The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  “My dear madam, your feet are on the Rock. The Creator is all-seeing and all-wise. It is not for us to doubt His mercy—or His justice.”

  “But supposing He should ask me if my conscience is clear?”

  The vicar smiled. “You will reply that it is troubled. And with His infinite compassion He will—”

  “But supposing He did not?”

  “My dear Mrs. Poulteney, if you speak like this I shall have to reprimand you. We are not to dispute His understanding.”

  There was a silence. With the vicar Mrs. Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was her social inferior, and an inferior who depended on her for many of the pleasures of his table, for a substantial fraction of the running costs of his church and also for the happy performance of his nonliturgical duties among the poor; and the other was the representative of God, before whom she had metaphorically to kneel. So her manner with him took often a bizarre and inconsequential course. It was de haut en bos one moment, de has en haut the next; and sometimes she contrived both positions all in one sentence.

  “If only poor Frederick had not died. He would have advised me.”

  “Doubtless. And his advice would have resembled mine. You may rest assured of that. I know he was a Christian. And what I say is sound Christian doctrine.”

  “It was a warning. A punishment.”

  The vicar gave her a solemn look. “Beware, my dear lady, beware. One does not trespass lightly on Our Maker’s prerogative.”

  She shifted her ground. Not all the vicars in creation could have justified her husband’s early death to her. It remained between her and God; a mystery like a black opal, that sometimes shone as a solemn omen and sometimes stood as a kind of sum already paid off against the amount of penance she might still owe.

  “I have given. But I have not done good deeds.”

  “To give is a most excellent deed.”

  “I am not like Lady Cotton.”

  This abruptly secular descent did not surprise the vicar. He was well aware, from previous references, that Mrs. Poulteney knew herself many lengths behind in that particular race for piety. Lady Cotton, who lived some miles behind Lyme, was famous for her fanatically eleemosynary life. She visited, she presided over a missionary society, she had set up a home for fallen women—true, it was of such repentant severity that most of the beneficiaries of her Magdalen Society scrambled back down to the pit of iniquity as soon as they could—but Mrs. Poulteney was as ignorant of that as she was of Tragedy’s more vulgar nickname.

  The vicar coughed. “Lady Cotton is an example to us all.” This was oil on the flames—as he was perhaps not unaware.

  “I should visit.”

  “That would be excellent.”

  “It is that visiting always so distresses me.” The vicar was unhelpful. “I know it is wicked of me.”

  “Come come.”

  “Yes. Very wicked.”

  A long silence followed, in which the vicar meditated on his dinner, still an hour away, and Mrs. Poulteney on her wickedness. She then came out, with an unaccustomed timidity, with a compromise solution to her dilemma.

  “If you knew of some lady, some refined person who has come upon adverse circumstances…”

  “I am not quite clear what you intend.”

  “I wish to take a companion. I have difficulty in writing now. And Mrs. Fairley reads so poorly. I should be happy to provide a home for such a person.”

  “Very well. If you so wish it. I will make inquiries.” Mrs. Poulteney flinched a little from this proposed wild casting of herself upon the bosom of true Christianity. “She must be of irreproachable moral character. I have my servants to consider.”

  “My dear lady, of course, of course.” The vicar stood. “And preferably without relations. The relations of one’s dependents can become so very tiresome.”

  “Rest assured that I shall not present anyone unsuitable.” He pressed her hand and moved towards the door. “And Mr. Forsythe, not too young a person.” He bowed and left the room. But halfway down the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered. He reflected. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy—or at least a not always complete frankness—at Mrs. Poulteney’s bombazined side, at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room. He stood in the doorway.

  “An eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff.”

  5

  O me, what profits it to put

  An idle case? If Death were seen

  At first as Death, Love had not been,

  Or been in narrowest working shut,

  Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

  Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

  Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

  And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.

  Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

  The young people were all wild to see Lyme.

  Jane Austen, Persuasion

  Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time—in Phiz’s work, in John Leech’s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips—to extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets—that denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a man like Charles she proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Albertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite.

  When Charles departed from Aunt Tranter’s house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down to his hotel, there gravely—are not all declared lovers the world’s fool?—to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt’s house that she could really tolerate.

  Having duly admired the way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top hat to Aunt Tranter’s maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of sixty—a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one year—Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt Tranter’s house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of a quarter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful, and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV, could be attached.

  Nobody could dislike Aunt Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and talking—especially talking—face was absurd. She had the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence. Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.

  However, Ernestina did her best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five; on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on the subject of her aunt’s oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina’s being in Lyme at all.

  The po
or girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim summoned decorators and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon which all her bouderies and complaints made no impression. And that was her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days’ rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life; she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition. She could have—or could have if she had ever been allowed to—danced all night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents’ fixed idea than a baby to pull down a mountain. Had they but been able to see into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.

  An indispensable part of her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother’s sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter’s lumbering mahogany furniture; and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed, if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previous winter, and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least, she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for—and more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect for convention; and she shared with Charles—it had not been the least part of the first attraction between them—a sense of self-irony. Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself (“You horrid spoiled child”) that redeemed her.

  In her room that afternoon she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her chemise and petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly narcissistic self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face justice; she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter’s night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked—a dancer, an actress. And then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something very curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And she hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.

  For what had crossed her mind—a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch her eye in the mirror—was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny all that gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her mind.

