by Jean Giono
Angelo drew close enough to touch the barrels. The gun was still pointing at him. The man had little pig’s eyes, very steady. “Got a note?” he said. As Angelo didn’t understand he explained that he meant a sort of passport issued by the mayor of the village, without which he wouldn’t be let through.
“And why?” asked Angelo.
“To make sure you aren’t sick and bringing the cholera in your pocket.”
“Hell,” thought Angelo, “this isn’t the moment to tell the truth.”
“So far from bringing it,” he said, “or wanting to bring it, I cleared out as soon as I heard there’d been a case. I went up the mountain and never went back to the village; that’s why I haven’t got a note or even a coat.”
The man was studying the horse’s head and its harness, which was very elegant: the frontal, cheekstrap, and noseband were encrusted with silver, the rosettes, curb chain and rings of the backstay were all solid silver. He darted a furtive look around him. “How much have you got?” he asked in a low voice. Angelo gaped. “Yes,” said the man, “what it takes. Everything has to be explained to you, I see; you really are from the mountain,” and he rubbed his thumb over his forefinger as if he were counting coins.
This naïveté saved Angelo from a much greater danger than that of missing his dinner. He was so glad, after days of heroism, to meet a man whose cunning spoke to him of the refreshing peace of self-interest, that he was literally fascinated. He was also extremely hungry, and in spite of his aloofness the cholera was beginning to weigh on his mind.
“Of course I have,” said Angelo stupidly.
“Would you have at least a hundred francs?” said the man.
“Yes,” said Angelo.
“I shall need two hundred,” said the man, “but get off the road and go round by the little stream down there. Watch out if you see the other guards through the trees; they’ve gone on patrol as far as the barricade on the Saint-Vincent road; then come up here from that side. Don’t try to bolt, I’ve got you covered, and remember, my boy, I’m not the least bit squeamish about shooting a man.” He pulled back his sackcloth sleeve and showed on his arm—which was enormous and hairy—the official tattoo-mark of the convict on heavy labor. He also tried to roll his little pig’s eyes in a frightening manner, but Angelo, on the contrary, couldn’t help drawing great comfort from this performance, and even from his shaven face, which displayed the signs of many vices.
Nevertheless, as he crossed the stream, after making sure that the undergrowth was empty as far as he could see, he took advantage of the moment when he was passing close to a thick clump of alders, which hid him to the waist, to put his hand in his pocket and count out ten louis into his handkerchief.
“The rest,” he said to himself, “you can come and search for. You’ve been most obliging, but I need it. I’ll show you that we in the mountains can handle a pistol too.” It was pleasant, having to deal only with two-footed riffraff.
“You’re taking a long time,” shouted the man. “This is no time for counting daisies. I bet you stole that horse. Those who can’t ride should walk, my boy. I’m for sharing the wealth; you’ll find that out. Get a move on. All right, let’s see the color of it,” he said when Angelo got near him.
“Moron,” thought Angelo, “can’t you see that if I tighten the reins and use my spurs you’ll get both my horse’s front hoofs in your chest? And then, good-bye to your cash.”
“Here’s what I have,” he said, “if it means anything to you,” and he pulled six twenty-franc pieces out of his handkerchief.
“That’s what you say,” said the man, “but I prefer chimes. Fork out the rest. Who’s to stop me giving you a barrelful and saying you tried to rush the sentry?” “Those men coming down the hill there would stop you for sure,” said Angelo coldly, and he took one of his feet out of the stirrup. The man turned his head to look toward the hill and instantly received a booted toe on the chin. He fell backward, dropping his gun. With a leap, Angelo was on him and pressing the pistol into the small of his back.
“Hold on, citizen, stop this fooling,” said the man. “Where did you learn to vault? I’ve been obliging, haven’t I? Don’t play with firearms. I could have made you cough up when you were the other side. I don’t mind telling you, I thought of it, only you seemed so stupid. You’re a good one at hiding your game, you know.”
