A King Alone

by Jean Giono

  From then on the great walls of the sky will be painted evening after evening with colors that facilitate our acceptance of cruelty and free the ritual sacrificers from any and all remorse. Daubed in purple, the west bleeds on the rocks; they are incontestably more gorgeous when washed in blood than when a summer evening coats them a satiny pink or a pretty azure at the hour when Venus looks as delicate as a grain of barley. Pale green, violet, stains of sulfur, and even sometimes, where the light is brightest, a handful of plaster, while the three other walls of the sky cram together to form compact blocks of a night that is no longer smooth and shiny but suspect, condensed into enigmatic structures: such are the subjects of meditation that the monastery frescoes of the mountains offer us to contemplate. While in the shadow, the trees are tireless as they shake their tiny rattles of dry wood.

  •

  The sawmill beech had not yet reached, of course, the magnitude it has today. But in its youth (well, at least in relation to today), or more accurately its adolescence, it was already of a stature and fabric that placed it head and shoulders above the other trees, even all the other trees combined. Its foliage was thick and bushy, dense as stone; its trunk (which could not be seen, covered as it was with small impenetrable branches) must have been of a rare strength and beauty to bear so much accumulated weight with such grace. And it was (at the time) filled to the brim with birds and flies; it had as many birds and flies as leaves. Crows, rooks, swarming things plowed into it and shook it continually; at every moment it released splashes of nightingales and titmouses and vapors of wagtails and bees; it breathed out falcons and gadflies; it juggled multihued balls of finches, gold-crests, robins, plovers, and wasps. All around it was an endless dance of birds, butterflies, and bugs; and the sun seemed to break up into rainbows through bursts of sea spray. And in fall, with its long crimson strands, its thousand arms entwined with green serpents, its hundred thousand hands of golden foliage playing with feathered pom-poms, strings of birds, and crystal dust, it was no longer really a tree. The forests, seated on the mountain terraces, ended up staring at it in silence. It crackled like an inferno; it danced as only supernatural beings know how to dance, its body proliferating around its immobility; it swayed in a twisting of scarves, so quivering, so bronze, so indefatigably remolded by the euphoria of its body that you could no longer tell if it was anchored by the clinging of its prodigious roots or by the miraculous speed of the tip of the spinning top on which the gods take their rest. The forests, sitting on the bleachers of the mountain amphitheater in their grand priestly vestments, no longer dared to move. That masterful beauty was as hypnotizing as the eye of a snake or the blood of wild geese on snow. And all along the roads that went up to or came down from that beauty, a procession of maples stained with blood like butchers fell in line.

  Which did not prevent the winter of 1844 from arriving; on the contrary. And Bergues disappeared. He wasn’t missed right away. He was a bachelor and no one could say exactly when the world noticed his disappearance. He was a poacher; he hunted the most improbable things; he loved nature; he was sometimes absent for a week. But, in the winter of ’44, people began to worry after four or five days.

  Everything you saw at his place made you fear the worst. First, his door wasn’t closed; his snowshoes and rifle were there; his jacket, lined with sheepskin, hung on its nail. Sadder yet: his plate, with its congealed remnants of rabbit stew (you could see traces left by a piece of bread he’d used to sop up the gravy), was on the table next to half a glass of wine. He must have been in the middle of eating; something, someone must have called him outside; he went out right away, perhaps without even swallowing his mouthful of stew. His hat was on the bed.

  This time, the villagers were terrified like a flock of sheep. In broad daylight (overcast, dark, blue, snow, cloud cutting the arrow of the steeple), you heard the women crying, the children shouting, doors slamming, and it was an uphill battle to try to decide anything. Everyone talked about the gendarmes; no one wanted to go fetch them. One had to travel three leagues in solitude beneath the black sky and, because it was a question of Bergues—a mature man, sturdy, brave, the cleverest of all—no one felt sturdy enough, brave enough, or clever enough. Finally, four of them agreed to go together.

