“But of course, Finiels … we have crossed the passes together in the bad season.”
Finiels began to laugh.
“You have seen the snow and the storm, I remember: one real storm too, but in a safe place, with a good road under the snow, the village ahead, your head clear, a well-filled knapsack, and a draught of rum to set you up.”
Finiels pronounced it “ron,” but I knew quite well what he meant; I remembered this draught of rum taken in the storm, without which I should not perhaps have taken another step through the snow.
“Besides, even that was a safe part of the mountain, a part where you can get by. … If you wish to have a bad time, go off the road, turn to the right or the left into the forest or on the plateau: after a hundred yards you will no longer know where you are, and if you have ventured over the crests, you can call yourself a dead man.”
Old Liron broke in:
“Before the road went through, no one crossed the mountain in wid-winter. At other times, people took the great trail over the crests, and even this was quite an undertaking. At the first notch there was a house, however, the only one at that time, which was called ‘Campanette.’ It took its name from a bell which the guard rang every hour through the bad days of autumn or when the winter was not too advanced and you might still expect travellers. … This did not prevent people from getting lost on the mountain, and sometimes they even circled for hours about the bell and died a hundred yards from the refuge without being able to find the door.”
I had known these stories from my childhood. Campanette and its old guard and the score of tales that belong to them—the two gendarmes carried off by the storm, the Lozerotte family entirely buried by the snow, the merchant of Meyrueis eaten by wolves. … I felt I knew thoroughly the mountain that I had crossed many times in mid-winter and I rather suspected all those mountaineers of exaggerating the perils it offers.
These grave and restrained men—so different from the peasants of the neighbouring plain, who are often joyous and always excessive—do not know how to exaggerate or even change a story. Unlike the other Southerners, they do not know how to modify their moral world, their ideas and their feelings. They consider them always with the austere exactitude, the cold precision, of economical and provident men. When these mountaineers judge a man from the moral point of view, they never condemn utterly: even their custom of referring everything to the Bible has not been able to change them in this respect, and if, following Scripture, they speak of the wicked and the impious in every connection, it is only to express general condemnation; not to sit in judgment on anyone whom they know.
But, to make up, they always exaggerate the power of natural forces and, for them, the most trifling storm unhorns the cattle and the least flood carries away the whole valley. …
I knew too well this tendency of their minds not to be a bit sceptical when I heard them speak of the dangers of the mountain. These men, who are extremely mature morally, and who, through the wealth and richness of their emotions and their self-control, share in the most exacting civilisation, have none the less remained primitive in the presence of natural forces. …
The old mountaineer, sensing my distrust, persisted in trying to convince me:
“I remember those days of the Campanette: there were those terrible winters then when no word came down from the upper villages for two months. When people died, they carried them out into the snow, twenty yards from their houses, and did not bury them until spring. You found them weeks after, looking as if they had died there the evening before. …
“Now, the postman always goes as far as these villages, except during two or three bad weeks: so much so that you might think that the road had changed the climate of the mountain, and this is true for the inhabited parts and for the guard-houses.
“But as I told you just now, go a little to the right or the left off the road and you will find the old-time winter. I even found it once myself, fifteen years ago, and I can tell you about it. I had nimbler legs then than I have now, and stronger ones, yet I surely thought I had met my finish there. …
“This was before the war; Monsieur Rolland had come to the château for Christmas with a gentleman from Paris. It was a fine winter; beautiful weather, very dry and firm in the valley, which must mean frightful cold on the mountain.
“One fine day, monsieur came to find me, with this other gentleman from Paris.
“ ‘Finiels, we want to make an excursion to Aire de Côte.’
“ ‘There is a lot of snow up there, and we are getting near the time for bad weather. This is not the season for excursions, especially over by Aire de Côte, where there is no road. If you want to see wild country, monsieur would do better to come back this summer.’
“ ‘What we want is to see the wildest slope of the mountain covered with snow; we canot find a better guide than you. You must go with us. …’
“I protested. Monsieur had a thousand reasons for urging me and I ended by yielding.
“The next day, we set out at three o’clock in the morning; it was clear and very calm. We climbed up to Sauveplane, passed the little meadow, and found ourselves in the fir-grove: no snow yet … at three hundred metres from the gravel pit, we drew near the ubac fields, and all of a sudden, before we knew it, we were right in the snow, perhaps a yard and a half deep, already old and bearing us well.
“Day came, and we were on the peak and these gentlemen could see in all directions. … It was, as you say, picturesque: the morning fog lay deep over the valley and made a sort of sea just at the edge of the snow. Then, very far away, beyond this great sheet, we saw other mountains and other lands emerging.
“ ‘Finiels, what is that great plain, all white, on our left?’
“ ‘Montals lies behind you, giving you the direction of the low country. … It is not a plain, monsieur; quite the contrary, a high mountain: the Causse Méjean. It is almost as high as the mountains about here, but it is as flat as a floor for threshing wheat, with no more earth and as many stones.’
“ ‘So we have the sea at our backs; we should see it between the summits of the Basses-Cévennes. …’
“ ‘You can see it in fine, very dry weather, but today you cannot see anything but the ponds over by Cette and Montpellier. The same is true in all four quarters of the horizon.’
