L'orée du bois

There is a painting in the house that comes from my father’s side of the family, a large canvas with two girls returning home at dusk from a day in the fields. One holds a cow by a rope and the other carries a bundle of sticks gathered in the woods. In the background, declining light filters through branches of trees, a composition that the French might title with turn of the century crepuscularism ‘l’orée du bois’ (the edge of the woods).

My parents have always disdained the painting, the reason I own it, and before moving to Paris, Dan & I had it professionally cleaned to correct years of neglect and cigarette smoke from my aunt’s parlor, an old spinster who also found the scene too gloomy. 

I am happy to have it, especially since the restorer unveiled leaves glimmering with the last rays of sun and flimsy branches against a Corot sky. Dan and I have invented stories about the two girls walking arm in arm (the glaring sunset is actually a fire they’ve ignited to burn down their homes as they head to a new life in the city) and the restoration worked miracles on their expressions too. What we thought were angry or sad faces are actually well contented and expectant airs.

Every night or so, lacking other forms of entertainment – not yet having a TV or DVD connected - we read aloud a bit from Jacquou le Croquant, the French novel set in the Dordogne of the 1820’s that recounts the adventures of a dirt poor peasant revolted by the local nobility.

The history thrills us as it takes place in our very area and names nearby villages that were, at the time, connected only by paths crisscrossing the forest. In the pages we’ve read so far, Jacquou is but a child and flees with his mother across the woods in search of a new dwelling after being evicted following his father’s imprisonment.

         At that time there were no well-marked routes except two wide but poor roads skirting the edge, in which the water cut gullies in winter and flooded the low places, and the paths in the woods used by the charcoal-burners and the poachers.

Shortly after we had left Bessedes, Mion's husband left the road we were following to take another. This was not really a road at all but one of those tracks made in the wood by the wheels of the carts which came to carry off the chopped logs. In winter, when the track became too bad in places, people turned off to the right or left and so traced new paths in all directions, uncertain tracks which intercrossed on the heath and in the woods.

The painting, the story of Jacquou in the woods, and our forested property, all seem to gel; and as for our garden, we are still in a pre-creation stage whereby we are separating the wild from the civilized, the decent shrubbery from the weeds, the chaos of the overgrown from the structured scheme we have in mind. Perhaps you think too that ‘l’orée du bois’ behind our houses evokes the painting?