“ ‘The best wine in the country is made on that mountain,’ replied Roux, ‘but it is not heavy enough, and if you don’t take care it turns more quickly than you can drink it.’
“ ‘That is true of the lowlands, but not of our villages. At Nîmes they can’t keep this wine, even in the best cellars. … We know something about it because of our cousins at Mont-du-Plan who carried away a little keg of it and were not able to drink it. But on the mountain this wine can be kept well and it can even become especially good, because of the height. …’
“ ‘That’s true, nowhere save at Sauveplane does the wine keep better than at Bessède or Saint-Jean. I remember how my poor father had a little cask of wine that was beginning to turn brought up to Bessède. Everybody laughed when they saw him take such pains, but after it had stayed quietly in our cellar for six months, this bad wine was just as good as Tavel or the light wines they harvest in the neighbourhood of Uzès.’
“Thus Roux and the soldier talked, as if there had not been any war, as if Roux had not committed any act of folly. Presently Roux got up, took his knapsack, and slung it over his shoulder. My cousin, who saw that Roux wanted to go, went to the door and looked out at the weather.
“The snow entered the open door with one of those gusts of wind on a level with the ground that lash your legs and bend you in two. At the same moment a great mass of water leaped over the pansière and made a whirlpool under the little wall of the terrace. My cousin closed the door and said to Roux:
“ ‘You are not going out in this storm. Put down your knapsack and stay with us.’
“But Roux would not listen to him, and said good-bye to everybody. As we were all telling him to stay, he answered that he had to go back to the mountain and that he had already stayed with us too long.
“ ‘To everybody his own destiny. I must spend the winter on Luzette. …’
“We were not able to do anything with him and Roux set off again in the storm. He took the path that climbed up to Roquelongue following the river of the country, and that night, as on many another, he went and slept in one of the grottos of Luzette, where he had nothing better than a bed of branches. …
“I did not see him again all that winter, which was as bad as the rest. … In our mountains, winter is always winter, and when one speaks of past times there’s always the same thing to say about the three or four bad months of snow. But what really changes, what is never the same from one year to another, is the spring. … This year, our spring was open as on the plain: it did not drag out in the Rouergue and we did not have a single late frost. From the first the roads were firm and the snow melted and the trees bloomed. Summer weather, but summer without drought. The spring water, which is better than that of the other seasons, ran everywhere, in the meadows, in the gardens, in the basins of the terraces. … It was a blue water that exhaled the odour of snow and sunlight, a water that brought results.
“With this spring, Roux came roaming more and more about the farms and villages. Now that it was good weather on the mountain, he did not seem to want to stay there particularly. But at the same time that he became less wary, the gendarmes began to make things worse for him. During this fine weather, they did not go on their rounds so regularly: you saw them one day at Bessède, the next day at Mouzoules, the day after toward Sauveplane. They had received new orders from the city, or perhaps they were angry with themselves, feeling that all the people had become comrades of Roux the Bandit.
“For several months they obliged Roux to hide in the woods behind Luzette. Only at night was he able to resume his wandering toward the villages. The dogs never barked at him, for he was a familiar figure at all the farms, all the sheepfolds.”
“That is true,” resumed the oldest of the boys from Bessède, “our two dogs, which are worse than all the others in the valley taken together, never stirred when Roux passed by our door. And this was not natural, for dogs like ours bark at the least suspicion and at anything that is out of the way. From the valley to the mountain, they feel everything strange or unwonted that happens. … When one evening, after a storm, a gully that had never had water began to flow for a few hours down across our farm, ravaging the garden-plots of the terraces, the dogs howled all the time. …”
“Which proves that Roux did nothing wrong on the mountain, and that his presence there was natural, like that of a good spring which always flows. …
“At this period, when Roux was out walking in the night, he often met people he knew, mountain folk who were late in returning to their homes. He spoke to them and helped them carry the sacks which they were bringing up from the town. It was always at late hours, toward the middle of the night, for Roux did not dare leave the woods before ten o’clock, because of the gendarmes, who now and then made their rounds in our villages at that hour. …
“This surveillance prevented him from coming to eat with the people of the farm, as he had done in the winter, at the time when the gendarmes did not come up to the mountain; now when he reached the villages all the doors were closed and people had been sleeping for a long time. Therefore, in order that he might not risk dying of hunger, the women on the farm in the neighbourhood of Roquelongue or behind Le Pas, toward Mouzoules, very often, in the evening, left something to eat on the little walls of their terraces. And when Roux the Bandit passed, late at night, on his way down from the mountain, he would take a bit of bread and cheese which they had left for him in front of the door.
