How true is this imaginative picture? Let us leave the last word to the inhabitants of Rognes/Romilly themselves. Zola's son-in-law went back there fifty years after the publication of La Terre. Were they appalled by the picture Zola had painted of them? Not at all: they knew the work well, they could quote episodes from it. Nowhere did he meet anyone who felt that Zola had blackguarded him and he adds, perhaps maliciously, that if nobody thought of recognizing himself in the novel, people were very ready to discover in it portraits of their neighbours…

DOUGLAS PARMÉE

PART ONE

Chapter 1

THAT morning, Jean had slung a blue canvas seedbag round his middle, and was holding it open with his left hand, whilst with his right he took out a handful of wheat and at every third step scattered it broadcast with a sweep of his arm. His heavy shoes sank into the rich, thick soil which clung to them as he strode along rhythmically swaying his body; and through the constant haze of golden seed, each time he cast you could see the red glow of two corporal's stripes on his old regimental tunic, which he was wearing out. He looked preternaturally tall as he walked slowly forward, alone in front of the harrow covering up the grain behind him and which was drawn by a pair of horses urged on by their driver, who kept cracking his long whip around their ears.

The field, situated at Les Cornailles and a bare couple of acres in extent, was not large enough for the owner of La Borderie, Monsieur Hourdequin, to have thought it worth-while to send out his mechanical seeder, which was being used elsewhere. In point of fact, the farm buildings themselves lay only about a mile and a half away in front of Jean as he moved up the field from the south to the north. Pausing at the end of the furrow, he lifted his head and stared blankly as he took a breather.

The low walls and the brown patch of old slate roof seemed lost at the edge of the plain of Beauce which reached out towards Chartres, for beneath the late October sky, vast and overcast, the rich yellow farmland, bare at this time of year, extended for a score of miles or more, its broad stretches of arable alternating with green expanses of clover and lucerne, with no sign of a hillock or a tree as far as the eye could see; everything merged and fell away over the far skyline, as curved and clear-cut as a horizon at sea. Only to the west was the sky fringed by a tiny strip of russet wood. Down the middle went the chalk-white road joining Châteaudun to Orléans, which ran dead straight for a good fifteen miles, geometrically marked by its line of telegraph poles. And that was all, except for three or four wooden windmills, with idle sails, perched on their timber frames. A few villages were scattered about like little islands of stone and in the distance the steeple of an invisible church would emerge from a fold in the ground, hidden in the gentle undulations of this land devoted exclusively to wheat.

Jean now turned back and set off once again, this time from north to south, his left hand still holding open the bag while his right swept through the air and dispersed its cloud of seed. Directly ahead of him now lay the narrow little valley of the Aigre, cutting through the plain like a dyke, while beyond it the flat lands of Beauce began once again, their vast expanses stretching as far as Orléans. The only hint of meadows or shade was a row of tall poplars whose yellowing heads, protruding from the hollow, looked like low bushes, on a level with the banks of the stream.

Of the little village of Rognes, built on the slope, there could be glimpsed only a few rooftops, huddled round the church whose tall steeple, of grey stone, provided a venerable haunt for families of rooks. And to the east, beyond the Loir where the chief town of the canton, Cloyes, lay concealed five miles away, the low hills of the Perche rose up in the distance, purple against the slate-grey sky. This was formerly the region of Dunois which nowadays formed part of the administrative district of Châteaudun: lying between Perche and the extreme edge of Beauce, its poor fertility had earned for it the title of the bad lands.

When Jean reached the end of the field, he stopped once more and cast his eye down along the Aigre, a swift clear stream flowing between meadows parallel to the Cloyes road: and he could see the procession of carts coming in from the country on their Saturday morning market day. Then he turned again and went back up the field. And he continued in this way, up and down, from north to south and then back, always at the same pace and with the same sweeping gesture, enveloped in the living cloud of grain, while behind him at the same gentle, almost meditative, pace, the harrow buried the seed to the sound of the cracking whip. Long spells of wet weather had held up the autumn sowing; the fields had already been newly manured in August and the land had long been ready for the plough, its deep soil, cleaned of unwholesome weeds, ripe to produce its crop of wheat following the rotation of clover and oats. So the fear of the coming frosts, potentially damaging after so much rain, had spurred on the activity of the farmers. The weather had suddenly turned cold and windless and a pitch-black sky spread a sombre, even light over this still ocean of land. They were sowing everywhere: another sower was working three hundred yards away to the left and yet another further along to the right; and for miles around, others and yet others could be seen sinking from sight and receding into the distance over the level ground ahead, tiny black figures, mere lines which grew thinner until they were finally lost from view. But all of them made this same gesture of casting the seed which you could sense floating in the air around them like a living wave. And even in the distance where all was blurred and the scattered sowers could no longer be seen, the plain was still quivering beneath it.

Jean was on his way down the field for the last time when he spied a large brown and white cow coming from Rognes and led on a rope by a girl, barely more than a child. This little cowgirl and her charge were following the path which ran parallel to the valley at the edge of the plateau; and Jean, going up the slope with his back turned, had just finished his sowing when the sound of running mingled with stifled cries made him raise his head as he was untying his seedbag in preparation for leaving. The cow had bolted and was galloping away through a patch of lucerne, followed by the girl, who was making desperate efforts to hold her back. Afraid that she might come to harm, he shouted:

‘Let her go!’

She ignored him and continued to hurl breathless abuse at the cow in an angry, scared voice:

‘Coliche! Now, Coliche, do be good! Oh, you stupid cow! You silly stupid cow!’

Till then, by dint of running and jumping as fast as her little legs would carry her, she had managed to keep up with the cow. But now she stumbled and fell, picked herself up for a few more steps and then fell down again; and as the animal then took fright, she was dragged along the ground. She was shrieking now and her body was leaving a trail in the lucerne.

‘Let her go, for heaven's sake!’ Jean kept crying. ‘Let her go!’ He was shouting automatically, through sheer fright, for by now he was running himself, having at last realized what was wrong: the rope must have caught round her wrist and was being drawn tighter at every jerk.