Roux the Bandit

by Chamson, André;

  “ ‘He was an upright man. … He has set the best example in this war.’

  “ ‘If he has set the best example, you would have done well to follow him instead of running off to the mountain.’

  “Roux the Bandit looked at me, his right hand resting on his thigh and his left hand holding the cord of his bag. Then he said:

  “ ‘A pastor should always watch over the flock. If the flock goes astray and is in danger of the precipices, the pastor should follow it just the same. If sickness falls on the flock, the pastor should take care of it and remain near it, even though the sickness be carried by flies or by the air which it poisons. And as long as men make war, the pastors cannot refuse to go, because they must be wherever there is suffering and misfortune. Into the midst of war they can carry the good Word, as the pastor of Anduze was able to do. … But the duty of the Christian is not the same. He may refuse to follow the flock that goes astray, he is not obliged to accompany it in all its tribulations.’

  “Then, as if to explain to me what he had just said, Roux added in another voice:

  “ ‘Come, Finiels, you must remember that before the war there was a pastor in the town who did a great deal of good. I loved to hear him talk and I would have made real sacrifices for that man, so that I never missed one of his sermons. …

  “ ‘You may have heard it said that this pastor often went into the bad cafés in Nimes and Alais, to talk to those who were misbehaving and paid no heed to the Word. Well, in spite of all the pleasure I took in listening to him, if people had told me to follow him into those evil places, I must have replied that it was not my business, and I would have refused to listen to them.’

  “This was well said and I realised that Roux’s reason was worth something. But I had still more to say to him when he forestalled me and said:

  “ ‘I know quite well that if war is an evil thing, those who are forced to wage it are yet honest according to their sense of honesty. In saying what I have just said, I do not mean to compare them with those who live wretched lives, but to explain that the first duty of the pastor was to follow the misery of men. My duty was not the same; it was—not to risk killing my neighbour. …’

  “ ‘You could have enlisted just the same, refusing to fight and asking to take care of the others. … They certainly allowed the pastor to do so.’

  “ ‘Yes, but the pastor was a clever man and his commanders listened to him because of this. If I gave myself up, I would have had to go like the others: a peasant cannot reason with city gentlemen. They respected the pastor’s determination, but they would have done violence to my own, and nobody, neither the colonel nor the government, would even have listened to me.’

  “That was a real reason, Monsieur André, and I found myself at once of Roux’s opinion. … You cannot deny it: when he is up against the government, a peasant must do everything that is asked of him, without discussing it, or else refuse to do it altogether.”

  Finiels was going to speak further, but the door opened suddenly and the mayor, followed by the two boys from Bessède, entered the room.

  “How much does she weigh?” Finiels cried out to them amid a burst of laughter.

  “She weighs more than yours, but she is still running,” replied the mayor, seating himself near us.

  “If you had not left, we would surely have got it, but there were not enough of us to place a guard on all the trails. …”

  “We might all have stayed all night on the mountain without seeing her,” replied Finiels’s son. “I told you that at about eight o’clock the dogs had taken the wrong back-scent, and I am quite sure you did not even hear them give tongue for her.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the elder of the boys from Bessède, “we heard them pick up her scent in the Calles de Grimald, and they followed her in full cry as far as the plateau. She passed like lightning a hundred yards away from me and in my excitement I fired my gun at her twice. It was a fine animal, larger than the one Finiels killed this morning, and it snorted like an ox. The dogs were not able to round it up. There were not enough of them. … You might at least have left us yours. …”

  V

  The hunting stories, the technical discussions, and the long controversies that sometimes kept us passionately interested for hours, could not hold us today. The sound of the wind on the shutters, the wavering of the night fogs before the door, the damp and tenacious odour of the high meadows which enveloped the last comers, all those things that come from the mountain and recall it, and especially the presence of Finiels, led our thoughts back to the story of Roux. We could not make up our minds to talk of anything else with interest or even with indifference. The mayor and the two boys from Bessède did not, for that matter, try to continue the story of their hunt: tired out from the long chase, they accepted our gibes and our raillery, happy to let their wet gaiters steam before the fire and to stretch out to the flame their hands, which were red and rough like bricks. On our part, we did not attempt to drag out our pleasantries, to connect them with fresh stories of unfortunate hunts, to support them by grotesque anecdotes, as we are accustomed to do on the mountain; but we turned toward Finiels and our silence seemed to leave the talk to him. Finiels knew what we wanted, but he appeared to hesitate to continue his story; he was silent for several minutes, then suddenly he decided to speak:

  “I am going to finish telling my story … with the permission of the mayor and the government.”

  We all began to laugh as we looked at the mayor, who smiled also, but who did not understand this sally. At first I thought it only a jest of good-natured familiarity, but, looking at Finiels closely, I noticed in him an element of distrust and perhaps even of hostility.

  “I was speaking of Roux,” added Finiels, with the same air of aggressive embarrassment.

  The mayor just shrugged his shoulders, while the two boys from Bessède sat motionless on their chairs, attentive like all the other mountaineers.

