Flower o' the Wheat was the prettiest girl in my village. Tall, well set up, stepping along with a fine self-confidence, she brightened by her clear laughter the fields, the woods, the deep road cuts of the VendÉe. With the first warm days of spring the milky whiteness of her skin would be dotted over with a constellation of freckles.

The peasants used to say: "The good Lord threw a handful of bran in her face."

Bran and flour, it would seem, for her face under the sun's rays remained as white as if dusted over with the powder of bolted wheat. Hence, perhaps, her surname, or possibly she owed it to her red hair, matched rather unusually by tawny eyes. She gave one the impression of being all of the beautiful gold-brown tone of ripe wheat. Flower o' the Wheat was beautiful, and knew it because she was told so all day long.

The man of the fields is not by a long way insensible to beauty. His esthetic sense is not the same as ours. He is not moved by a line, a contour, the grace of a moving form, but he is powerfully affected by colour, as are all whom civilization has not overrefined. Flower o' the Wheat being a creature of living colour, had, therefore, the pleasure of hearing herself proclaimed fair, and of having to fend off the playfulness, and occasionally the somewhat robust caresses, of manly youth all the way from Sainte Hermine to Chantonnay. Plant a flower wherever you will, there the bees will congregate. Wherever you meet beauty, you will see men coming to forage, with eyes and hands and lips. Between city and country there is only a difference of setting.

As her fame spread beyond the borders of the canton, Flower o' the Wheat had a throng of admirers such as had not been seen for many a day in our neighbourhood. The pride of it shone in her eyes, dazzled by their own attractiveness, and if she had been told of Cleopatra on whom was centred the gaze of the world, it is not certain that she would have thought the Egyptian queen had an advantage over the country maid. For which I praise her, for enumerating a multitude of adorers is a foolish pastime. Moreover, the queen was dead and the peasant girl alive: the best argument of all.

The delightful part of the story is that Flower o' the Wheat, while permitting herself to be admired by every man, and envied by every woman, kept her heart faithful to the friend who had known how to win it, in which she differed notably from Cleopatra. Now, that friend, for I must finally come to my confession, was none other than your humble servant. I may be pardoned the pride of that avowal: I loved Flower o' the Wheat, and Flower o' the Wheat entertained sentiments for me which she was not in the least loth to exhibit. I used to follow her about the fields with her dog, "Red Socks," so called because of his four tawny paws, and while the flock browsed very improperly beyond the limit set by the rural guard, I told her all about Nantes, where I had spent the winter. I amazed her with tales from my books, or else she talked to me about animals, what they did, what they thought; she told me extraordinary stories. Our souls were very near to each other, I will not say the same of our hearts, for the sad part of our love was, alas, that she was twenty and I was six—or seven, if I stood on tiptoe. This did not make it difficult for either of us, however, to hug the other. It was only later that I realized my misfortune.

Our best days were at harvest time. The abominable smoke of the threshing machine had not yet invaded the countryside. The flail was still in use. At dawn, men and women divided into groups would begin the round of the threshing floor, their motions accompanied by the rhythmic thud of the wooden flail, muffled by the straw on the ground; one half of the quadrille would slowly retreat, while the other half gradually advanced. The necessity for attention, and the sustained effort, obliged them to be silent. But what a reaction of laughter and song when the wooden pitch forks came into play, stacking the straw! Noonday would see the ground strewn with harvesters taking their rest in the full glare of the sun, for the peasant fears the treacherous shade. Upon the stroke of a bell, the noisy concert of the flails would again fill the air on every side.

At evening there were dances, and there were songs, in which Flower o' the Wheat excelled. She knew every song of that region, and would sing in a nasal, untutored voice, delicious to the rustic ear, ingenuous poems, in which "The King's Son," the "Nightingale," and the "Rose" appeared in fantastic splendours, joyful or sad. A local bard had even made about Flower o' the Wheat, a somewhat free and outspoken song in dialect, the refrain of which said that the flower of the wheat surrenders its grain under the harvester's flail. Flower o' the Wheat without false shame celebrated herself in song, and there were fine jostlings if some young fellow jokingly made believe to put the refrain into action.

Sooner or later, Flower o' the Wheat was bound to come under the harvester's flail. And here I call the reader's attention to this story, whose merit is that it is the story of everyone. I know of no greater error than to suppose that extraordinary adventures are what make life interesting. If one looks closely, one finds that the truly marvellous things are those which happen to us every day, and that duels, dagger thrusts, even automobile accidents, with accompanying hatred, jealousy, betrayed love, and treachery, are in reality the vulgar incidents in the enormous drama of our common life from birth to death.

To bring, without any will of our own, our ego to the consciousness of this world, be subject to a fatal concatenation of joys and sorrows dealt by the hazard of fortune, and end in the slow decay which brings us back to the condition preceding our existence, is not this the supreme adventure? What more is needed to make us marvel? Some, who are called pessimists, accept it with a certain amount of grumbling. Others, regarded as optimists, consider their misfortune so great that they eagerly add to it, by way of consolation, the dream of a celestial adventure which everyone is free to embellish as much as he pleases.