“Little by little, this had become a habit of the mountain folk and almost a superstition; many women would not have been willing to go to sleep any more, or throw the ashes over the logs or even put away their dishes and set the room in order, without having prepared the provisions for Roux, for they somehow believed that this would bring them good fortune.”
The elder of the boys from Bessède could not remain motionless on his chair. He rocked himself to right and left, then suddenly, as if to force himself to remain quiet, he bent forward, leaned his elbows on his knees, stretched out his forearms and joined his hands, in a nervous gesture of passionate attention. Like all the other mountaineers, he followed ardently Finiels’s story, but he was not satisfied to follow it in silence, he had to share in it also, and this ardour, which drove him to remain last on the mountain on hunting days, seemed to animate him still and obliged him to emphasise all the passages of any importance, to uphold by his testimony all the facts that might seem doubtful.
“That is the truth,” he said, “and I know it well, for I was at home the last year of the war on account of my leg and a bursting shell. At Borie they always left Roux’s share outside the door; they placed it on the highest end of the terrace wall so that the beasts couldn’t get at it, and always in the same plate—‘Roux’s plate,’ as my aunt said. And even well after the end of the war, when Roux had been in prison for a long time, there still were women who wanted to leave something to eat outside the door, they had been so accustomed to doing this every evening and it had been such a great pleasure.”
“True,” said Finiels, “but just as in other years, the gendarmes ended by tiring themselves out. They climbed up to the mountain less often, as if they were discouraged or as if Roux were no longer there. … Then Roux sometimes came down earlier, and toward the close of summer, as he knew the days when the gendarmes were watching the other side of the valley, near the main stream, he even ended by coming down to our villages in the afternoon. He stopped and talked with the people whom he met on the terraces, who were working the soil, and often he even lent them a hand.”
“Yes,” said the boy from Bessède, “he helped us in our grape-gathering just a few days before he was taken by the gendarmes. … At Bessède, we do not gather the grapes very early, but at the end of September, and when the bad weather has already begun. Ours are not pleasant harvestings such as they have on the plain. We begin them in the sun and finish them in the rain and fog. And the moment the grapes are ripe, we make as much haste as possible: but this
year we didn’t have enough people; we were four, all told, for the harvesting; my father, my two sisters, and I. And I was still limping. There were just enough of us to manage the cart. My father and my elder sister carried the baskets and my other sister was left alone to do the cutting. … On the morning of the harvesting, we climbed up to the vineyard. The weather was threatening, the Cap de Coste was in fog, and the valley of Calles was entirely covered. …”
Finiels’s son thought he should add to this description of the weather the proverb which has established its meteorological significance for the inhabitants of these mountains. For every aspect of the horizon there is a corresponding proverb, and all these proverbs compose a sort of rose of the winds, in consecutive rhymes.
“Quand lou cap de Costo mes soun capel
Lou pastre pòu mestre soun mantel.”6
“Quite true,” concluded the boy from Bessède, “but just the same, while we were waiting for the storm, the sun came out from the other side, from the direction of Séranne, and burned our backs. ‘Not for twenty hectogrammes of grapes,’ said my father, ‘did I come out to catch a cold on my chest.’