“Better than you think,” said Angelo, “and I haven’t yet shown you all I know. But I’m a decent fellow, and I’ll let you keep what I gave you if you’ll find me something to eat.”
Angelo threw the gun twenty paces the other side of the barricade and ran his hand rapidly down the man’s sides to make sure he had no knife in his belt; the sackcloth uniform he was wearing had, moreover, no pockets.
“Being a guest of the government makes a fellow rusty,” said the man, getting up. “Five years ago that pirouette of yours would have misfired, young man!”
“The main thing is that it went off at the right moment,” said Angelo, smiling. He had a considerable liking for this fat man who was as ugly as a louse.
“If you’re a philosopher,” said the man, “that’s fine. I’ve some sausage and bread, will that do? They’ve been pampering us, ever since they made hospital orderlies out of us. You could have shown a bit more respect for my gun, though. This is what I get for being helpful.”
In spite of his saliva, Angelo waited till he was mounted before biting into his hunk of bread. While the man was going round the barricade to fetch his gun he galloped toward a thick clump of willows, passed them, and galloped on for another half hour after having passed them.
Night was falling, but he trotted on for a good hour before it was dark. He saw that he was coming to the meeting of the valleys and that his path joined a main road running at right angles to it. “One must act here as one would in enemy territory,” he thought, “and I’m learning fast. There may be more of those barricades; I’ll cut across the fields.” He had on his right the lower part of the stream that had enabled him to pass round the convict’s barrier, and he could hear it, a little farther down, join a more important stream, which was rolling pebbles briskly along in the silence of the night. “Cross over,” he told himself, “and keep at an equal distance from the road, whose poplars you’ll always be able to make out, and this water, which is chattering too loudly to be overlooked.” He was delighted at having to make use of his military sense. He had been dreading the return of night and the memory of that “poor little Frenchman,” snarling in vain up there at the foxes or the captain’s quicklime.
First he fell into some bramble bushes and only extricated himself with difficulty, leaving strips of his shirt behind; then he got onto a flat stubble field where he could walk in peace. The night was very thick, and there was not a star to be seen. He heard, close by him at various times, the silky sighs of the thickets he had made out at sunset.
The stubble continued indefinitely. From time to time the horse stumbled against the low banks of irrigation channels, but recovered at once with an adroit twist of the haunches. Soon Angelo thought: “All these fields must belong to a village, or at least to three or four big farms. It’s amazing that they don’t bring me to a house. It’s not late, and there ought to be light in the windows.” After looking hard, he saw in the depths of the darkness a few wan façades. Some of them seemed to have their doors and windows wide open.
“I must also,” he thought, “be passing near some huge arbors or thickets of jasmine whose flowers have been slashed by some storm and are rotting,” for he could smell a violent odor of sweetened dung. At length he realized that it was the smell of corpses left to rot and, despite the imprudence of doing so, he spurred his horse, which shuddered, but continued forward with extreme caution.
In these uplands the nightingales were nesting late. Angelo heard a great number of them calling to each other from thicket to thicket. In the hollow night their trills had an extraordinary luster. He remembered that these bir
ds were meat-eaters. He had some peculiar thoughts about them, about the rotting corpses they must be eating and about those golden raptures puring back from the walls of darkness.
The smell, like that of crushed jasmine, soon became a much stronger one, so dense that, but for the night, one would doubtless have seen it swirling like smoke. Angelo, whose need to eat had been far from appeased by the convict’s piece of sausage and hunk of bread, found it most appetizing, though most repugnant. It was as if someone were cooking, over charcoal, an enormous thrush; a fine blue woodcock; a pheasant fit for an old gourmand. “I don’t much care for game,” he thought, “but I gather it’s a great standby for those who have nothing left but the table, and helps one get along without love. Anyway, just now, I wouldn’t say no to a few slices of toast spread with gamy meat properly cooked.” In the end, though, the smell was too strong not to become rapidly disagreeable, and made him feel sick: he was obliged to lean over and vomit up a flood of very salty saliva.