“ ‘What a wonderful observatory!’ said Monsieur Rolland to that gentleman. ‘It is truly one of the most significant spots in France. We have the Massif Central at our back, the valley of the Rhone at our left, and the Mediterranean in front of us. The point of solidity, the point of anarchical and brutal variations, and the point of harmonious variations. …’
“He said many other things which I cannot recall now and which perhaps I did not understand very well; but I listened to them with pleasure just the same, because I have always liked to hear capable men talk. When I have well understood a sentence, I remember it for ever, like that which I have just repeated to you.
“While they were talking, the sun had finally risen. … A true summer sun that made the little particles of snow dance, like grasshoppers in a meadow.
“The walking was easy; we had long slides under the beeches, and these gentlemen were enjoying the excursion. …
“We passed Campanette: you know there is nothing left now but the walls. The gentlemen made me tell them about it: the gentleman from Paris thought it was odd. He looked at the rampart from all sides:
“ ‘So you see, Rolland,’ he said to monsieur, ‘these fine monoliths and that handsome decoration: this is certainly no recent construction.’
“And they began asking me whether the old-timers had known Campanette, if any of them said they had seen it built.
“At last we ate a bite sitting in front of the door, and when we had finished I spoke about returning. But the gentlemen told me that they wanted to follow the old trail a little way, two or three kilometres, over towards the mountain.
“ ‘It is early,’ monsieur to
ld me. “They don’t expect us before night.’
“So we took the trail and walked toward the mountain. … It was perhaps half-past eleven: the sun still fell full on the snow which hummed like a meadow. I could feel quite plainly that it was beginning to get too soft to hold us. At times it gave way and we sank in up to our knees or even to our thighs.
“The gentlemen followed the line of shade just under the fir-trees and there the snow still held well enough. … We passed the notch of Trescôumbos and climbed down a little way toward Bousuges. We were still following the trail when, all of a sudden, I found the forest right before our noses, and no trail, either to right or left. ‘Wretch,’ I said to myself, ‘we have lost our way.’ I turned round. I saw Montals on our left and far behind us. I told the gentlemen to bear to the right so as to find the trail again. They went in among the fir-trees: we walked ten minutes, no trail. At this spot the forest was old and the snow bore us well because of the shade. All at once we stumbled on a younger growth; the snow no longer held, and there we were in the drifts up to our hips, still looking for that trail on our right.
“The gentlemen, who walked well for gentlemen from the city, began to give out and I myself thought, each time, that I could not budge from my hole in the snow. I kept saying:
It was beginning to get too soft to hold us.
“ ‘The trail is twenty yards to the right; we will find snow that will bear us, further down the slope.’
“But after twenty yards there was no more trail than before, only other still deeper drifts.
“Then Monsieur Rolland began to say:
“ ‘You are mad, Finiels: we shall never get out. You are too far to the right, come back on the left. We shall find snow that will carry us.’
“I turned again and still saw Montals on the left and behind: we didn’t want to get on to the plain to lose our way in the fir-groves. I said to monsieur:
“ ‘I don’t want to contradict you, but I am going to the right. We shall get to the valley finally. Go to the left if you like, but you are a dead man.’
“Night came on: mild, but so black that you could not see three steps ahead. This was just our luck; the snow was not going to freeze until the small hours, perhaps it was even going to stay soft all night. …
“We still bore to the right, without finding the trail; fatigue gripped us and we had nothing left to eat. The gentleman from Paris slid into the snow-holes like a dead man falling into his grave: every few minutes we had to stop to let him get back his strength. … We spent the night circling like this, in the snow, like mad dogs. …
“In the morning, the cold hardened the snow and we were able to walk with less difficulty. But I did not recognise the mountain any longer and turned in all directions without finding a trail; I still bore to the right, like a madman, without even knowing why I did so. … The day dawned still warm and I felt that the snow was going to melt again. …
“To be brief, we wandered all day on the plateau, and it was only at five o’clock in the evening, that we stumbled upon Borie de Côte, like famished wolves, dead with fatigue. …”
Old Liron broke in:
“And the son of the guard of Cap de Coste who was found dead last year in the storm, fifty yards from his home. …
“Yet he was a steady, capable fellow, who was quite at home on the mountain. He had taken the field with the infantry and always in the worst spots. He had married since the war and stayed on at Saint-Jean; he worked in the spinning-mill and earned a good living, especially toward the end.
“Last Christmas, he got the idea of going to visit his father on the mountain. He set out on a very calm day, and his wife stayed at Saint-Jean and never thought of worrying for a moment.
“It was fair all day in the valley, but in the evening a storm broke over the mountain.
“You know that the guard’s house, on the Cap de Coste, is not precisely on the worst part of the mountain. It is almost on the road, and on the side that is best sheltered from the wind from above. But on this day it was just over these parts that the storm broke.
“The wind glided over the snow and detached fragments of ice that spun over it like the stones that children skip over water: and this snow and this ice whirled all night like a foaming torrent.