  “I had reached the next to the last year of the war,” resumed Finiels, “or, if you prefer, the year 1917. During the good season of that year, Roux the Bandit made a slight change in his quarters: he forsook the slopes of Sauveplane for those of Lingas, on account of Birenque, the shepherd of Dourbies, who passed the summer on the meadows of this mountain with three or four flocks which they brought up to him from the lowlands in the hot weather.

  “This Birenque was very much in need of a little help to get through all his work. When a sheep was injured and another was lost, he was obliged to set out in two directions at once. As Roux was wandering about the mountain, with nothing to occupy him, the least he could do was to try to make himself useful. Two or three times he chanced to find a lost sheep and bring it back to Birenque. To reward him Birenque made him share his daily food, and gradually, although they never shook hands on a mutual agreement, they formed the habit of staying together: Roux the Bandit watched Birenque’s sheep and Birenque shared his dinner with Roux.

  “This Birenque was a half-crazy old man, the one who made up songs and who died last year. He knew all about his sheep and his dance tunes, but as for anything else, he lived as if nothing else existed. … He knew just what to do when it concerned music, and, if making songs could be called a trade, one might say that Birenque was a good workman. He made his music first: music for dancing almost always, or sometimes music for singing as you walked—bringing in the cattle, for instance. When he had found his music, he delighted in putting the words to it, then he went about singing his songs on the farms and in the villages.

  “You must know his songs: the girls must have taught them to you. At least you know this one. …”

  And Finiels hummed softly, to a mountain air, these words which I knew well:

  T’aimo b’un paou, mioune,

  Mai pa gaire:

  T’aimo b’un paou, mioune,

  Un paou mai pa gaire;

  T’aimo pa pus

  Ai conneigut l’abus. …3

  How could I be ignor
ant of this song? It was to this that the mountain girls had danced at the village fêtes ever since the end of the war. Marcelle and Noélie had taught it to me, and I had seen them dancing their raïole borée while they sang it. They had assured me that it was indeed composed by a shepherd of Dourbies, but I had not believed them. For if the music of this borée had the cadence of all the mountain refrains—with something more strained, more ironical perhaps—its words seemed to me so pure, so perfect, that it was impossible for me not to pay homage to the most ancient and the most refined basis of the folklore of the high valleys. I believed that it required a great number of successive versions, and the slow labour of inattentive but subtle minds, skilful in modifying words and measures, to give so finished a perfection to any songs which the shepherds might compose. But I no longer had the right to doubt, for Finiels assured me that this song was the work of Birenque and that, before they had heard him sing it at the fêtes of Espérou, Camprieu, and Dourbies, nobody in the whole country could have said the first line of it.

  “He has made a good many others, Monsieur André, and longer ones. He has even made some that would make you think he had something in his mind, and yet, I repeat, he was a simpleton and apart from his songs one could never get anything out of him.

  “The people of the upper slopes, who knew that he had spent whole days with Roux, told him whenever he came down to the village for his provisions:

  “ ‘Watch out, Birenque, the gendarmes will put you in prison at the same time as the boy from Sauveplane.’

  “And Birenque could only reply:

  “ ‘The boy lives near, and doesn’t mind giving me a hand. I could not repay him by throwing stones at him.’

  “This was doubtless Roux’s happiest time on the mountain. It was still a difficult time, for he had to sleep on the ground with a flint under his head, but at last, although it was no feast, he had almost enough to eat every day and he was no longer alone with the wild beasts, and with no one to talk to.

  “My boy, who had leave of absence at this period, always answered with a laugh, when people spoke to him about Roux:

  “ ‘The monster is taking his time of rest with Birenque.’

  “He did not say this as a reproach. Quite on the contrary. Besides, I have never heard anybody—either the old people of this region or the men passing on leave—wish Roux’s bad times to begin again. But this peace was not made to last, and all the misfortunes of the boy were coming back of themselves.

  “After the first heavy autumn rain, Birenque closed his hut, herded his beasts together, and returned to the lowlands. With the bad weather, Roux the Bandit again found himself all alone on the mountain.

  “He could not think of remaining on the plain of Lingas because that is one of the worst spots on the mountain during the winter season, and certainly the most solitary, for you have to go down to the bottom of the valley to find a village or even a farm that is inhabited the whole year round.

  “So he returned to Luzette on account of his mother and all the people he knew who lived on the farms under this shoulder of the mountain. Our countryside is less deserted than the plain of Lingas, and, by remaining thus in the retired parts of Luzette, Roux did not have too long a road to travel to get provisions. You know that he had already had to manage this way during the three winters he had spent on the mountain, and during this last bad season of the war it was still easier for him to get along, since nobody was angry with him any more.

  “There wasn’t a man left in the whole valley who thought of betraying Roux, or even giving him a harsh word. Gradually, we all persuaded ourselves that he could not go to the war, and it was almost as if he had been discharged by the government. Of course we knew that he could not have been discharged for lack of arms or legs, but we allowed ourselves to believe that he might have been discharged because of the ideas he had, and it seemed to us all that this, too, was a good excuse.

