The Life Of Jeanne Boulet

A Story by Sydorax_Squid

Jeanne Boulet is a young woman living in rural France in the 1760s. She has time to think as she watches the sheep, but perhaps she should pay more attention…

The Life Of Jeanne Boulet

Jeanne Boulet awoke irritably at sunrise. It was a chilly June morning in Gévaudon and she needed to go out and tend the sheep. She groaned inwardly. Soon, very soon, she would be courted by handsome men and married off and she would never again need to spend her days out in the fields warding off wolves with a stick.
“I am fourteen,” she told herself as she got dressed for the day. “Girls have been married younger than that.” The young woman looked at herself in a dirty piece of mirror. She gently poked her face, her round cheeks and bright eyes were very fetching and pleasing to see. “So why,” she wondered. “Has no man shown interest?”
She was disheartened. A pretty lady shouldn’t be out watching sheep all day, every day! She should be in town, catching the eye of strong young men that want families and home-cooked meals. Poor Jeanne Boulet sighed, tying back her long brown hair. Perhaps she could convince her parents that Claude was old enough now to take her place. His ninth birthday was in October, that was close enough.
Gévaudon was a quiet place, apart from the occasional mauling that was fairly commonplace in rural France. An expected fact of life; death, swift and sudden. But the sheep were precious, they fed and clothed the lucky few who survived the wars, the beasts, the sicknesses and those yet unaffected by the ravages of time. One way or another, death would come. Death was consistent.
Poor Jeanne Boulet knew all about the inevitability of death; she’d watched it claim her younger sister. Death came in the form of illness without cure, and it ate up her sister from the inside, hollowing her out, whittling her down to naught but bones with cheesecloth skin holding them together. Jeanne Boulet had watched little Maria die, held her skeletal hand as God’s angels took her away to be reunited with the Lord. Jeanne had believed then that God took Maria because He missed her up in Heaven. But that was only the first. The longer Jeanne Boulet lived, the more people she knew were reunited with God, the less that thought seemed to comfort her. She began to wonder why God would send people down here at all if He was just going to take them back after a few years. God was being selfish, thinking only about how much He missed these people and not how much their living friends and family would miss those He took back.
Jeanne Boulet had grown to dislike this aspect of God. He had taken many of her friends and siblings away, too, as well as her grandparents. She wasn’t so mad about her grandparents. By the time death came for them, they were too old to work; they just ate and slept and took up space. God did them and her family a favor, saving them from prolonged suffering, probably as an apology for what Maria went through a few years prior. Jeanne still loved God; she prayed to Him and spoke to Him often when out alone in the fields. She simply didn’t agree with him on a few things, which was fine. She had noticed that blind, mindless faith was like a pumpkin left on the vine; eventually it will rot and crack and the innards will spill out to be eaten or buried by animals. Stagnation led to death. That’s why God gave them challenges, to save them from wretched stagnation.
“He’s challenging me now,” Jeanne Boulet muttered to herself, staring out at the sheep as they grazed peacefully. “Testing my patience. Well, I’m patient enough. You can stop it.” She smiled to herself. Maybe God would reward her unyielding tenacity with a loving, handsome husband! One that would carry her away from Gévaudon and sheep and long lonely days filled with dread.
“Do You ever get lonely, Lord?” she inquired, waiting on an answer that never came. “I would think so. You’re unique, peerless. It must be hard, being the only one. Nobody to relate to.” She nodded. “I know what that’s like. I’m lonely, too. But at least I have You.” She looked up into the sky, observing the big flock of fluffy sheep wandering across the blue prairie above her head. She felt a comforting warmth in her bosom at the thought. God was always there, listening and watching. Even if she never found a husband, at least she had the company of God. The idea made her rather happy. God was without death, He was eternal, the one constant in life anyone could turn to for positivity, for love, for comfort. During the worst times; times of war, famine, disease and suffering… He was always there.
Jeanne Boulet’s mind wandered by memories of her grandfather. He was always quick to blame misfortune on the Almighty. Everything that went wrong in life was God’s fault, but the little miracles and successes were never equally owed to that same all-powerful deity. Bon-papa never praised or cherished God’s gifts. He was bitter and angry and chose instead to blame all of his problems on a higher power, never taking accountability upon himself.
