by Jean Giono
November 17
Sylvie is studying history. Her mother has her recite her lesson. What is a border? Sylvie: It’s a line where there’s an enemy on either side.
November 18
Snow this morning on all the hills. Manosque has become black with smoke as during my childhood. It hangs heavily. Delightful rain. Dark nests of snow squalls lie to the south near Marseille. Snow here always comes from the south. Snow from Corsica. It might even be called Italian snow. Beautiful winter. Magnificent winter. This delightful annoyance.
Calm here. Yesterday Michel came for his weekly chat. He came from Aix where he’d gone to deliver Chulan’s horse. A race-horse belonging to Saint-Cyr that had to be turned over to the draft board. M. rode the horse to Aix. A story from “Merovingian times.” Going up to Venelles, he said, he dismounted to eat. He gave the horse free rein and it grazed beside him. But the roads where the tar wasn’t completely worn away were slippery for horseshoes and he yearned for a dirt road the whole journey, a simple dirt road. Now that would have been an improvement, because it would have let him trot and he could have stopped worrying about his horse falling if he let up on the reins.
In one village in the Hautes-Alpes, the farmers who relied on horses to work the fields simply plowed up all the roads that ran through their area. They didn’t want to risk broken knees.
Real life rests a hand gently on my arm, like Socrates’s daemon.
There are two or three very good pages to be written right between John’s lines and Donna Fulvia’s lines at the end of the third act, and then Voyage will be perfect.
Three vivid, romantic, Stendhalian pages on the real risks that Julio runs and that consequently D.F. is going to run, the transport of love. Then it will be done.
I spoke too soon about the calm. Telephone call at noon. It’s Meyerowitz! There’s a plot afoot at the boarding house! A gendarme accused him of wild partying, told him he better get to work as a farmhand, and took his papers. He’s in a panic. Once again, all is lost. The gendarme was rough. And then, he (Meyerwitz) says, “Have you seen Mme. Régnier about the piano, have you worked on Bout de la route (which he wants to make into an opera) for me?” I reassured him. I’m gnashing my teeth a little.
In the afternoon I heard Élise below raising her voice as when there’s an argument. I went down a bit later and asked what was going on. It seems that Charles didn’t want to go get the coal. (We missed our turn for 400 kilograms.) Élise gets upset easily with the help and can’t make anyone listen to her without shouting. But it’s true, Charles has been acting strangely for some time. What’s up with him? He’s part of the family. He even gets the same dessert as the children. He works about three hours a day and what is that work? Going for milk and the paper, splitting a little wood, when it’s nice out going to the farms by bicycle from time to time for supplies. I would easily and happily do all his tasks myself. So what’s up?
I went to the funeral of my cousin Odette’s brother-in-law. A farmer’s funeral. Quite noble, handled like the business of peasants. When I got back I found a summons from Liotard, the examining judge, for Thursday, November 25 in Digne at two o’clock “as witness in the matter about which he will be given knowledge.” Haven’t the least idea what this is about. But this coming Thursday worries me especially.
To get my revenge, I’m ordering a few beautiful books that I’ve wanted, Apocalypse de saint Sever, by Ariosto, illustrated by Doré, the Bible also illustrated by Doré, and then a standard edition of Maurice Scève from Garnier. I already have an Ariosto from 1603 and one from 1586, both illustrated with woodcuts and a little Ariosto in ten volumes, text and translation on facing pages, that I’m using to learn Italian. I also have a beautiful Dante from 1564 (the 43rd edition) with commentaries by Landino and Sansovino that I’m planning to read to learn Italian. And all worries become secondary.
November 19
American progress and comforts. Imitation snow sprayed in the streets by municipal vehicles, the nights of Christmas too mild, “Happy Christmas!” nevertheless. Who would accuse us of forgetting traditions? Sharp reaction against the dumbstruck, admiring expectations of the majority. You don’t like them? Yes, of course I do, and that’s why I don’t make the mistake of telling them a few plain truths.