At one moment his path was barred by a dark bulk, which he recognized as a thicket, wider and deeper than the others. He didn’t want to become entangled in undergrowth in the darkness; he had no desire to dismount; he made his way round the grove and then perceived, ahead of him, some lights glowing as red as blood. He realized that he was approaching a sort of hollow, at the bottom of which, no doubt, was the bonfire from which the smell came. This was now frankly unpleasant and even rather disturbing. Mingled in it one could distinguish the balm of resin and the special scent of beechwood smoke, but as a whole it suggested monstrous and unusual things. For all the disgust inspired by this monstrosity, it still appealed directly to the desire to eat.
As Angelo advanced, the lights grew more and more dazzling, although they retained that almost dark intensity of color peculiar to blood. He noticed that they gave off a smoke blacker than the night, so heavy that it sank back to the ground and rolled along in greasy slabs. Soon he could see the white heart of the bonfire.
He heard someone who must be on sentry duty there hail him and call: “Monsieur Rigoard.”
“I’m not Monsieur Rigoard,” said Angelo.
“Monsieur Mazouillier?”
“Not him either,” said Angelo.
“Who are you then?” said the man, coming out of the shadows and approaching.
“Someone profoundly astonished,” said Angelo. “What’s going on here?”
“Where are you from?” said the man. His features were barely visible, but he seemed quite ordinary, and his voice still had the gentleness usual when welcoming someone who has come to help you out of a ticklish situation.
“I’m trying to get down toward Marseille,” said Angelo, eluding the question.
“You’re going in the wrong direction,” said the man; “you’ve got your back to it.”
“Do you mean I must turn back?”
“Yes, and that’s lucky,” said the man; “they wouldn’t let you through here.”
“Why not?” said Angelo.
“Because of the cholera,” said the man. “Nobody’s being allowed into Sisteron, and you’re at the gates of the town, don’t you realize?” He pointed to the right, above the red glows. It was true; they lit, high up in the sky, a pale town and a citadel clinging to a rock.
“Nothing doing for me in that direction,” said Angelo, as though talking to himself. “But what’s that great fire down there?” he added.
“We’re burning the dead,” said the man. “We’ve run out of quicklime.” Angelo suddenly wondered whether there was not, somewhere, mixed up with the universe an enormous joke being played.
“You’ve not seen Monsieur Rigoard?” the man asked naïvely.
“I don’t know him,” said Angelo, “and anyhow, nobody can see two yards ahead.”
“I wonder what they’re up to,” said the man. “They should have been here an hour ago. I’m getting fed up with this.” He wanted to talk. Angelo was as fascinated by the funeral pyre, the slow ceremony of the red flames and the greasy smoke, as he had been by that reassuring depravity imprinted on the convict’s face.
The man said that an emergency committee had been set up of well-meaning men; but that he had always had doubts about M. Rigoard. “The rich always rush to get their names on some list; but when it’s a question of getting to work, they leave everything to poor bastards like me. I knew he’d leave me by myself all night. I was sure, I was, that the first time it’d be necessary to come here in the middle of the night with a tumbrel full of dead, there’d be just me, just a few poor bastards. In point of fact, there’s only me. The others are convicts. And yet it was M. Rigoard, M. Mazouillier, M. Terrasson, M. Barthélémy, all the bigwigs, who thought up this system of building a bonfire here and making the convicts cart the dead to it. In the middle of the night, so as not to ‘alarm the populace.’ To hell with the populace! The cart made more noise on the cobbles than all the drums of the regiment, and now there’s this fire visible a league off and beckoning at their windows. Not to mention the smell. That must be lovely.” Indeed the town, above the red flames, was silent and greenish.
“Are there many dead?” asked Angelo.
