Mitchell_-_Gone_with_the_Wind.pdf

Gone with the Wind

Mitchell, Margaret

Published: 1936

Type(s): Novels, Romance

Source: http://gutenberg.net.au

About Mitchell:

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949),

as Margaret Mitchell was an American author, who won the Pulitzer Pr-

ize in 1937 for her novel, Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. The

novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 28

million copies (see list of best-selling books). An American film adapta-

tion, released in 1939, became the highest-grossing film in the history of

Hollywood, and received a record-breaking number of Academy

Awards.

Source: Wikipedia

Life+50.

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ans après mort de l'auteur.

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Part 1

Chapter 1

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when

caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too

sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of

French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was

an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale

green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and

slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted up-

ward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that

skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bon-

nets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of

Tara, her father's plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she

made a pretty picture. Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its

twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched

the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought

her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist,

the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed

breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the modesty of her

spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon

and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self

was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were

turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous

demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's

gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes

were her own.

On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, squint-

ing at the sunlight through tall mint-garnished glasses as they laughed

and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle

muscles, crossed negligently. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall,

long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn

hair, their eyes merry and arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue

coats and mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two

bolls of cotton.

Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing in-

to gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses of

white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins' horses

were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their masters' hair; and

around the horses' legs quarreled the pack of lean, nervous possum

hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent wherever they went. A little

aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle

on paws, patiently waiting for the boys to go home to supper.

Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship

deeper than that of their constant companionship. They were all healthy,

thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, the boys as

mettlesome as the horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous but,

withal, sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.

Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot

since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor

soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent

all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull

things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still

new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charle-

ston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South

looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north

Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame,

provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good

cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies

with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things

that mattered.

In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally

outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained

between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses,

more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less gram-

mar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors.

It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the

porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been expelled from the

University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in

two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with

them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins

were not welcome. Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a

fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since

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