Wonderful dark weather. North wind, cold, rain. Today, truly, weather for a bed warmer. Last evening I was reading an old issue of the Revue de Paris, pages from the journal of Julien Green. At first Gide says to him, “You’ll have to choose a side, Communist or Fascist.” And shortly after that Gide says to him, “You do well in not choosing between Communists and Fascists especially since it’s the same thing. You’re apolitical, stay there.” In between, the trip to the U.S.S.R. It’s impossible for me to stop thinking about Gide being in English territory and keeping quiet and especially that others are keeping quiet for him. Strange conclusions to be drawn from that.
Is Meyerowitz going to muck up my peace today? Seven o’clock in the evening. The bell rings. Meyerowitz of course. He doesn’t dare come up. He has a short letter delivered to me that says, “Between train and bus. I almost don’t dare face you. If you aren’t anti-Jewish, I’ll be the one to make you so. Even if I transformed myself into Saint Cécile, even then, I could never make up for all the damned trouble that my iniquitous being causes you. I am ashamed! May I sit down with you for a minute? Your ignoble M.” I say, “Have him come up.” I learn that the boarding house plot is limited to the complaints of women with sons doing compulsory work for the S.T.O., and who were scandalized seeing M. walking about impervious. He hasn’t been “retiring as a violet.” Does that come as any surprise? Through Ch. and the Marseille prefecture, I’m devising a way to have the ears boxed of the Forcalquier warrant officer. But above all, M. must be discreet, I tell him again, discreet, and he must walk on tiptoe, there are sick people in the house, damn it! Revenge. As he’s leaving, I ask, “what will your fiancée do in Saint-Maime for Christmas?” “There are two hotels,” he says. “Yes, but she’s going to get bored.” It comes out so naturally that he explodes, “With me!?” That’s all. “That’s diabolical,” he says. Basically, he’s not a bad fellow.
November 20
Realism. André Antoine is wrong and that must be said if we want to find the elements for a renaissance poetics: it’s performing before the audience that’s true. Wholly facing the audience. Never turning your back to them, never performing from behind, that is the truth. As for the real, as for realism, if we want go the whole way with it, it must be in the space, and not the plane. Then, yes, that’s real. As for the rest, it simply makes for voyeurism, looking through a keyhole, indiscretion. Don’t bother, indiscretion is already part of the artwork. Modern art murdered by Antoine’s so-called discovery. Parisian invention. As for true reality, there’s nothing more unreal. Thérive and the populists real? No. Dabit real? No. Petty. The real is not petty. Nobody can make me believe (it’s physically impossible) that there isn’t a milligram of gold sludge in a worker at Renault or in the Soviet’s Poutekoff iron and steel factories. And a milligram, even a hundredth of a milligram, even a trace, and their whole theory of realism shatters into a tale from A Thousand and One Nights. Reality imitates life? What life? At the root of this error, ignorance of true human nature. What arrogance they must have to decide that life is this pettiness. False scholars, but followed as such. Clearly this is easier to understand than true knowledge. Parisian prophets, another great subject for a good laugh.
November 21
One can’t say Germany or Russia anymore. It doesn’t mean anything. You have to say National Socialism or Communism. For England and America, it’s Democracy. But France still doesn’t have a proper name on the political map of this war. How lovely if it had a proper name (in literal sense of the word proper). Just now I said National Socialism and not Fascism. Fascio is Italian and there has never been an Italy, a political Italy (on the international level),
that’s a mirage (a fraud).
Sunday. I’d like to be in Delphi, boarding with a family in some small Greek village. The sacred olive trees caressing my gray hair and reading Aeschylus’s Prometheus today in the great empty theatre set into the hill like an ammonite. That’s out of the question: I go to the movies: Raimu, Monsieur La Souris. I come home. I enjoyed it.
