The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles

BOOK: The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
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THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S
WOMAN

John Fowles

Copyright © 1969 by John
Fowles

Signet Edition
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: 77-86616
First Printing, august,
1970

Every emancipation is a restoration
of the human
world and of human relationships
to man himself.
M
arx, Zur Judenfrage (1844)
 

£

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should like to thank the
following for permission to quote: the Hardy Estate and Macmillan &
Co. Ltd. for extracts from The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy; the Oxford
University Press for quotations from G. M. Young's Victorian Essays and
Portrait of an Age; Mr. Martin Gardner and the Penguin Press for a slightly
compressed quotation from The Ambidextrous Universe; and finally Mr. E.
Royston Pike and Allen & Unwin Ltd., not only for permission to quote
directly but also for three contemporary extracts and countless minor details
I have "stolen" from his Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age (published
in the United States by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., under the title Golden
Times: Human Documents of the Victorian Age). I recommend this brilliant
anthology most warmly to any reader who would like to know more of the
reality behind my fiction.
--
J. F.

1

Stretching
eyes west
Over the
sea,
Wind
foul or fair,
Always
stood she
Prospect-impressed;
Solely
out there
Did her gaze rest,
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to
be.
--Hardy, "The Riddle"

An easterly is the most
disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay-- Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the
underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg--and a person of curiosity
could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair
who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym
of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March
of 1867.

The Cobb has invited what
familiarity breeds for at least seven hundred years, and the real Lymers
will never see much more to it than a long claw of old gray wall that flexes
itself against the sea. In fact, since it lies well apart from the main
town, a tiny Piraeus to a microscopic Athens, they seem almost to turn
their backs on it. Certainly it has cost them enough in repairs through
the centuries to justify a certain resentment. But to a less tax-paying,
or more discriminating, eye it is quite simply the most beautiful sea rampart
on the south coast of England. And not only because it is, as the guidebooks
say, redolent of seven hundred years of English history, because ships
sailed to meet the Armada from it, because Monmouth landed beside it ...
but finally because it is a superb fragment of folk art. Primitive yet
complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes
as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of
mass. I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb
has changed very little since the year of which I write; though the town
of Lyme has, and the test is not fair if you look back towards land.

However, if you had turned
northward and landward in 1867, as the man that day did, your prospect
would have been harmonious. A picturesque congeries of some dozen or so
houses and a small boatyard--in which, arklike on its stocks, sat the thorax
of a lugger-- huddled at where the Cobb runs back to land. Half a mile
to the east lay, across sloping meadows, the thatched and slated roofs
of Lyme itself; a town that had its heyday in the Middle Ages and has been
declining ever since. To the west somber gray cliffs, known locally as
Ware Cleeves, rose steeply from the shingled beach where Monmouth entered
upon his idiocy. Above them and beyond, stepped massively inland, climbed
further cliffs masked by dense woods. It is in this aspect that the Cobb
seems most a last bulwark--against all that wild eroding coast to the west.
There too I can be put to proof. No house lay visibly then or, beyond
a brief misery of beach
huts, lies today in that direction.

The local spy--and there
was one--might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people
of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere
harsh wind. On the other hand he might, focusing his telescope more closely,
have suspected that a mutual solitude interested them rather more than
maritime architecture; and he would most certainly have remarked that they
were people of a very superior taste as regards their outward appearance.

The young lady was dressed
in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning
of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the
telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness--and
shortness, since two white ankles could be seen beneath the rich green
coat and above the black boots that delicately trod the revetment; and
perched over the netted chignon, one of the impertinent little flat "pork-pie"
hats with a delicate tuft of egret plumes at the side--a millinery style
that the resident ladies of Lyme would not dare to wear for at least another
year; while the taller man, impeccably in a light gray, with his top hat
held in his free hand, had severely reduced his dundrearies, which the
arbiters of the best English male fashion had declared a shade vulgar--that
is, risible to the foreigner--a year or two previously. The colors of the
young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but
the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline
dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in
her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion.