  People even avoided Bergues’s house as if it belonged to a victim of the plague. It stood gaping right onto the snow in the street; its door, which no one had the courage to close, was wide open and the sky overhead seemed even darker than the inside of his house.

  Before the four emissaries to the royal gendarmerie in Clelles departed, the entire village came out and stood quietly around them; those emissaries looked very serious and quite pale behind their beards as they placed their weapons in their braces and secured belts filled with boar cartridges, an entire arsenal of sharp knives, naked blades, and even a small ax on their padded jackets. At last they put on their snowshoes; then, climbing very slowly up the hillside behind which the main road passes, they disappeared. All that was left to do now was to barricade yourself inside.

  You can easily imagine the stories these four men told at the gendarmerie in Clelles after walking several leagues in sheer solitude in the dying light. Despite the overcast sky and the state of the roads that prevented quick journeys, there must have been a lively and immediate exchange of dispatch riders between the police quarters in Mens and Monétier because, at eleven that night, along with the four emissaries who were guiding it, a small company of six gendarmes on horseback arrived in the village with weapons and bags and a captain named Langlois.

  They were all old soldiers and immediately they began to growl and grumble with such familiarity that everyone felt completely reassured. They requisitioned the stables for their horses and set up a bivouac to keep watch right in the town square, with a sentry box made from boards, and sentinels, patrols, passwords, the whole thing. Langlois took a very long clay pipe from his haversack and, seated behind the windows of the Café de la Route, he directed the operations.

  Despite this long clay pipe, the fur-lined slippers, and a deerskin cap under which he sheltered his ears, Langlois was a right rascal. He shed some light on things; it was a sinister light, but light nonetheless.

  The table on which Bergues had eaten his last meal faced a window. This window did not look out onto the street but onto the meadows. Langlois sat where Bergues had sat to eat his stew. Langlois mimicked Bergues eating his stew and soaking up the gravy with the piece of bread that had left its traces in the congealed fat. As he did so, Langlois was led to look through the window and he asked, “What’s over that way?” (and it was a good question because, over that way, like over every way that season, was snow, and gray, bluish, and black cotton); over that way was the Avers road. Langlois sent for his boots. While waiting for them to be brought to him, he explained that in his opinion Bergues had been in the middle of eating when he must have seen something extraordinary that immediately drew him outside.

  Once his boots were on, Langlois and one of his men left in the direction in which Bergues must have gone. They didn’t get far. They went just up to the spot where the mist and the cloud began to erase them. There, they motioned for the others to join them. And while the others set out toward them, they advanced another twenty steps, that is, as far as the village was concerned, they walked straight into the cloud; from the village, they surely could no longer be seen. Those who were on their way to join them could still see because they were getting closer. Langlois and his man were leaning over something. It was not Bergues. It was a large trampling of crows’ feet. In digging down some twenty centimeters through the snow (which was about the depth of the snow that had fallen over the past six days—taking into account the settling produced by the night freeze and the wind), they found a large patch of blood-bound snow.

  So this was where Bergues had ended up. Behind the curtain of clouds. And from there? Nothing. Only the snow, untouched all around except for the tracks left by Langlois and the gendarme, and
those who had joined them.

  Patrols were sent out to look for the body. Not unsystematically, as in the case of Marie Chazottes, but methodically, in squads of four, each squad led by a gendarme to a precise sector that Langlois had marked in pencil on a map of the canton. Nothing was found. Obviously there was a 99 percent chance that the snow—or the thaw—would give up the body. But the thaw had not given up Marie Chazottes’s body. After two weeks, Langlois went back to the Café de la Route, took up his long clay pipe again, and once again put on his slippers and his deerskin cap.

  “What I need to know,” he said, “is why they are being killed and carried off. It’s not to steal. It’s not women killers because of Bergues and, also, Ravanel Georges . . . If we were in Zululand, I would say it was to eat them . . . Other than that, I just can’t see what it could be.”

