7.44 Gide — La Symphonie pastorale — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of André Gide 's La Symphonie pastorale , the diary of a Protestant pastor who takes in a blind orphan girl. Follow a first-person narrator who is not fully honest with himself, and learn to read between his lines. Recognise the clear, classical prose of the early twentieth century, close to the French you write yourself. Notice how the diary form, with its dates and its weather, lets the past and the present of the narrator meet. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English que la servante avait été chercher lorsqu’elle vit s’affaiblir sa maîtresse, whom the servant had gone to fetch when she saw her mistress growing weak, Il faudra la mettre à l’hospice ; She will have to be put in the poorhouse; Je m’offusquai d’entendre ainsi décider de son sort devant elle, soucieux du chagrin que ces brutales paroles pourraient lui causer. I took offence at hearing her fate decided like this in front of her, concerned about the grief these brutal words might cause her. toutes deux agenouillées au chevet du lit, both kneeling at the head of the bed, Mon âme frissonna en entendant l’emploi de ce neutre et j’eus peine à maîtriser un mouvement d’indignation. My soul shuddered at hearing this neuter used, and I could hardly master a surge of indignation. exciter leur pitié, leur sympathie pour celle que Dieu nous invitait à recueillir to stir their pity, their sympathy for the one whom God was inviting us to take in Prerequisites : 7.43 — this reading follows 7.43 Reading . The nuance words of 5.27 Vocabulary will help you hear the pastor's self-justifications, and the literary tenses of 5.28 Vocabulary , including the pluperfect subjunctive, appear in his careful prose. About this text André Gide (1869–1951) received the Nobel Prize in 1947. La Symphonie pastorale (1919) is a short novel in the form of two notebooks kept by a pastor in a village of the Swiss Jura. Snowed in, he decides to write down how he came to take into his home Gertrude, a blind girl found beside a dead old woman, and how he taught her to know the world and God. As the story goes on, the reader understands, before the pastor does, that his charity has become love. This lesson gives about 3,300 words from the beginning of the first notebook, without omissions: the snowbound morning, the drive to the dying woman, the discovery of the blind girl, the return home and his wife Amélie 's reaction, and the first days of disappointment. The text is that of the edition published in Paris by Gallimard ( Nouvelle Revue française ) in 1934, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Gide died in 1951, and his works entered the public domain in France in 2022. Reading the pastor An unreliable narrator. The pastor writes in good faith, but the reader learns to doubt him. He praises his wife as un jardin de vertus and then criticises her in the same paragraph; he says he did not think of keeping the girl, then that Amélie gave him the idea. Watch for the words with which he excuses himself: je l'avoue , certainement , sans doute . Two times. The diary has a present, the snow of the day he writes, and a past, the evening two and a half years earlier when he found Gertrude. Notice the change of tense: the present and the perfect for the day of writing, La neige est tombée encore abondamment cette nuit ; the literary past for the story he tells. The Gospel. The pastor sees himself as the shepherd of the parable who goes after the lost sheep: Je ramène la brebis perdue . Amélie sees five children, a tired wife and a girl covered in vermin. The novel is built on the distance between the two views. A classical style. Gide writes long but perfectly clear sentences, with the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive and inversions of classical French: si pauvre que fût son apparence , si l'événement lui eût laissé le temps de réfléchir . This is careful written French as it stood a century ago, and it is still a model for French writing today. Reading it a second time, part by part The snow. Snowbound in his village, the pastor begins his notebook to tell the story of Gertrude. The journey. Two and a half years earlier, a little girl took him by carriage past a forgotten lake to a cottage where an old woman had just died. The discovery. By the fire crouches a blind girl of about fifteen, who neither speaks nor seems to understand. The neighbour talks of the hospice; the pastor, praying, decides to take her home. The return. His wife Amélie is angry: they already have five children. He calms her; then she finds that the girl is covered in vermin, and breaks down in tears. The first night. Little Charlotte comes down to kiss him good night and asks why she did not kiss the blind girl. The next days. Amélie washes and dresses the girl, whom Charlotte names Gertrude. The pastor is disappointed: the girl is hostile, wordless, almost an animal. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. The Pastoral Symphony The snow, which has not stopped falling for three days, is blocking the roads. I was unable to get to R…, where for fifteen years I have been accustomed to hold the service twice a month. This morning only thirty of the faithful gathered in the chapel of La Brévine . I shall take advantage of the leisure this enforced confinement gives me to go back in time and tell how I came to take charge of Gertrude. I have planned to write down here everything that concerns the formation and development of this devout soul, whom it seems to me I brought out of the night for no other purpose than adoration and love. Blessed be the Lord for having entrusted me with this task. Two years and six months ago, as I was coming back up from La Chaux-de-Fond, a little girl I did not know came in great haste to fetch me