“Eighty-three this evening,” said the man.
Angelo turned his horse suddenly, but the man leaped forward and seized the bridle. “Wait for me, sir,” he said; “do you think I’m really any use here, now, at this fire? It could burn two or three hundred of them without being stoked. I’ve done my duty, believe me. I must say I don’t want to stay here.”
“All right, all right, come along,” said Angelo, in a voice that he made as gentle as he could.
The man knew a trail leading to the road. It was the one by which he had come with the cart. At one moment the horse shied away from a form lying right in the middle of the trail, on which it had nearly stepped. The man struck a light, saying he was sure, all the same, that they hadn’t lost any corpses. He leaned over, holding his light at arm’s length. “It’s a convict,” he said. “A moment ago he was with me, and now he’s dead. Let’s get on, sir, please.” He blew out his light and walked on, leading the horse by the bridle.
“Keep me company as far as the sentry post, if you don’t mind, sir. It’s not far,” he said, when they had reached the road. They walked for a few more minutes in the darkness, then saw the light of a lantern that had been hung on the barricade.
“Would you like a cigar?” said Angelo.
“I won’t say no,” said the man. They each lit one of the little cigars. “That’s quite set me up again,” said the man. “Your way lies over there. Stick to the road. Don’t cut across the fields again: there are bogs in which you might have some trouble.”
“How about on the road?” said Angelo. “Don’t you think there’ll be a little lantern, like that one, where I’ll have some trouble?”
“Not for two leagues,” said the man; “not till you get to Château-Arnoux.”
“And then what?” said Angelo.
“I don’t know,” said the man, “but in your place I’d rather kill four or five people, even by biting them, than stay here. Somewhere else it may be worse, but you never know.”
* * *
“And yet he stays,” thought Angelo, watching him run toward the barricade. “I’d better go back and have another look at that convict lying across the track down there. He looked him over pretty hastily, I thought. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Has one the right to abandon a human being? And even if he dies, shouldn’t one do all one can to give him an easier death? Remember the poor little Frenchman, and how he looked for the last ones in every corner, ‘those who still have a chance,’ as he put it.”
He searched for the branching-off of the earth track along which they had come. He must have passed it; he retraced his steps. But the track must have emerged through a patch of grass; he tried in vain, groping along the banks, light in hand, to try to find the cart tracks. He remounted and set off toward the south. He was highly displeased with himself. He could see once m
ore the ironic look of the “poor little Frenchman” and even the terrible irony imprinted on his face in its death agony.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was impossible to tell if the night was ending. On all sides there were opaque shadows. The road led through woods.
Several times Angelo, advancing at a walk, had a feeling that he was passing close by hidden people. His nerves were on edge, and he felt more and more displeased with himself. He was sorry he hadn’t stayed with the captain to dig the graves. If he could have found a way back, he would certainly have done something foolish. He had even reached the stage of thinking, not only that he was vulgar and base, but also that his face must have become vulgar and base; that his whole attitude, his way of riding, even his ease of manner, were vulgar and base.
“Without someone watching you, you’re worthless,” he told himself. “Since you couldn’t find the path, you should have covered the fields until you came upon that convict, who must now be dying, and brought him back to the sentry post, where they’d have looked after him. Or at least have made certain he was indisputably dead. Afterward, you’d have had the right to go on your way, but not before. Otherwise, you have no quality.” And he even told himself: “You say it was difficult. Not at all. You had only to return toward the red flames, to the place where you met that frightened man, who was doing his duty in spite of his fright, and whom you’ve no right to judge anyway since you’ve never stayed in the middle of the night by a bonfire burning eighty corpses, and you don’t know if, in his place, you wouldn’t have done worse.”
He was perfectly sincere. He entirely forgot the night and day during which he had ceaselessly tended the child and the “poor little Frenchman,” as well as his vigil beside the two corpses, when he had behaved extremely well.
