Le Val

Use in the book

Le Val offers a third possibility between the religious retreat Guérin has left and the metropolitan life he fears. Its domestic circle opens toward woods and sea while preserving work, affection, conversation, and common worship. The celebrated account of a household day gives equal weight to meals, walks, study, collecting fuel, the child’s changing expressions, and the evening fire. Poetry belongs to this sequence of ordinary acts rather than to a separate ceremonial occasion. The shore extends the home’s fellowship: Hippolyte and Guérin listen together, and mother and child enter the seascape without ceasing to be particular people. Anticipated departure converts present pleasure into future grief before the stay is over. On the last walk Guérin asks the landscape to impress something permanent upon his soul. Le Val later becomes a remembered shelter in Paris, and Marie’s death changes the direction of the return he can make to it: the beloved place can no longer restore the whole company.

Places to read

1. 7 December 1833 · ¶4The house between two regions shelters a traveller from Carmel to Babylon; mother and daughter share the name Marie.
2. 20 December 1833 · ¶2A complete domestic day makes friendship, work, childhood, and coastal nature mutually sustaining.
3. 20 January 1834 · ¶2The farewell walk culminates in a plea that the places transmit something imperishable to the soul.
4. 2 February 1835 · ¶5Bereavement forces imagination away from its familiar route toward the beloved retreat.

Translation in this edition

The 1861 December 7 witness explicitly adds that the figure is a reality because the house stands by the sea. That sentence is absent from the 1864 paragraph and must not be silently restored to it.