  Thus she had evolved a kind of private commandment—those inaudible words were simply “I must not”—whenever the physical female implications of her body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional, tried to force an entry into her consciousness. But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness. Ernestina wanted a husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children; but the payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed excessive.

  She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women of her period felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder that duty has become such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian age—or for that matter, such a wet blanket in our own. [2]

  Having quelled the wolves Ernestina went to her dressing table, unlocked a drawer and there pulled out her diary, in black morocco with a gold clasp. From another drawer she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. She turned immediately to the back page. There she had written out, on the day of her betrothal to Charles, the dates of all the months and days that lay between it and her marriage. Neat lines were drawn already through two months; some ninety numbers remained; and now Ernestina took the ivory-topped pencil from the top of the diary and struck through March 26th. It still had nine hours to run, but she habitually allowed herself this little cheat. Then she turned to the front of the book, or nearly to the front, because the book had been a Christmas present. Some fifteen pages in, pages of close handwriting, there came a blank, upon which she had pressed a sprig of jasmine. She stared at it a moment, then bent to smell it. Her loosened hair fell over the page, and she closed her eyes to see if once again she could summon up the most delicious, the day she had thought she would die of joy, had cried endlessly, the ineffable…

  But she heard Aunt Tranter’s feet on the stairs, hastily put the book away, and began to comb her lithe brown hair.

  6

  Ah Maud, you milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  Mrs. Poulteney’s face, that afternoon when the vicar made his return and announcement, expressed a notable ignorance. And with ladies of her kind, an unsuccessful appeal to knowledge is more often than not a successful appeal to disapproval. Her face was admirably suited to the latter sentiment; it had eyes that were not Tennyson’s “homes of silent prayer” at all, and lower cheeks, almost dewlaps, that pinched the lips together in condign rejection of all that threatened her two life principles: the one being (I will borrow Treitschke’s sarcastic formulation) that “Civilization is Soap” and the other, “Respectability is what does not give me offense.” She bore some resemblance to a white Pekinese; to be exact, to a stuffed Pekinese, since she carried concealed in her bosom a small bag of camphor as a prophylactic against cholera… so that where she was, was always also a delicate emanation of mothballs.

  “I do not know her.”

  The vicar felt snubbed; and wondered what would have happened had the Good Samaritan come upon Mrs. Poulteney instead of the poor traveler.

  “I did not suppose you would. She is a Charmouth girl.”

  “A girl?”

  “That is, I am not quite sure of her age, a woman, a lady of some thirty years of age. Perhaps more. I would not like to hazard a guess.” The vicar was conscious that he was making a poor start for the absent defendant. “But a most distressing case. Most deserving of your charity.”

  “Has she an education?”

  “Yes indeed. She was trained to be a governess. She was a governess.”

  “And what is she now?”

  “I believe she is without employment.”

  “Why?”

  “That is a long story.”

  “I should certainly wish to hear it before proceeding.”

  So the vicar sat down again, and told her what he knew, or some (for in his brave attempt to save Mrs. Poulteney’s soul, he decided to endanger his own) of what he knew, of Sarah Woodruff.

  “The girl’s father was a tenant of Lord Meriton’s, near Beaminster. A farmer merely, but a man of excellent principles and highly respected in that neighborhood. He most wisely provided
the girl with a better education than one would expect.”

  “He is deceased?”

  “Some several years ago. The girl became a governess to Captain John Talbot’s family at Charmouth.”

  “Will he give a letter of reference?”

  “My dear Mrs. Poulteney, we are discussing, if I understood our earlier conversation aright, an object of charity, not an object of employment.” She bobbed, the nearest acknowledgment to an apology she had ever been known to muster. “No doubt such a letter can be obtained. She left his home at her own request. What happened was this. You will recall the French barque—I think she hailed from Saint Malo—that was driven ashore under Stonebarrow in the dreadful gale of last December? And you will no doubt recall that three of the crew were saved and were taken in by the people of Charmouth? Two were simple sailors. One, I understand, was the lieutenant of the vessel. His leg had been crushed at the first impact, but he clung to a spar and was washed ashore. You must surely have read of this.”

  “Very probably. I do not like the French.”

  “Captain Talbot, as a naval officer himself, most kindly charged upon his household the care of the… foreign officer. He spoke no English. And Miss Woodruff was called upon to interpret and look after his needs.”

  “She speaks French?” Mrs. Poulteney’s alarm at this appalling disclosure was nearly enough to sink the vicar. But he ended by bowing and smiling urbanely.

  “My dear madam, so do most governesses. It is not their fault if the world requires such attainments of them. But to return to the French gentleman. I regret to say that he did not deserve that appellation.”

  “Mr. Forsythe!”

  She drew herself up, but not too severely, in case she might freeze the poor man into silence.

  “I hasten to add that no misconduct took place at Captain Talbot’s. Or indeed, so far as Miss Woodruff is concerned, at any subsequent place or time. I have Mr. Fursey-Harris’s word for that. He knows the circumstances far better than I.” The person referred to was the vicar of Charmouth. “But the Frenchman managed to engage Miss Woodruff’s affections. When his leg was mended he took coach to Weymouth, there, or so it was generally supposed, to find a passage home. Two days after he had gone Miss Woodruff requested Mrs. Talbot, in the most urgent terms, to allow her to leave her post. I am told that Mrs. Talbot tried to extract the woman’s reasons. But without success.”