Le champ d’oliviers (or The Olive Grove and The Olive Field) is a novella written by Guy de Maupassant. Released in 1890, it tells of a priest being visited by his illegitimate son.
Characters[]
- The Abbé Vilbois - the former Baron de Vilbois, a man with extreme athletic prowess
- Philip Augustus - The Abbé's illegitimate son
- Marguerite - the Abbé's maid
Plot[]
After returning from a fishing trip in the Bay of Piscon, the Abbé Vilbois returns to his home (set within an olive grove) with his catch. His servant Marguerite talks of a hobo she saw walking around the cottage. Said hobo reveals himself and asks to speak with the Abbé. The hobo reveals that he is the Abbé's illegitimate son.
Several decades previous, the Abbé (then the Baron de Vilbois) loved a woman who fell pregnant who cheated with him with one of his friends. On discovering the affair, the Baron savagely beat the woman intending on killing her and the unborn child in her womb. The Baron's victim only escaped by lying and saying that the father of the unborn child was not the Baron but rather his friend. Shortly after this, the Baron took the vows of the Church.
Though at first hesitant to believe the hobo's story, the Abbé decides to invite his son in for dinner. In an attempt to discover what happened to the woman he once loved, the Abbé gets his son drunk. While in this mood, the hobo (who reveals his name to be "Philip Augustus") reveals that his mother died three years previously from tuberculosis. Even before this he was a rascal - accidentally drowning an entire carriage-full of people - but only learned the truth while his mother was dying. Shortly after her death and funeral (which he and his "father" attended), Augustus savagely tortured his father for money (while recounting this, he jokes that the Abbé has gotten his "revenge" on his friend) before fleeing. Unfortunately for Augustus, he was quickly caught by the cops and was sent to jail for three years.
On hearing of the torture, the Abbé is filled with rage at the notion that the odious creature sitting near him could even claim to be his son. After a brief argument, Augustus grabs for a knife but the Abbé upturns the table - plunging the room into darkness as the two grapple. The Abbé's maid hears this commotion and rushes into the room. She finds a pool of blood along with the forms of father and son hidden in the darkness but rushes out before she can investigate further. She is found by the Abbé's neighbours and alerts the police to the scene that played out. On arriving, they find the Abbé dead with a slit throat and his son sleeping in a drunken stupor on the floor. Once Augustus awakens, he is arrested for the murder of his own father - a murder that never happened as, unbeknownst to everyone else in the room, the Abbé slit his own throat.
Sources[]
- French Wikipedia