A Fisher Girl of France

A Fisher Girl of France by Fernand Calmettes

Elise Hénin, nineteen, and her twelve-year-old brother Firmin are orphaned fisherfolk of a French coastal village near the Bay of Somme. Their father drowned years earlier in the treacherous shoal known as the Vergoyer, his body never recovered; their mother died soon after. Elise has raised Firmin single-handedly, determined to make him a skilled sailor, and has repeatedly postponed marrying her devoted suitor Silvere until Firmin comes of age. On the eve of departure for the herring fishery, the siblings visit their mother's grave, and Elise and Silvere pledge themselves to each other there before Elise and Firmin join the sloop Bon-Pêcheur, captained by their cousin Florimond. Trouble begins almost immediately: a jealous, blustering sailor named Barnabé resents Elise's presence aboard, and a quarrel with Silvere (who has followed to warn Barnabé off) distracts the crew and runs the boat aground. Later, whipped into a superstitious rage by Barnabé, the crew nearly throws Elise overboard, blaming her for their misfortune; she is fished out barely alive. When a storm strikes, Elise nurses the injured Barnabé back to loyalty and, through her competence and courage, wins the crew's genuine respect—overshadowing Florimond, who grows privately jealous and resentful despite owing her his life. During a thick fog, Firmin is stranded on a floating cask while separated from the ship's boat, then is nearly drowned before being hauled up with the herring nets—only to fall into the hands of a Flemish pirate craft, the flambart, that has been poaching the Bon-Pêcheur's nets. In the collision that follows, Firmin is carried off aboard the pirate vessel while Elise watches helplessly; Florimond refuses to give chase, fearing further damage to his already crippled boat, and Elise's plea is overruled. The Bon-Pêcheur, badly damaged, survives a harrowing storm on the voyage home—Elise, forced to take the helm after Florimond is knocked unconscious and accidentally sealed below deck, brings the boat safely into port through the dangerous shoals, but Florimond, humiliated and irrationally certain she engineered his imprisonment, turns bitterly against her. Back home, Elise is haunted nightly by visions of her father's ghost, who reproaches her for never having sought to recover his body for proper burial and withholds any word of Firmin until she does so. Village superstition, fanned by Silvere's mother and by Florimond's slander, brands Elise a witch bringing bad luck; she is shunned, stoned, and nearly killed by a mob, saved only by the fierce loyalty of Barbet, a devoted stray dog once belonging to the recently deceased coast-guard captain, who adopts her as his new mistress. Undeterred, Elise besieges the Maritime Bureau at Saint-Valery day after day, aided eventually by a sympathetic hunchbacked clerk, petitioning officials to search for her father's remains. Ground down by rejection, the loss of her share of nets (appropriated by Florimond), and despair over Firmin, she attempts to drown herself—but Barbet drags her back from the sea. That same night, Barbet's distinctive bark announces the return of Silvere, thought lost at sea for weeks; the village's suspicion of Elise collapses, and Silvere renews his pledge to marry her once her father is properly laid to rest. Taking Elise out to the Vergoyer, Silvere helps her sound the depths; guided uncannily by Barbet's barking, they locate the exact gulf where her father and his companions lie. Pursuing a suspicious shadowing boat that turns out to belong to the now-hostile, obsessive Barnabé, Silvere nearly wrecks their own craft in the shoal; Barnabé's boat capsizes and he and his uncle drown. On the way home, Elise and Silvere joyously encounter the four sailors long believed lost with the small boat—Chrétien, two other hands, and old Coulin—safely returned aboard another vessel. Elise's persistent petition finally reaches the Maritime Prefect, and a naval steamer arrives with experimental diving equipment to test underwater apparatus, incidentally fulfilling her request. Villagers and relatives of the drowned converge in a flotilla to witness the search. A diver descends into the gulf and recovers two bodies—not her father's, but Barnabé and his uncle, drowned there only the day before. As the captain prepares to conclude the costly experiments and recall the diver, Elise desperately insists the search continue for her father, refusing to let the mission end before her father's remains—and, she believes, her hope of Firmin's return—are finally recovered.

By Fernand Calmettes · First published 1892 · Genre: Social Realism, Maritime Adventure, Romance · 30 chapters · 82,518 words

First lines

To-morrow at daybreak they will go aboard together, Elise Hénin and her little brother Firmin. They have put on their Sunday clothes to say farewell to their mother, who sleeps on the slope of the dune in a corner of the old graveyard. Nine years has the poor woman lain there in the peace of her last sleep -- deaf forever to the noise of the tempests which roused her so often, of old, to the vigil of anxious nights.

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A Fisher Girl of France is listed on Textopian as a novel by Fernand Calmettes, dated 1892 CE.

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Tags

french literature · maritime fiction · fishing village · coastal life · the sea · shipwreck · bereavement · family life · rural france · translated fiction · 19th century · domestic fiction

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