The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fete At Coqueville, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Fete At Coqueville
1907

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: L. G. Meyer

Release Date: October 27, 2007 [EBook #23222]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FETE AT COQUEVILLE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FETE AT COQUEVILLE

By Emile Zola

Translated by L. G. Meyer.

Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son

I

Coqueville is a little village planted in a cleft in the rocks, two
leagues from Grandport. A fine sandy beach stretches in front of the
huts lodged half-way up in the side of the cliff like shells left there
by the tide. As one climbs to the heights of Grandport, on the left the
yellow sheet of sand can be very clearly seen to the west like a river
of gold dust streaming from the gaping cleft in the rock; and with good
eyes one can even distinguish the houses, whose tones of rust spot the
rock and whose chimneys send up their bluish trails to the very crest
of the great slope, streaking the sky. It is a deserted hole. Coqueville
has never been able to attain to the figure of two hundred inhabitants.
The gorge which opens into the sea, and on the threshold of which the
village is planted, burrows into the earth by turns so abrupt and
by descents so steep that it is almost impossible to pass there with
wagons. It cuts off all communication and isolates the country so that
one seems to be a hundred leagues from the neighboring hamlets.

Moreover, the inhabitants have communication with Grandport only by
water. Nearly all of them fishermen, living by the ocean, they carry
their fish there every day in their barks. A great commission house, the
firm of Dufeu, buys their fish on contract. The father Dufeu has been
dead some years, but the widow Dufeu has continued the business; she
has simply engaged a clerk, M. Mouchel, a big blond devil, charged with
beating up the coast and dealing with the fishermen. This M. Mouchel is
the sole link between Coque-ville and the civilized world.

Coqueville merits a historian. It seems certain that the village, in
the night of time, was founded