  New, very precise passwords were given to everyone. The school was closed. People were advised not to leave the village for any reason, even in broad daylight (still overcast, dark, blue, snow and cloud, by the way); if there was no avoiding it, then it should be in a group under the guard of two gendarmes. And in the village itself, people were told not to go out alone; there should be at least two men and at least three women. Two gendarmes were on duty in the town square; four others, two by two, did rounds of the town. Twice a day Langlois put his boots back on and made a careful inspection, nosing about in all the courtyards, barnyards, nooks, crannies, and cul-de-sacs. At three in the afternoon, final chores: wood, fodder for the barns that were separate from their houses, and at four o’clock, curfew. The outside patrols came in. The entire company made the rounds of all the houses, one after the other, and a sentinel remained stationed at the sentry box in the town square. Twice a night, patrols went through the village. Langlois made everyone hang an old basin and a cudgel on their front door. At the slightest thing, the order was to bang on the basin with the cudgel with all one’s might.

  “I prefer,” Langlois had said, “to be disturbed twenty times for nothing than to miss the one time that matters. So don’t hesitate; if something scares you, bang.” (Langlois was a fine man: delicate mustache, a nice shirtfront, a certain elegance; he knew how to speak and wasn’t lazy.)

  After what I’ve told you, do you perhaps get the impression that the people were a bit cowardly? Naturally: we aren’t there; they are. And yet, they didn’t bang on their basins every second; they only banged once—the afternoon when Callas Delphin-Jules disappeared from the face of the earth.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” Langlois said after a week of cursing and racing through the woods that were lost in the clouds. “I can’t do anything about it. I am not God and you are a bunch of imbeciles. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: ‘Don’t go out alone, even in broad daylight.’ Your Delphin’s wife claims that he wanted to go out alone ‘to sit on the dunghill.’ I can understand that. But how hard is it to keep on your toes: one, two, and it’s over in a flash, do you understand? Do I need to draw you a picture? When she finally decided to bang on her pot, more than an hour had gone by since your Delphin had left. I told her, ‘Birdbrain, you should have banged after five minutes.’ She said to me, ‘My Delphin took longer than five minutes. He smoked his pipe out there!’ Stupid biddy! Well, there goes another. And this one right out from under our noses. Don’t I look clever now!”

  •

  Callas Delphin-Jules! We know what that one looked like. Barely two years earlier, he’d had his portrait painted with his wife, Anselmie, their pinkies linked. The portrait is here, at the Honoriuses’; I’ve seen it. Go over there, you’ll see it. The Honoriuses are from Corps but Honorius’s sister-in-law, well, I don’t know, some first-cousin thing that I confess I don’t know very much about. Normally we should know those things, but in this case, it’s not clear; I don’t really know. What’s certain is that the sister-in-law, the cousin, inherited from a Callas from here. No. I know, wait, I’m on the right track now. It isn’t the sister-in-law or the cousin, it’s Honorius’s aunt, his mother’s sister who inherited from a Callas, who was her brother-in-law, her husband’s brother and the grandson of the brother of Callas Delphin-Jules. There, that’s it. I knew I would remember. I’ve followed the family lines of everyone who participated in the thing. To see how they now figure in the present (but we’ll get to that later). When the aunt died, there was a settlement and the Honoriuses from Corps got the use of the house here with all its furnishings. The house is where they opened their grocery and notions shop, and it was among these furnishings that I found the photograph of Callas Delphin-Jules and Anselmie.

  Anselmie! You can understand Langlois. She must have stood before him (no doubt in her Sunday best on that occasion, because she was now a widow) just as she is in the portrait: her body incomprehensible under all those petticoats, bodices, bustles, and belts binding and trussing and encircling her from all sides and back to front; the head of a goat, the eyes of an antediluvian mammal, a mouth like it’s been slit by a saw, and two nostrils turned up toward the rain. More stubborn than a mule! Stubborn as the statue of a mule! Next to her was Delphin-Jules, whose last joy since he’d had the imprudence to latch on to Anselmie’s pinkie, the last joy and the one for which he risked his life, was to go smoke his pipe sitting on the dunghill.

