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Updated: June 18, 2025
Witnesses were found to declare that during these absences he led a life different from the one he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he busied himself with his estate, attended mass daily, and found his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and water-fowl.
He had married young and lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived alone at Kerfol. Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there; and occasionally he rode to Rennes on business.
I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only the sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a kind of majesty to all old houses.
The satisfaction increased when various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say with apparent sincerity that during the year or two preceding his death their master had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his second marriage.
My friend had brought his solicitor back from Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat and affable stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol.... But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted in the study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the drawing-room. "Well are you going to buy Kerfol?" she asked, tilting up her gay chin from her embroidery.
I saw him lying there. He was dead." "And the dogs?" "The dogs were gone." "Gone where to?" "I don't know. There was no way out and there were no dogs at Kerfol." She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above her head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream. There was a moment of confusion in the court-room.
They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol. My heart beat a little as I began to walk down it.
The book was written about a hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I believe the account is transcribed pretty literally from the judicial records. Anyhow, it's queer reading. And there's a Hervé de Lanrivain mixed up in it not exactly my style, as you'll see. But then he's only a collateral. Here, take the book up to bed with you.
As to his wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her husband was away on business at Rennes or Morlaix whither she was never taken she was not allowed so much as to walk in the park unaccompanied.
If we'd remembered, we never should have sent you to-day but then, after all, one doesn't half believe that sort of thing, does one?" "What sort of thing?" I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to the level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: "I knew there was something...." Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring smile. "Didn't Hervé tell you the story of Kerfol?
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