Flower o' the Wheat did not bother her head with any of this. She was twenty, a more engrossing fact. She listened to the voice of her youth, like the women gone before her, as well as those who will follow her on this earth. In the fields, nature being so close, people are very little hampered by the more or less fantastic social conventions, which undertake to regulate the human relations between two young creatures hungering and thirsting for each other.

A special sort of cake called "ÉchaudÉ" is the chief industrial product of my village: a cake made of flour and eggs, very delectable when fresh from the oven, but heavy, and cause of a formidable thirstiness, by the time it has travelled through the bracken as far as Niort, La Rochelle, or Fontenay. Its transportation is carried on by night, in long carts drawn by a horse whose slow and steady gait rocks the slumbers of the driver and of the woman who accompanies him to preside over the sale of the cakes. These carts are terrible go-betweens. The scent of fern is full of danger. The two lie down to sleep, side by side, under the open sky. They do not always sleep, even after a long day's labour. The market town is far away. The unkindly disposed and censorious are shut within their own four walls. Temptation is increased by the jolts that throw people one against the other. Wherefore resist, since one must finally surrender?

Flower o' the Wheat, who was in the service of a rich dealer in ÉchaudÉs, one fine day married her "master," after having given him, to the surprise of no one, two unequivocal proofs of her aptitude for the joys as well as duties of maternity. Her neighbours in the country will tell you that there was nothing out of the ordinary in her life. Her husband beat her only on Sundays, after vespers, when he had been drinking too much, and she took no more revenge upon him than was necessary to show outsiders that he did not have the last word.

I saw her again, at that time, after a fairly long period of absence. The handful of flour and bran was still there. Her eyes had kept their lustre, and her hair still blazed under the fluttering white wings of her coif. But her glance seemed to me sharper, and already the curve of her lips betrayed weariness of life. Her pretty name still clung to her, but the flower had lost its bloom. She still laughed, but she no longer sang. Fortune had come to her, as rings and brooches and gold chains attested. On Sundays she wore a silk skirt and apron to church, and carried a gilded book, a thing found useful even by those who cannot read, since it gives them the satisfaction of exciting their neighbours' envy.

My visits to the village had become brief and far spaced. We had lived very far apart, when I met her one day, in one of our deep road cuts, leading her cow to pasture. An old, wrinkled, broken, worn-out woman. We stopped to chat. Her husband was dead and had left her with "property," but the children were pressing her to make over everything to them. They would have an allowance settled on her "at the notary's," they said.

"I shall have to make up my mind to do it," she ended with a sigh. "Will you believe that my son came near beating me yesterday, because I would not say yes or no?"

Ten more years passed. One day, as I was going through a neighbouring hamlet, a tumble-down hovel was pointed out to me and I was told that "the Barbotte" was ending her days there. Flower o' the Wheat was no more. She was now "the Barbotte," from her husband's name, Barbot.

I entered. In the half light, I could see, under the remnants of an old mantle, the shaking head of an aged woman, with a dried-up, shrivelled parchment face, pierced by two yellow eyes wherein slumbered the dim vestiges of a glance. A neighbour told me all about it. The children did not pay the allowance, which surprised no one. It was the usual thing. From time to time, they brought her a crust of bread, occasionally soup, or scraps of food on Sunday, after mass. The old woman was infirm, and waited on herself with difficulty. A servant was supposed to come and see her once a day. Often she forgot.

"Why not make a complaint?" said I, thoughtlessly.

"She spoke, one day, of letting the notary know. They beat her for it. And who would be willing to take her message? No one is anxious to make enemies. Her children are already none too well pleased that any one should enter the hut. They do not want people meddling with their affairs."

During this talk tears were shining in the blinking yellow eyes. "The Barbotte" had recognized me.

"Don't be troubled on my account," she said in a thin voice that betrayed the fear of being beaten. "I need nothing. My children are very kind. They come every day. Maybe you are like the rest, sir, you think I find time heavy on my hands. Do you know what I do, when I am here alone? I sing, in my mind, all the songs of long ago. I had forgotten them, and now they have come back to me. All day I sing them, without making any noise. I sing them inside. One after the other. When I have finished them all, I begin over again. It is like telling my beads. It is funny, is it not?"

And she tried to smile.

"Monsieur le curÉ scolds me," she took up again. "He wishes me to say my prayers. But I have no sooner started on the prayers than back come the songs. I cannot help it. You remember, don't you, 'The King's Son?' Oh, the 'King's Son!' And the 'Nightingale?' And the 'Rose?' I want to sing one for you. Out loud, instead of in my mind. Which one? 'Flower o' the Wheat!' Flower o' the Wheat! Ah...." She seemed on the point of singing, but dropping from it, exclaimed: "The flail of the harvester came. The grain was taken. Nothing is left but the straw ... and that badly damaged. It was threshed too much.... Dear sir, you who know everything, can you tell me why we come into this world?"

"I will tell you another day, my dear friend, when I come again."

But I never went back.