“We had scarcely begun to work when Roux leaped into the midst of the four of us: he came down from the mountain through the terraces.
“ ‘You come in good time to give us a little help,’ my father said to him.
“ ‘It is always pleasant work gathering grapes,’ replied Roux.
“ ‘But it’s a bad business, just the same, carrying the baskets,’ my sister said to him, laughing.
“ ‘Good,’ said Roux. ‘I’ll carry the baskets. … That is no work for women.’
“Naturally, I had not seen Roux since the beginning of the war. I did not know what to say to him: I was not angry with him, for you cannot be angry with people who act according to their beliefs, when they are not insincere … but Finiels has told you this better than I.
“So I held the mule by the bridle, at the entrance to the vineyard, when my father, seeing that we embarrassed each other, bethought himself to say:
“ ‘The boy hasn’t got the whole use of his leg.’
“ ’All right,’ said Roux. ‘Don’t let him tire himself; when I have carried the baskets, I shall go down with the cart as far as the good road.’
“But I answered: ‘I can walk all right, alongside the mule. So long as it is not too much, I can do anything. …’
“ ‘If you prefer,’ said Roux to me, ‘I will do the cutting and carry the baskets, the work will go more quickly. … All these aramons will spoil if they are wet by the storm. …’
“All day, Roux worked with us as if he had been labouring at fixed wages. Only at noon we had a bite to eat and Roux with us, but we did not talk much because the weather was more and more threatening. Toward four o’clock, when it began to rain, we were just finishing our harvesting. Roux came down with us as far as the good road, for he wanted to lead the mule, which took fright at the thunder and was not easy to hold. …
“When we reached the road, he left us without saying much of anything, but as my father was thanking him again for his help:
“ ‘It is as if the other boy were here,’ he replied, as he went off.
“He meant my brother who was at Salonica with the Fortieth.”
“This was not the only piece of help which he gave people who were working on the mountain,” resumed Finiels, “and, indeed, it was this that undid him. At the beginning of October, he stayed several days with the woodcutters in the woods of Luzette, making up little bundles of faggots and bringing them down by the cable.
“I remember that one day I was passing along the road of Grenouillet just where the cable comes down from Roque-Pertuse. At the foot of the cable, I found the farmer of Vernède with his boy. They were receiving beech faggots and putting them into their cart. I asked them:
“ ‘Have you a workman on the mountain?’
“They began to laugh.
“ ‘A good journeyman, who understands the work very well. No fear, with him, that the faggots will slide into one another.’
“I looked at the cable. The bundles of faggots were coming down one after another, at regular intervals. They rushed down, whistling in the air like a stone, and struck against the butoir of the cable. The boy from Vernède had just time to free his bundle when the next one arrived in its turn—and so on, without stopping for a minute. Seeing the work going this way, anyone would have known that it was no green hand who was loading the cable.
“The two men were still laughing—then the father said to me:
“ ‘It’s Roux who is on the mountain. He made up the bundles with us and now he is sending them down to us.’
“From above—a hundred metres in the air on the edge of Roque-Pertuse—the bundles of wood were still gliding down. I watched them descending on the cable, and I felt joy in my heart at the thought that Roux was working at his trade, being of service to somebody, earning his right to live. …
“From that time he ventured more and more into the lower parts of the valley, working here and there when he found work to do. And people allowed themselves to talk about it and repeated it in the villages.
“All this tittle-tattle came back to the gendarmes, not through malevolence, but rather through the stupidity of this, that, and the other. You see, there are men who do not know how to hold their tongues: when they come down to Saint-Jean the café-keepers get them to babble out all the gossip of the mountain. I heard them say: ‘Roux has taken up his old trade again. …’ And more of the same.
“So, on the second Tuesday in October, we were getting ready to go out for chestnuts. This was just the day when the gendarmes were in the habit of making their rounds toward the river, and we did not think they were on our side of the mountain.
