The Wife of Martin Guerre

55-56 ‘It was the time of year… all these she noticed and enjoyed as never before.’

A few months after Martin Guerre’s return, Bertrande is unable to refrain from confronting him with her doubts about his identity. She cannot believe her authoritarian, selfish husband, his father’s son in every respect, has become the gracious and forgiving spirit that stands before her. She notes that he doesn’t strike her when questioned and arraigns him repeatedly with his generosity. Ultimately, however, his overwhelming good nature convinces her that the man is her husband, come back a changed man, leaving her ‘full of confidence and ease.’

Following this, Lewis turns to Bertrande’s peasant world, experienced afresh in her joy, in one of the many descriptive passages in the novel. The passage begins by shifting from the specific incident that preceded it to a season, ‘the time of year,’ suggesting the beginning of a new phase in Bertrande’s life. Autumn, the harvest season for grapes, literally fills the air with her happiness, ‘the odour of ripe muscats.’ Olfactory perception does return but the passage is largely dominated by visual imagery, as the scarlet of the autumn leaves is also the colour of dusk that transforms the landscape. In order to establish this doubled temporal sense uses an interesting structure, setting the subordinate clause in the season (‘When the wine…’), with the main clause describing an action, riding out, that Bertrande performs at dusk. Following this, we have entered a limited third-person perspective, with the landscape described as experienced by her.

This description is layered using two simultaneously operating patterns of imagery. First, the landscape is animated: the valleys are dipping towards Luchon, the woods make irregular advances, moving just as the sweeping wind, which is also presented in the same sentence. Second, more noticeably, beginning with ‘scarlet,’ metaphors of flame are used for colours—‘fire’ and ‘burning,’ and, adding variation, a base of ‘dull gold.’ Towards the end of the long sentence, however, our view moves from the landscape towards the sky: motion slows, as the clouds are ‘piled’ and, in the next phrase, are described using the static ‘was,’ and the red gives was to a uniform blue, the sky reminding Bertrande of the sea, in a dream even beyond the dreamlike land.

Brining us back to earth, Lewis, having already shown us how the landscape has changed, makes the fact of change explicit: the ‘blue haze of evening’ begins to ‘intercept and transmute’ the shapes of things. Following from the comparison to the Mediterranean, we now move from listening to the narrator’s description of Bertrande’s perception to her own thoughts about what she sees. The reawakening of her ordinary surroundings reaches the level of religious awe, reminding her of the incense in the church; the scarlet of the leaves reappears as the colour of the coat one man wears, an image ‘intensely perceived’ for its inherent curious beauty; and the metallic gleam of the halberds, showing how even a cold, sharp image could strike her with ‘piercing joy’ precisely because of its sharpness, its clarity. In fact, two of these images, the interior of the church and the halberds, will reappear later in the novel with far different effects: the church becomes oppressive because of the curé’s reaction to her confession, while the halberts herald the arrival of Martin Guerre, the soldier with an amputated leg, at court in Toulouse. Lewis skilfully uses these motifs to trace the changing thoughts and emotions of her protagonist in transformations of the perceived landscape.