Rarely do I give what I promised. Often I give less or nothing, but even more often, much more often, “too much.” So much so that what I give no longer bears any relationship to what was asked of me and what I promised; and thus, what I give doesn’t count, and I still owe what I promised. In either case, it’s terribly awkward and more in the second case than the first. All my enemies are the result of this. All my friends, even my most dear (and only) friends have gone and left me because of this. But one. I must acknowledge him, Auguste Michel. His gratitude has never wavered and he has never tired of it. Steadfast loyalty, and I say to all of you, Lucien Jacques, you as well, that Michel has known me since kindergarten and it’s certainly not through knowledge that one tires of me but through pride.
General rule by which I could be judged: I never make a profit from what I’ve promised (even when I give less, or nothing).
November 23
The examining judge in Digne is taking his time. After summoning me to Digne on Thursday the 25th – it’s a long trip and disrupts my plans – he sent word today that instead of the 25th he want me on Monday the 29th. I rescheduled my engagements for exactly that date. I responded immediately by telegram and by letter, sharply and firmly. I will not go to Digne on Monday.
November 24
A visit from the Forcalquier sub-prefect last evening. He’s a poet. He won the Guillaume-Apollinaire award. Speaking of things in general, he told me that the police are afraid. Thus, impunity for all acts of terrorism, no matter what they are. But, in my opinion, that means everyone is free to murder and plunder. Not just the Communists, but also the enemies of the Communists, and even just plain crooks. That’s when the idea of revolution will lose its virginity. A few big gratuitous murders, followed by very conspicuous thefts with as many horrifying details as possible, rapes, hangings of small children, crude and sadistic cruelties, with Communism carefully written all over them, and there you have it, the idea defiled. It’s a wonder that the Communists aren’t suspicious. Because the police could easily pull this off. Or a kind of Ku Klux Klan, vigilantes assembled by a handful of the firmly resolved (and these could be sons, brothers, of the murdered). It would only take ten or twelve of them, strong, brave, armed, masked, quick, to attack a small town some evening where there have been murders attempted by Communists. They could massacre with impunity one or two Communist families well-known there, hang them from trees along the boulevard, and vanish, quick, masked, mysterious. The Avengers! A huge sensation no doubt. Especially if they were cunning enough to give their attack a romantic edge, the mark of Zorro. Very dangerous, because one initial success would be enough to make huge numbers, in every country, district, town, and village, want to play, begin to play, Zorro.
The works of mine that Grasset argued against publishing in 1929 and the following years are now the ones saving Grasset Editions through their reissues and sales.
Gray weather, snow and cold. I can’t stop thinking about Lucien Jacques. What stupidity, because if it’s not stupid, it’s tragic. He must have drawn the wrong conclusions from me not wanting to go with him to Besson’s or Martin’s during his business with the Contadour. But if I didn’t go with him, it was for other, purely personal, reasons, and to stay out of his way, because his complaints, in my presence, could have been taken on a whole other level.
November 25
Maman came into my office to have me cut her fingernails on her right hand. She sits down to rest in front of my fire, valiantly calming her asthma. Her breathing is so labored that I take big breaths myself as if the air I so easily inhale could aerate her. Then I cut her nails. She lets out the usual little cries when I cut the corners. Her nails are brittle as stone. Then she does the nails on her left hand by herself. But she asks me, “Are these alright? – No, they aren’t cut very well, wait, I’m going have you fix them. – I used to be able to cut them very well, but now I can’t anymore.” Then, while I cut them, she makes little girlish sounds, laughing. “Here, now file my nails,” and she gives me small butterfly tweezers on which there’s a kind of file. And she goes on forever gently filing her nails, dozing before my fire.