Grand-mére was different. She chose to see the suffering and hardships of life as gifts in their own right. Jeanne could remember her words; “Everything we go through, every blessing and every hurtle is a gift from God that we must cherish. These things shape us, mold us, make us who we are. For better or worse, good or bad, we are the sum of our experiences and every one of those experiences are because of God.” Grand-mére was ancient and wise, if not a burden on the family in her final days, though she was remembered with great fondness.
Poor Jeanne Boulet saw a sheep had wandered off a bit and she quickly went to bring it back to the bulk of the flock. She sighed, stroking the animal’s thick, warm wool. The animal bayed quietly, walking deep into the billowing fold of it’s fellows. Jeanne found herself longing for a husband again. She wanted a family of her own, she wanted to have a few babies, live in a nice town, in a warm, red-brick house; far from sheep and this solitary life.
“Am I asking too much?” Jeanne inquired. “I’ll be happy to be married before I turn sixteen. That’s how old Maman was when she married Papa. Maman and Papa are much older now and they had seven children. But it’s just me and Claude left. If I have any hope of having my own children, I must start soon. Please, God, let me have children. I’ll keep tending sheep, I’ll even work in the fields if it means I can have my own family.”
Bargaining with God; how silly! Jeanne shook her head. No one ever got anywhere that way. She just needed to trust in Him, in His plan for her. But what if what God wanted for her wasn’t what she wanted? How could she just trust that His silent intentions were best for her? She wanted so much to believe as her grandmother had; with her entire heart. But what about asking questions? Jeanne Boulet was young and curious. She naturally had many, many questions that brewed inside her, whirling around in a quizzical tornado, wrecking havoc on her heart.
“If only You would talk to me,” she said, upturning her eyes once again to the sky, searching for any little sign of… anything. She sighed, sitting down on the freshly-chewed grass. She lay her staff down across her lap, absently picking at a loose fiber of wood she spotted there.
One of the sheep looked up, it’s ears twitching nervously. Two more ewes joined the first, their rectangular pupils dilating as they looked around. Jeanne Boulet was busy picking at the wood staff, thinking about what kind of husband she might someday have, about God’s possible intentions for her life, and whether or not God controlled every little detail of everyone’s lives.
More and more sheep ceased their grazing, their bodies tensing under their woolen coats. Poor Jeanne Boulet was far too deep in thought to notice the warning signs, not before it was terminally too late.
The sheep began baying and bleating frantically, stomping and prancing, bumping into each other and then Jeanne. The young woman shot to her feet, looking around the field at the panicking animals, clutching her only means of defense tightly in her hands. The sheep split apart, moving and flowing over the ground like water, revealing just what had upset them.
Poor, poor Jeanne Boulet. She stood there, alone in the quickly emptying field, faced with something that she couldn’t quite comprehend.
It was so large. Jeanne had seen wolves before, but this was much bigger than a wolf. The creature in question was the size of a cow, lean in frame with a broad chest. It snarled at her with a wide mouth set in a flattened snout, flashing two-dozen vicious bone-daggers at the fourteen-year-old girl. It shook a dog-like head, the foreign face and pointed ears directed, focused on the unfortunate Jeanne. She noticed the color of the fur; tawny with a black stripe that ran the length of the beast’s spine. A strange color for a wolf.
Jeanne swung the stick at the enormous monster as it approached, it’s unusually long tail swayed back and forth, a little tuft on the end like some mocking decoration. She shouted at it, swinging the stick again. She stepped back, her foot hit a stone and her body tumbled backward to the ground. She saw the beast leap towards her, revealing a soft white stomach just before it pounced.
Poor Jeanne Boulet felt the full weight of the cow-sized creature hit her, the many sharp teeth closed around her slender neck. As the needly points sank into her flesh, she wondered if God was still there with her. Was he watching? She felt a very sharp pain, a pull at her throat, then she was staring up at the bloody maw of the monster.
She felt cold.
She tried to speak, to apologize to God for being mad at him. But Jeanne Boulet’s throat was gone, swallowed up by the anomalous creature. She was scared, yes, but not alone.
God was there with her, as He always had been and forever would remain. He was always there when they needed Him, always.
Jeanne Boulet closed her eyes.

END