"You move too quickly for me to argue," I said sullenly enough, "But I have read about table-turning and spirit rappings in Papa's magazines and I say it sounds like conjuring tricks for the credulous."
"You have read accounts by sceptics," she said, all fire. "Nothing is easier to mock."
"I have read accounts by believers," I said staunchly. "I have recognised credulity."
"Why are you so angry, Cousin Sabine?" said she.
"Because I have never heard you say what was silly before now," I said, and that was true, though doubtless it was not why I was angry. "One may conjure real daemons with drawing-room conjuring tricks," said my father, meditatively.
NOVEMBER
I have always thought of myself as an affectionate being. I have complained of not having enough people to love, or make much of. I do think it is true to say I have had no experience of hatred until this time. I dislike the hatred, which seems to come from outside myself and take possession of me, like some great bird fixing its hooked beak in me, like some hungry thing with a hot pelt and angry eyes that look out of mine that leaves my better self, with her pleasant smile and her serviceableness, helpless. I fight and fight and no one seems to notice. They sit at table and exchange metaphysical theories and I sit there like a shape-changing witch, swelling with rage and shrinking with shame, and they see nothing. And she changes in my sight. I hate her smooth pale head and her greeny eyes and her shiny green feet beneath her skirts, as though she was some sort of serpent, hissing quietly like the pot in the hearth, but ready to strike when warmed by generosity. She has huge teeth like Baba Yaga or the wolf in the English tale who pretended to be a grandmother. He gives her my tasks when she asks him for employment, and salts the wound by saying "Sabine was finding all this copying burdensome, it is good to have other so-skilled hands and eyes." He strokes her hair as he passes her, the coil on her neck. She will bite him. She will.
At the time I write this I know I am absurd.
And when I write that, I know I am not.
NOVEMBER
Today I set out for a long walk along the cliff. It wasn't a good day for a walk, there were great solid patches of mist and spindrift-and quite a powerful wind. I took Dog Tray. I did not ask her if I might. I took pleasure in the idea that he will follow me anywhere now, although she said he was a dog who loved exclusively and once only.
He loves me, I am sure, and his mood suits mine, for he is a sorrowful and reserved sort of beast, he makes his way purposefully in the weather, but he does not play, or smile, as some dogs do. His love is a sad offer of trustfulness.
She came after me. That has never happened. All those times when I hoped she might come or follow, she never came, unless I begged, or cajoled for her own good. But when I walk to escape her, she comes running after, hurrying a little without wishing to be seen to hurry, in her great cape and hood, with the silly umbrella flapping and creaking in and out in the wind and of no particular use at all. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
There is the walk which passes all the monuments-the Dolmen, the fallen menhir, the little Lady Chapel with its granite image on its granite table, not so different from the rough stone of the first two, and probably made from part of one or the other.
She caught me up and said, "Cousin Sabine, may I go with you?”
“As you will," I said, with my hand on the dog's shoulder. "As you please, of course." We walked a little, and she said, "I fear I have offended you in some way?
"Not in the least, not at all."
"You have all been so kind to me, I have truly felt I have found a sanctuary, a kind of home, here in my father's country.”
“My father and I are glad of that.”
“I do not feel you are glad. I have a sharp tongue and a thorny exterior. If I have said anything-"
"You have not."
"But I have intruded into your peace? Yet you did not seem wholly satisfied with your peace-in the beginning." I could not speak. I quickened my step and the dog loped after. "All that I touch," she said, "is damaged.”
“As to that, I know nothing, for you have told me nothing." It was she who was silent, then, for a time. I walked quicker and quicker; it is my country, I am young and strong; she had some difficulty in keeping up.
"I cannot tell," she said, after a time. Not plaintively, that is not her way, but sharply, almost impatiently. "I cannot make confidences.
It is not in me. I keep to myself, I survive in that way, only in that way. And that is not true, I wanted to say, but did not. You do not treat my father as you treat me.
"Perhaps you do not trust women," I said. "That is your right."
"I have trusted women-" she began, and did not finish. Then "That did harm. Great harm."
She sounded portentous, like a sibyl. I went quicker. She sighed after a little and said her side hurt her, she would go back. I asked if she needed to be accompanied. I asked in such a way that pride must make her refuse, as it did. I put a hand out to the hound, and willed him to stay, which he did. I watched her turn back with her hand to her side and her head down into the wind, toiling a little. I am young, I thought, and should have added "and bad," but did not. I watched her go and smiled. Part of me would have given almost anything for things to have been as they were before, for her not to be melodramatic and pitiful, but all I did was smile and then stride on, because I am at least young and strong.
[Note by Ariane Le Minier] Here there are some pages missing, and what is written becomes perfunctory and repetitive. I have not made photocopies of the rest of this month until the evening of Christmas. You may see this material if you wish.
CHRISTMAS NIGHT 1859
We all went to hear Mass at the church at midnight. My father and I always go. My grandfather would not enter the church; his principles were republican and atheist. I am not sure that my father's religious beliefs would please the Curé, if he were to discuss them with him, which he does not. But he believes strongly in the continuance of the life of the community, the Breton people, which includes Christmas and all its meanings, old and new. She says she is a member of the Church of England in England, but that here the faith of her fathers is the Catholic faith, in its Breton form. I think that the curé would be surprised to know what she thinks also, but he seems to welcome her into his church, and respects her isolation. She has been going up to the church more and more during Advent. She stands in the cold, looking at the work of the sculptor of the Calvary, the crude figures carved with such effort out of intractable granite. Ours has a good St Joseph, holding the ass, on the way to Bethlehem (our church is dedicated to St Joseph). My father spoke of how in our country the animals in the barns have speech on the night of the Nativity, when all the world is reconciled to its maker in primeval innocence, as it was in the days of the first Adam. She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature-at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead. I said nothing. I watched him put his cloak round her shoulders and lead her up to our place in the front of the Church, and saw it, God help me, as a préfiguration of our life to come.