Summary
A lone vagrant, Jean, drifts through the ochre furrows of a sun-blasted Beauce like a pilgrim without shrine, until a skittish heifer and the trembling girl at the other end of its rope—Françoise—pull him into the orbit of the Fouan clan, a peasant dynasty rotting from the roots up. Patriarch Fouan, stooped yet wilful, slices his patrimony—patchwork of wheat, loam, and apple-bright orchard—among his two jackal sons and a daughter whose gaze already weighs inheritance against grief. What begins as a notary’s scratch of quill on parchment metastasizes into a slow-bleeding civil war of silences, stolen boundary stones, poisoned wells of mistrust, and the nightly clatter of sabotaged ploughshares. Jean, hired to cradle scythe and hope in equal measure, becomes privy to the whetted knives of gratitude and resentment, while Françoise watches the men she might have loved mutate into ledger entries. The earth itself—furrowed, rain-lashed, dew-gilded—emerges as final arbiter, swallowing blood and seed alike until only the hush of wind-polished stubble remains, a hush that sounds uncannily like forgiveness or forgetfulness, impossible to tell apart.
Synopsis
As Jean is walking across the countryside in search of work, he helps and befriends a young woman, Françoise, who is having trouble controlling the cow that she is leading. Jean finds work at a local farm, but he soon finds himself caught in the middle of the conflicts in Françoise's family. Her uncle Fouan has just decided to divide everything that he has amongst his two sons and his daughter, hoping that he can then spend the rest of his life at ease. But the details of the division only create bitterness, rivalry, and intrigue.
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