Books: Christian Animals

RUMOR IN THE FOREST (152 pp.) —Madeleine Couppey, translated by Marguerite Waldman—Scribner ($2).

A rabbit named Muc speaks:

“There can’t be two laws, two kinds of happiness, two kinds of love. And freedom doesn’t count before love. . . . You’ll never be richer or freer than in divesting yourselves of your selves. If you give only half your life, the other half will be resentful and its reproaches will rob you of joy. . . . Why worry about those who consume us? The vine and the corn do not refuse themselves to the unworthy. . . . Be a sacrifice in the universal sacrifice . . . come to Love . . . Love is strong enough to save the world. . . .”

Muc’s words are addressed to a pigeon named Grey-Flight, Muc, the pigeon, a dog and a cat are the chief characters in Madeleine Couppey’s beautiful allegory, which has already gone into 58 editions in France. All the animals in Rumor in the Forest experience inner torture in their common search for the ultimate meaning of life. About them, the trees of the dense forest look on with understanding, and are themselves capable of being hurt and forgiving. Skeptical readers who doubt that a moving tale of love, renunciation and death can be brought off as an animal story had better turn to Rumor in the Forest.

Escape from Man. In the beginning, the rabbit in the hutch, the domestic pigeon, the hearth cat and the farm dog all agree that freedom, especially freedom from man, will bring total happiness. They escape to the forest, but as time goes on, their happiness wears thin. It is the rabbit that gives words to the principle which ultimately wins them all and becomes a rumor in the forest: renunciation of self, even of personal freedom and of life if necessary, to help establish “that law of love which should govern all the world, prevent it from shriveling like an old furze-bush.”

What is remarkable about Rumor in the Forest is the fact that the characters are credible as animals while the reader himself almost subconsciously does the job of transferring their thoughts and words into the minds and mouths of men.

Unschooled Prose. It is equally remarkable to get such pure prose from a young (28) woman who never got beyond primary school. Normandy-born Madeleine Couppey was born in poverty, became a housemaid in her early teens. At 16 she was washing cars in a Paris garage.

When the Germans came, she fled to a small village where she—wrote Rumor in the Forest, returned to Paris in 1941 and worked in the Resistance movement until war’s end.

Miss Couppey’s only other book is Chansons pour Moi, a volume of quiet, unaffected verse. Rumor in the Forest’s calm, allegorical reaffirmation of Christ-like love is all the more effective because it too never raises its voice.