  But as far as can still be made out on that old, pale yellow daguerreotype, Delphin-Jules’s features yield a tiny clue that is not to be overlooked. His face is round and babyish, with a thick handlebar mustache that emphasizes the girth of his cheeks, the heaviness of his chin, and the size of his jowls resting in three folds on his Souvaroff collar. If at the time there had been color photographs, there is no question that we would now see that Delphin was built from red flesh—good, bloody meat.

  Ravanel Georges, if we are to judge from today’s Ravanel, the truck driver, also had this appeal. Marie Chazottes, obviously, was not fat and red, but that’s the point. She had dark brown hair that made her look very pale, but what’s the expression that immediately comes to mind (I used it a while ago) when you want to suggest all the sparkling spiciness of those little brunettes? “Two pinches of pepper”—that’s it. In Marie Chazottes, we don’t find the quantity of blood we find in Ravanel (who was spied on) or Delphin (murdered) but we find a quality of blood, liveliness, and fire; I’m not talking about taste. I’ve never, as you can imagine, tasted anyone’s blood; and I also have to say that this story isn’t the story of a man who drank, sucked, or consumed blood (in our times, I wouldn’t have bothered to mention such a common act); I’m not talking about the taste (salty no doubt). I mean that, with her very dark hair and her very white skin, it’s easy to imagine the pepper of Marie Chazottes, to imagine that her blood was very beautiful. I said beautiful. Let’s speak like a painter.

  I’m not forgetting Bergues. Not that he’s all that important, poor fellow, but he was courageous, generous, impulsive—not a victim but a vanquished adversary. It’s as if Langlois himself had disappeared.

  Obviously there’s a way of looking at the world, not unlike in economics, where Langlois’s blood and Bergues’s blood are equal in value to the blood of Marie Chazottes, Ravanel, and Delphin-Jules. But then there is another way of looking that includes the first, according to which Abraham and Isaac proceed logically, one following the other, toward Mount Moriah; in which the obsidian knives of the priests of Quetzalcoatl logically drive deep into selected hearts. And it is through beauty that we come to know this. Impossible to live in a world believing that the sublime splendor of the guinea fowl’s plumage is meaningless. Just an aside. I wanted to say it. I have.

  Langlois decamped in early May. Even though the gargoyles and gutters groaned beneath enormous rivers of rain, people were more reassured by the arrival of spring than by the presence of the company of gendarmes. Many who hadn’t slept for three months found deep slumber again at the sound of the great torrents hurtling through the combes.

  As soon as the lovely light at the end of the
rains appeared, when Le Jocond emerges from shreds of fog like a pure emerald, the distant Veymont shimmers, and the sliding away of carmine clouds reveals the high country of shadow and ice that sleeps on top of the mountains of L’Obiou, Le Ferrand, and Le Taillefer, people had the sense they were living again; a sense precisely of living a second time, along with the desire to take advantage of everything they hadn’t the first time. The Workers’ Circle dates from this period, and it’s still going on. Burlet’s father, Cather’s father, Sazerat’s mother, Pierrisnard’s father, Julie’s mother, Raffin’s father, Antoinette Save’s mother, Lambert’s mother, Horatius’s mother, Clément’s father, Cléristin’s cousin (the one who bequeathed the barn to the Protestant cemetery), Fernand Pierre, who was the oldest man in the canton and who died three years ago, were all born in March or April of ’45. One learns, for example, that René Martin’s beautiful house, which he got from his father, had been bequeathed to his father by a man named Coursier who as a bachelor had no family to leave it to. That inheritance dates from July ’44. Sazerat: his father was a schoolteacher because a childless man named Richaud Marie paid for his studies in Grenoble. Sazerat can tell you: his father had left school in ’39. He was five years old. He was tending to the cows. In June of ’44, Richaud swore before a notary that he’d support him until he got his teaching certificate. This is how, in the public records office of the commune and in the notarial archives in Prébois, there remain traces of the efforts the people from here made in order to live outside the normal system during the spring and summer of ’44.