“We had been all day getting the frames ready for the blankets when, toward five o’clock, they came to tell me that the gendarmes had taken Roux below Mouzoules. … The village was in a turmoil, and all the people gathered to discuss the news.
“We did not want to believe it. It seemed to us that Roux was no longer at fault, that the gendarmes no longer had any concern with him. But you may imagine that what we thought had nothing to do with the matter. When the gendarmes make trouble for men who go fishing, for those who do not light the lanterns on their carts, for those who cut wood in the forest, we do not think them right. On the contrary, we think them wrong for not putting in prison those who make scandal, hypocrisy, and spite. … But, for all that, they have their orders and we can’t do anything about it.
“It was true that the gendarmes had taken Roux the Bandit below Mouzoules. They had lain in wait for him for more than half an hour while he talked with two men who were watching their sheep in the little meadow that slopes up to the notch. When he had come down to the road, they seized him without any difficulty, and then they went straight to Saint-Jean by the short cuts and without letting anyone see them.
“How had the gendarmes guessed where Roux was? I can’t tell you, but some say that it was the little girl from Mouzoules who betrayed him. This child, who was not yet twelve years old, had gone to the spring on the road to get a jug of fresh water. In passing through the meadows, she had seen Roux with the two shepherds of Mouzoules. … She may indeed have repeated it to the gendarmes, but with no thought of harm.
“Now this girl is grown up. She is even old enough to be married, but nobody looks at her—it is as if there were a curse upon her. … They don’t blame her perhaps, but they avoid her like one who is marked for evil. …”
“I am not going to speak to her,” said the boy from Bessède, “no matter how she flirts.”
“As for the end of the story, I can’t tell you much. From Saint-Jean they sent Roux to the town, then they put him on trial. He was not sentenced until after the armistice, and all we know is that he kept saying over and over that they could kill him but he would kill nobody. … They sentenced him to jail for twenty years: he stayed some time i
n the prison at Nîmes, then they sent him to another prison on the seashore, in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. It seems that he is loved by everybody in that prison. …”
“Yes, and they have even made him some sort of an assistant guard, under the regular wardens, because of his courage and intelligence.”
It was the wife of Finiels who, from the end of the room, added this testimony to the words of her husband. Since the arrival of the mayor, she had kept apart, but from the way she handled the dishes and the pots I had felt her there, uncompromising, nervous, and always attentive to what her husband was saying.
“They have not been too hard on him,” said the mayor. “For a boy of thirty, twenty years in prison won’t reach to the end of his life. He can keep the hope of ending his days in his own home. …”
“It would be better for him to come back at once. His mother and his sister Amélie are waiting for him; there are only two of them left to take care of the farm, and if nobody comes to their help the soil of Sauveplane will have become a waste again, in twenty years. …
“The elder sister is not at Sauveplane any more,” resumed Finiels, responding to the gesture of astonishment I had just made, “and this, with all the details, would make another long story. … But we are not going to tell love-stories now.
“When the war broke out the girl was about to marry a boy who did carting over by Saint-Etienne. This Bertin had to go, like the rest, and at first his family would no longer hear of the marriage, because of Roux. You can imagine the hard time the girl went through.
“Like her mother and her sister Amélie, she had to suffer the insolence of people because of her brother’s act of folly. But she suffered still more in her feelings, forsaken as she was.
“Bertin left her without news for more than a year, then they wrote each other a few letters, and on one of his periods of leave he went up as far as Sauveplane. … He wanted to make up with her, but his father, who is a patriot, with medals from several campaigns, and a sergeant in the Colonials, would not hear of it. There was a terrible quarrel between Roux’s sister, this boy, and his family, and always a bad time for the girl. … Little by little, things quieted down, and after the war they were married just the same, without any special celebration, as if the family had been in mourning: and the sister left Sauveplane and came to live at Saint-Etienne. …
Roux the Bandit Page 9