“The guard, who did not know that his boy was on the way up, closed his double door and went to bed quite calmly.
“Nobody knows what this boy went through that night about the house where his father slept.
“The next day the storm slackened and the old man took advantage of this to go and see whether many trees had been blown down. This was his whole duty: he watched the trees, in winter because of storms and in summer because of fire. …
“You know that fifty metres before you reach the refuge the road passes over a little bridge: the storm had driven the snow to one side, and on the other the ground was clear. Crossing the bridge, the old man saw a soldier’s knapsack partly buried in the snow. He climbed down to pick it up, and there, under the bridge that made a sort of grotto or shepherd’s hut in the snow, he found his son, seated, his eyes open straight before him, his fingers in his mouth, stiff in death, killed by the cold. …”
“This is to show you,” Finiels went on, “that you can’t fool with the mountain in winter. …
“This is why all the countryside thought that Roux would end by giving himself up.
“ ‘He’ll come down, like the wild boars, before the snow,’ they said. But plenty of snow had fallen, and Roux the Bandit had not come down from the mountain.
“The gendarmes were still watching the slopes of Sauveplane, but they never caught sight of our man. Once, however, they met him at nightfall and almost caught him: they fired several shots at him at long range and too hastily. …
“I was working that day in my vineyard at the end of the slope, over by the four roads. It is our vineyard farthest up on the mountain, the highest in the whole country. There are a few old-time terraces, a little sandy earth, and good flints to make a fire: we make a wine up there that is not first-class perhaps but I’m used to it and like it. Then, too, it’s very little trouble, and we have so few vineyards over here that we must take good care of those that we have. …
“Well, I was in this good sunny corner, busy pruning, when I caught sight of the gendarmes passing on the road, three hundred metres above my vineyard. It was all of half-past four to five o’clock and toward the end of the winter: night was beginning to fall and the fog rose from the valley. The two ‘blues’ were walking slowly toward Sauveplane, and I thought they were going to watch the approaches to it, always for the same reason. … I was not surprised: this was not the first time I had seen them at this trick. You see they must have had orders from the town: we should have been quite glad to see them catch Roux the Bandit, because his story set tongues wagging and because he was a bad example even for those who appeared to be most angry with him. …
“So I finished pruning the vines as long as it was light enough to see: then I thrust my bundle into the hut which we have at the bottom of the vineyard and prepared to go down. As I was coming down my terraces I heard a gunshot over toward Sauveplane—not the sound of a hunter’s gun but the sharp crack of an army rifle. I had forgotten my gendarmes and I stopped, saying to myself:
“ ‘Who is out after wild boars at this hour?’
“I turned toward Sauveplane and then in a few seconds, three other rifle-shots began to crackle like hail among the fields of ubac.
“ ‘The devil,’ I said to myself, ‘this is a fusillade.’ And all of a sudden I remembered my gendarmes and added: ‘You don’t know how truly you spoke! They must have surprised Roux near the farm and they are doing for him.’
“I was eager to go and see what was happening, but I was afraid of finding the boy stretched out dead by his farm, or wounded to death by the gendarmes and dying before his mother’s eyes. I would not have known just how to behave because of Finette and her girls; so I returned h
ere quietly, almost certain that Roux had been killed by the gendarmes.
“Here everybody was already talking of the thing, as they usually do. They had seen the gendarmes passing, they had heard the rifle-shots, and this was enough to make them believe that Roux the Bandit had been killed on his way to his farm.
“We should have liked to be sure of this at once, but we were all held back by the fear of finding ourselves with those women before the body of the boy. Although we had been angry with him, when we thought perhaps he had just died like a soldier in the war we felt a sort of pity for him.
“We expected to see the gendarmes appear every minute, and toward nine o’clock they did actually arrive, just as we were beginning to close our doors. But they tried to pass without saying anything and to go straight through to Saint-Jean. Liron, who recognised them, stopped them and asked:
“ ‘So there’s been hunting on the mountain today?’
“ ‘It’s not the season,’ replied the sergeant. ‘Hunting is not permitted.’
“ ‘There are some who can hunt without permission.’
“But the gendarmes walked on and did not appear to wish to talk. I had overheard Liron, from my doorstep, so I came up myself and asked them:
“ ‘You haven’t seen anyone on the mountain?’
“ ‘Nobody today,’ the sergeant answered as he moved away.
“ ‘They have missed their man,’ Liron said to me, and at that we went to bed.
“This was true. Later we learned the details of the affair, but from the first day we understood how it had happened. … As the gendarmes were on watch near the farm, they had seen Roux come out upon the little meadow near the fir-grove. The sergeant must have lost his head a bit and he had shouted to Roux to give himself up, when he was still a hundred metres away from them and close to the edge of the forest. Roux had made for the woods and the gendarmes had fired at him four times without being able to take good aim, because of the night and his running. Once Roux had disappeared into the forest, they had not wished to pursue him over the mountain, in the middle of the night. This would have been quite useless anyhow, since they did not know the short-cuts and the passes of the neighbourhood. So they had climbed down, none too proud of themselves and unwilling to speak to anybody about the matter.
Roux the Bandit Page 4
