an ox at the plow, though she has the many ways of suffering which they so fortunately lack. All the rich capacity for love wakened in her by her care for the motherless children to whom she devotes her youth is balked and wasted by the limitations of her life and the vulgarity of the people about her. In the hands of a naturalist like Pérochon the epic strain in peasant life is confused and disturbed by the meanness of actuality, and men, peasants as well as others, are always failing to live up to the ideal outlines of their type, Thus the vulgar infatuation of Corbier for the little dressmaker of the neighboring village is pathetically out of key with the nobility of his former life and of his surroundings—unworthy f the epic of plowing and reaping the fields which have supported generation after generation. Yet it is just in the description of this inharmony, this failure of life actually to attain the nobility which it suggests, that naturalism is at its best. The essence of Nêne's tragedy is that she alone of all the people with whom she comes in contact is worthy of the epic for which the pastoral surroundings and the traditions of their life seem to call.


 * The New Republic, 09 Aug 1922

This novel, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1920, is a well executed piece of work and one feels in its pages the spirit of genuine sincerity and effort. But that something we call genius, so precious that a grain of it will often illumine whole chapters of indifferent workmanship—hardly.

I thought, perhaps, much might be blamed the translator for this impression. But there is no great difference in the original. The language seems just as uncommonly stiff and correct for rustics. I am not making a plea for the photographic kind of dialogue, but if the language is not rendered literally it must be interpretively. It is a choice of naturalism or expressionism. Either the author must let his characters speak for themselves or he must hear their souls speaking behind their meagre handful of words. M. Pérochon has done neither. He has only put his own words into their mouths, has talked as he supposes they talk, and has failed to catch the rhythm.

The essential failure of the book might be stated as a corollary to this matter of language. The author has not learned to let people, places, things talk for themselves. He narrates them and consequently the reader feels one remove away from reality. What might be a living fragment of life becomes merely another book. When one thinks of Thomas Hardy, with whom M. Pérochon has been favorably and thoughtlessly compared, the distinction becomes obvious.

In brief, a middling, two-dimensional sort of book, a book not of French peasant life but about it, a book far from the great tradition of French novels.


 * The Bookman May 1922

The soul of a French peasant girl in a book that is mysteriously beautiful and poignant. The Goncourt prize winner for 1920.