But where the telescopist
would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber,
curving mole. It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning
against an old cannon barrel upended as a bollard. Its clothes were black.
The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring
out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth,
than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

2

In that year (1851)
there were some 8,155,000 females of the age of ten upwards in the British
population, as compared with 7,600,000 males. Already it will be clear
that if the accepted destiny of the Victorian girl was to become a wife
and mother, it was unlikely that there would be enough men to go round.
--
E.
Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age
I'll spread sail
of silver and I'll steer towards the sun,
I'll spread sail of silver
and I'll steer towards the sun,
And my false love will weep,
and ray false love will weep,
And my false love will weep
for me after I'm gone.
--
West-country folksong:
"As Sylvie Was Walking"

"
My dear Tina, we have
paid our homage to Neptune. He will forgive us if we now turn our backs
on
him."

"
You are not very
galant
."

"
What does that signify,
pray?"

"
I should have thought you
might have wished to prolong an opportunity to hold my arm without impropriety."

"
How delicate we've become."

"
We are not in London now."

"
At the North Pole, if I'm
not mistaken."

"
I wish to walk to the end."

And so the man, with a dry
look of despair, as if it might be his last, towards land, turned again,
and the couple continued down the Cobb.

"
And I wish to hear what
passed between you and Papa last Thursday."

"
Your aunt has already extracted
every detail of that pleasant evening from me."

The girl stopped, and looked
him in the eyes.

"
Charles! Now Charles, you
may be as dry a stick as you like with everyone else. But you must not
be sticky with me."

"
Then how, dear girl, are
we ever to be glued together in holy matrimony?"

"
And you will keep your low
humor for your club." She primly made him walk on. "I have had a letter."

"
Ah. I feared you might.
From Mama?"

"
I know that something happened
... over the port."

They walked on a few paces
before he answered; for a moment Charles seemed inclined to be serious,
but then changed his mind.

"
I confess your worthy father
and I had a small philosophical disagreement."

"
That is very wicked of you."

"
I meant it to be very honest
of me."

"
And what was the subject
of your conversation?"

"
Your father ventured the
opinion that Mr. Darwin should be exhibited in a cage in the zoological
gardens. In the monkey house. I tried to explain some of the scientific
arguments behind the Darwinian position. I was unsuccessful.
Et voila
tout
."

"
How could you--when you
know Papa's views!"

"
I was most respectful."

"
Which means you were most
hateful."

"
He did say that he would
not let his daughter marry a man who considered his grandfather to be an
ape.

But I think on reflection
he will recall that in my case it was a titled ape."

She looked at him then as
they walked, and moved her head in a curious sliding sideways turn away;
a characteristic gesture when she wanted to show concern--in this case,
over what had been really the greatest obstacle in her view to their having
become betrothed. Her father was a very rich man; but her grandfather had
been a draper, and Charles's had been a baronet. He smiled and pressed
the gloved hand that was hooked lightly to his left arm.

"
Dearest, we have settled
that between us. It is perfectly proper that you should be afraid of your
father.

But I am not marrying him.
And you forget that I'm a scientist. I have written a monograph, so I must
be.

And if you smile like that,
I shall devote all my time to the fossils and none to you."

"
I am not disposed to be
jealous of the fossils." She left an artful pause. "Since you've been walking
on them now for at least a minute--and haven't even deigned to remark them."

He glanced sharply down,
and as abruptly kneeled. Portions of the Cobb are paved with fossil-bearing
stone.

"
By Jove, look at this.
Certhidium
portlandicum
. This stone must come from the oolite at Portland."

"
In whose quarries I shall
condemn you to work in perpetuity--if you don't get to your feet at once."

He obeyed her with a smile.

"Now, am I not kind to bring
you here? And look." She led him to the side of the rampart, where a line
of flat stones inserted sideways into the wall served as rough steps down
to a lower walk. "These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa
Musgrove fall down in Persuasion."

"
How romantic."

BOOK: The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
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