La Grenadiere | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

LA GRENADIERE
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage

To D. W.

La Grenadiere is a little house on the right bank of the Loire as you go
down stream, about a mile below the bridge of Tours. At this point the
river, broad as a lake, and covered with scattered green islands, flows

between two lines of cliff, where country houses built uniformly of
white stone stand among their gardens and vineyards. The finest fruit in
the world ripens there with a southern exposure. The patient toil of
many generations has cut terraces in the cliff, so that the face of the
rock reflects the rays of the sun, and the produce of hot climates may be
grown out of doors in an artificially high temperature.

A church spire, rising out of one of the shallower dips in the line of
cliffs, marks the little village of Saint-Cyr, to which the scattered
houses all belong. And yet a little further the Choisille flows into the
Loire, through a fertile valley cut in the long low downs.
La Grenadiere itself, half-way up the hillside, and about a hundred
paces from the church, is one of those old-fashioned houses dating back
some two or three hundred years, which you find in every picturesque
spot in Touraine. A fissure in the rock affords convenient space for a
flight of steps descending gradually to the "dike"--the local name for
the embankment made at the foot of the cliffs to keep the Loire in its
bed, and serve as a causeway for the highroad from Paris to Nantes. At
the top of the steps a gate opens upon a narrow stony footpath between
two terraces, for here the soil is banked up, and walls are built to
prevent landslips. These earthworks, as it were, are crowned with
trellises and espaliers, so that the steep path that lies at the foot of the
upper wall is almost hidden by the trees that grow on the top of the
lower, upon which it lies. The view of the river widens out before you
at every step as you climb to the house.
At the end you come to a second gateway, a Gothic archway covered
with simple ornament, now crumbling into ruin and overgrown with
wildflowers--moss and ivy, wallflowers and pellitory. Every stone wall
on the hillside is decked with this ineradicable plant-life, which springs
up along the cracks afresh with new wreaths for every time of year.
The worm-eaten gate gives into a little garden, a strip of turf, a few
trees, and a wilderness of flowers and rose bushes--a garden won from
the rock on the highest terrace of all, with the dark, old balustrade along
its edge. Opposite the gateway, a wooden summer-house stands against
the neighboring wall, the posts are covered with jessamine and
honeysuckle, vines and clematis.
The house itself stands in the middle of this highest garden, above a

vine-covered flight of steps, with an arched doorway beneath that leads
to vast cellars hollowed out in the rock. All about the dwelling trellised
vines and pomegranate-trees (the grenadiers, which give the name to
the little close) are growing out in the open air. The front of the house
consists of two large windows on either side of a very rustic-looking
house door, and three dormer windows in the roof--a slate roof with
two gables, prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to the low
ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color; and door,
and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the attic windows,
all are painted green.
Entering the house, you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure, the
spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves take a
new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining- room,
floored with square white tiles from