A Life Read Online Free

inattentive husband, by the necessity of intercourse with a husband she loathes in order to bear a child, and by an ultimate 'unsexing' as she comes to abhor sensuality with the vehemence of the fanatical Abbé Tolbiac, who stones courting couples and excludes the 'fallen' from communion. For Jeanne, a life is one in which the illusions of romance are replaced by the bleak vista of hopeless despair: 'She believed herself to be so directly the target of unrelenting misfortune that she became as  fatalistic as an Oriental; and the habitual experience of seeing all her hopes and dreams crumble and vanish meant that she shrank from all further endeavour' (p. 231).
    Human Destiny and the Seasons
    It is true, then, that A Life presents the story of a seemingly inevitable process of degradation and disintegration, an 'entropic' vision which combines elements from both of Baguley's 'fundamental types' of naturalist novel. It is also true that this process is very emphatically seen as corresponding to some essential rhythm of nature. Just as the novel replaces the illusions of romance with some of the realities of adult sexuality, so too it substitutes for Rousseauistic idealism (as espoused by the Baron at the beginning of the novel) a view of nature in which the differences between human beings, animals, and plants become imperceptible within the broader context of immutable and irresistible cycles of nature. For one of the most prominent features of A Life is the way in which human destiny is interwoven with the pattern of the changing seasons and the vagaries of the weather. The novel opens on 3 May as the budding school-leaver contemplates her future and stands 'ready to reach out for all the good things in life of which she had so long been dreaming' (p. 3). Spring gives way to summer, and her courtship with Julien de Lamare leads to marriageon 15 August, as though the Feast of the Assumption were to mark the miraculous accession of the virginal Jeanne to a heaven of marital bliss. Following her first orgasm under the burning skies of Corsica, the return to Normandy and a drab life of routine is marked by autumnal melancholy; and her youthful dreams of romance and excitement are replaced by a winter of discontent in which the frozen landscape of late January becomes the scene of suicidal despair. But the seed of the future, of her son Paul, is stirring within her, and with pregnancy comes the following spring and a period of parturition prematurely ended in late July. So the cycle continues until the final pages of the novel when, on an evening in spring, 'an infinite peace lay upon the tranquil earth and the seed that lay  germinating within': and as Jeanne cradles her unnamed granddaughter in her lap, 'a feeling of soft, gentle warmth, the warmth of life, touched her legs and entered her flesh' (p. 239).
    The relationship between human destiny and the cycles of nature is at the very least symbolic and quite frequently causal. A cold wind is blowing on the day of Jeanne's summer wedding, and there is a smell of autumn in the air. Another cold wind, the Mistral, marks the end of her honeymoon. A violent storm accompanies the tumultuous murder of Julien and Gilberte. Mama dies at haymaking time. But these details seem like mere vestiges of the pathetic fallacy when compared with the occasions on which human beings appear to respond instinctively to the promptings of nature. As the sap rises, the physical relationship between Julien and Gilberte blossoms, and even Jeanne herself feels 'vaguely unsettled by this fermenting of life around her' (p. 139). Later, at the end of the novel, when she spends day after day sitting in front of the fire, the arrival of spring fills her with 'a restless excitement' (p. 233), and soon she is roaming the countryside once more as though filled with the 'unruly joy' of earlier days. The universe is governed by the rhythm of creation, germination, gestation, decay, death, and human beings are no