Chapter 1: Leaving the Convent

Jeanne, her trunks packed, went to the window. It was still raining.

All night the rain had beaten on the roofs and windows of Rouen; the sky hung low and heavy with water; the gutters were overflowing. Jeanne was seventeen; she had left the convent of the Sacred Heart the day before, free at last, ready to seize all the happiness of life, which she had dreamed of for so long; and she was afraid that her father would not set out if the weather did not clear. Then, at about ten, the Baron came in and said, "We'll go anyway."

Her father, the Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds, was a gentleman of the old century, a kindly, impractical man, a disciple of Rousseau, who loved nature and the fields and the animals with a tender, almost sacred affection, and who disliked priests and had a horror of tyranny. He had a great fortune once; generosity and carelessness had eaten half of it. He had had his daughter brought up in the convent until she was seventeen, ignorant of everything, so that she might come out new and pure into life, and learn love from poetry and from nature; and now he was taking her to live in the country, at the old family château of Les Peuples, on the cliffs above the sea near Yport, which was to be hers.

Her mother, the Baroness Adélaïde, had grown enormously fat; she suffered from what she called her "hypertrophy" — her heart — and walked with difficulty, leaning on her husband or on the maid. The maid, Rosalie, was a big, strong Norman girl, Jeanne's foster sister, who had been suckled with her and had grown up with her.

For five years Jeanne had been shut away behind the convent walls, cut off from the world, knowing nothing of men or of life except what she had dreamed. She had read a little poetry, and many prayers; she had heard the nuns talk of the world as a place of dangers, and her heart had filled it instead with marvels. She was tall and fair, with skin like a child's and eyes of a deep, almost startling blue, and she was full of an impatient, trembling eagerness for everything that was to come.

They set off in the rain, in the old family coach, across the dripping Norman countryside, to the sea. Jeanne's heart was singing. Everything she saw — the farms, the drenched apple trees, the cows standing in the meadows — seemed to her beautiful, and full of promise. At night they reached the château: a great, ancient grey house, with a farm on one side and the sea on the other, half hidden by a wood of beeches; it had been redone for her by her father.

The Baroness dozed in her corner of the coach, with her feet on a foot-warmer; the Baron looked out at the fields and talked of the crops; Rosalie sat silent, in her great Norman cap. Towards evening the rain stopped, and the sun came out over the wet country, and everything glistened; and Jeanne, leaning from the window, breathed in the smell of the earth and the grass, and felt that she was being born.

Her room was hung with old tapestries telling the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers of Babylon. That night she could not sleep; she opened her window, and looked out at the moonlight on the great lawn, and on the trees, and heard the far sound of the sea; and she dreamed of love — of the man who would come to her, whom she did not know yet, but who was somewhere in the world, and who would love her for ever. She felt that her life was beginning, and that it would be full of happiness. She fell asleep at dawn, at the window.