  “At this time, if Roux had wished to made an end of his privations and go into hiding on a farm, it would certainly not have been difficult. All the corn-lofts in the neighbourhood of Sauveplane and Bessède would have been opened to him; plenty of people would have managed to place a mattress and blankets for him in a corner of their silk-worm nursery or their orchard.”

  “That would not have been too easy,” broke in the mayor, “for the gendarmes have eyes and they would not have permitted this boy to spend the winter in warmth and comfort while all the men of his age were going to war.”

  “If Roux had wished to hide on a farm, the gendarmes would have know nothing about it, for nobody would have come to betray him,” replied Finiels, “and this would have been right, for, after all, the boy was not dishonest and he was harming nobody.”

  “We agree on that. … He was not dishonest, but, all the same, in allowing him to live at peace in the very midst of the war they would have set too bad an example.”

  “A bad example? But to whom? All the young men of our families were in the war, and since, from the first, they had not behaved like Roux, they had no reason for changing their behaviour after having seen four years of campaigning.”

  “I am not speaking for you or yours, Finiels, I know quite well that you always act honestly and according to your beliefs, but everybody is not like you, and there are people who are always ready to follow the worst example.”

  “They always say that. It is a plan of government to talk about those who are not honest to prevent those who are honest from doing the most natural things. … But how can you speak thus of those who are not honest? You know very well that there are not many of them in our country (three or four, here and there) and that, apart from them, you can answer for everybody. … So there was no question of setting a bad example, but simply of having pity for an unfortunate man. That is why Roux would have had no trouble finding a hiding-place. Moreover, don’t let me say that he could have gone and hidden anywhere; there were plenty of farms where they would not have been willing to take him in, especially those where there were women with husbands or sons in the war. I say merely that he would have had no difficulty in finding a farm where people would have welcomed him, without saying anything to anyone. But this boy was not like most folk: he was not looking out for his own comfort or even seeking an end to his miseries. He resigned himself, indeed, to coming to get a bit of bread and cheese from people, but he would go back to the mountain at once, in the midst of the snow and the bad weather. It was like an unchangeable determination or a fixed idea, a sort of need to escape from comfort and make himself suffer.

  “Very often, at this period, Roux came to the farms on our side of the mountain, toward nightfall. The people took him in as if he had been a travelling salesman: they gave him a plate of warm soup which he ate immediately and a bit of bread and stew which he stowed away in his knapsack, and then, whether it snowed or rained, he set out again for the mountain without their being able to keep him for the night.

  “Once, I recall, when the deep winter was setting in, I had gone up for the evening to see my cousins the Perriers. Their boy had come home on leave and we wanted to have a little chat together.

  “It was a time of bad weather, at the change of the moon, ice and snow and pitch-black night over the whole countryside. As always, the bad weather came down from Luzette, and yet, in this darkness, Luzette showed as a white spot: the deep snow came down all the way to the meadows of Roquelongue, and the ice had covered the fangas4 of the Méjean farm, the ground of which shone like fragments of broken glass. … You know the sort of weather.

  “As we were finishing supper, crowded about the fire as we are here, Roux arrived. He came now and then to this farm where the people were kind to him, because of a daughter who had married some relative of his. I had not seen him since spring, but he was still just the same, with his disgraceful clothes, his great wild beard, and his long hair. Seeing him, you would have said he was an animal, or that man of wax which they showed me once in the museum at Nîmes, in fron
t of a cave, with a stone axe in his hand. But when he spoke he was a man like you and me.

  “He said good day to everybody, without embarrassment and without surprise, then he went and sat down near the fireplace. The women brought him some soup and warm wine. He ate his soup, not ravenously like a hungry man who gobbles one mouthful after another, but, on the contrary, like someone who reflects as he performs an important act.

  “While he was eating, the women filled his knapsack with bread and home-made sausage. We all looked at him without speaking, and the soldier more than the rest of us, and as if the desire to speak to him were on the tip of his tongue. …

  “When he had finished his soup, Roux set his plate down and looked at the soldier. The soldier was still looking at him, and we wondered what they were going to say to each other.

  “Outside was the tumult of the storm. The pansière5 of the Perriers, which is behind the farm of my cousins, just below their terrace, made a terrible noise in the sluices of the mill. Every minute you might have thought that the conduit had been suddenly stopped up and that it was going to be carried away, and that half the river was hurling itself over it, as if all the water of the mountain had come down at once.

  “In the end, Roux and the soldier began to talk. We had thought they were going to discuss the war, but, on the contrary, they began discussing the work of the countryside. … The soldier was anxious about his little vineyard at the bottom of the hill which is just beside mine and which he had planted a short time before the war.

  “ ‘It had a fine start,’ he said. ‘The soil of this land is good although it is a little light. I have sent for the plans of Vezénobre, and I have more than five terraces.’