Of course Meyerowitz came by last evening with a terrible torrent of new catastrophes. Gestapo. Mme. Schweim is a spy. Two giants with machine guns arrested M. Folk and his son, who deserved it, he adds. I take all this seriously and advise him to take refuge in Aubenas and then go stay at the B.’s house in Vachères since they’ve given him their key. But immediately there’s the question of whether a piano can be delivered to Aubenas, and then, what will he do in Vachères. “I’ll go crazy,” he says. So I ask him if it’s really a question of life and death as he claims. “Oh, yes!” he says. So, in my opinion, now’s not the time to worry about a piano. Louis Maurel is staying with us right now, having returned sick after being held in Koenigsberg. I have to ask them both into my office at once, since it’s the only heated room in the house (except the kitchen).
Terrible wind. Under the sun, the cloudless sky is black as ink.
The examining judge in Digne had an officer deliver a polite letter in which he invites me to set the date for the hearing myself.
Louis Maurel told me that when he arrived in East Prussia, they had summoned the farmers in the area to come select prisoners, as slaves were selected in Cervantes’s time or, more recently, in America before the Civil War. The farmers sized them up, feeling their arms and legs, looking at their teeth. A horrible ceremony. Hard to pardon. Absolutely unpardonable. Despite the fact that, later, German soldiers coming from other areas in preparation for the attack on Russia behaved humanely toward them, especially at Christmas. Impossible to accept the slave market. Maurel tells me about the feudalism of the Prussian country squires and the vast snow-covered plains surrounded by a black crown of distant fir forests where he went by sleigh to cut wood. No matter what happens, those slave markets must not be forgotten.
Charles is nervous today; according to a note that appeared in the newspaper, the German authorities consider him a deserter. I reassured him.
November 28
The trouble with Charles started suddenly yesterday morning. Impossible to talk about it yet, whatever comes of this business. It meant that I had to ask Salomé for a small favor. It didn’t require much bravery. This morning Salomé arrived with the weekly supplies and you could see right away that he was doing it grudgingly. Did I hesitate to take on even greater risks than his when it was a matter of rescuing Francis? He talks about that business like an idiot. But that wouldn’t matter at all if I hadn’t noticed the truth about the business with Ch. Which let me see clearly the truth about Salomé. I wrote what appears above before sitting down to lunch with Salomé, where I vowed to give him a piece of my mind. It was Élise who came to tell me that he was refusing to help Ch. So I saw Salomé at lunch and I didn’t mention the matter throughout the meal. I reminded him incidentally and tangentially of all the favors I’d recently done for him. Then after lunch I shook his hand and said I was going to work. He followed me into the hall and told me that, regarding the business with Ch., he would do what I’d asked him – let me repeat, I asked him only to play a passive role. When I reminded him of this, he said, “Every time I ask you for this sort of favor (I’m really good about it, this is the first time I’ve asked! And probably the last!), there’s no risk in it for you. And moreover, every time, you lay all the blame on me.” As soon as this business is a little less fresh, I’ll use it for practicing those scales that are teaching me to stick as close as possible to the truth. An excellent exercise, it’s all here: the stark drama, the egoism of
these extraordinary times we’re living in.
Meyerowitz telephoned at noon. Of course he’s at Vachères and complaining: it’s sad, it’s lonely, he’s never been so unhappy, I need to call B., they haven’t made arrangements for the key. He’s annoyed, no one wants to make his meals (that’s more serious). He has never been in such a sad situation. But in passing he tells me that the sub-prefect has been extraordinarily kind to him on my recommendation.
One.
Two. Mme. Ernst, released from the hospital after her successful operation (which cost me 7,000 francs) comes to tell me that she has no more money. Neither do I. I’m waiting. Maybe I’m about to receive some.
Three. R., whose wife has been ill for years (some kind of stomach pains, kidneys, those mysterious women’s complaints, I believe), comes to ask me to telephone Dr. Aviérinos in Marseille so that he can make an appointment to have his wife examined on Tuesday. Once again, no money. On my recommendation, Aviérinos will examine her free of charge. But there’s still the taxi to Marseille. And the hospital, if necessary.
Four. L.D. and family don’t seem to have more than 250 francs. Once again, they need money.
