Occupation Journal

by Jean Giono

  It’s been clearly confirmed that this unrest was strictly regional and hasn’t spread beyond the district.

  Four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun’s out again.

  Sunday, June 11

  Fresh wind from the north, clear sky, bright sun, good cheer, clear horizons, you can see the pines on the hill twenty kilometers away. Great indifference generally for the aborted attempts of the last few days. Once more, the dead are dead. I had hung hams in the storeroom where I was keeping my supply of flour and spelt and they’ve been infested by weevils. A. Michel is in the process of fumigating them using laurel from the garden. Twice I’ve lent 4,000 francs to A. Michel who doesn’t work and must send shoes to his son Jacques in Germany. Despite my huge money worries at the moment. No chance of seeing them end, just the opposite.

  I’m beginning to see a very small way out of my struggles with that difficult passage in Deux cavaliers that I’ve worked and reworked more than five or six times this week. This morning I’m catching a glimpse of it.

  Began to read some Balzac: La Muse du département. As every time, moved. Perhaps I’ll be able to work today.

  Had a visit the other day from Germaine Bellec who has set up a tailor shop in Céreste. I told her that I was thinking of all those phonies in the Contadour. Of whom she is one. Because how she squirmed, turning all her kindness sour as she explained that she still loved me, but…. Why still and why but? I told her why: because I was too generous with her and with them all. No burden is more unpleasant than gratitude. Nothing is more invigorating that ingratitude. At least have the frankness to acknowledge it. For my part, I acknowledge that I was stupid and very childish with them. But now that I know, I have no pity. Don’t count on my weakness anymore. You cannot imagine how cruel I am now; keep your distance and stay on your guard; at least I’m giving you warning. And I say this to your face.

  Renée, Maurel’s little girl, came to play with Sylvie at noon. She repeats what she hears and when asked if she has news about her father she tells us, “They are marching on Valensole!”!! I’ve never witnessed a more peaceful day.

  Chinese proverb: If all the idiots wore white hats, the street would resemble a bed of lilies.

  Two hours later I heard Renée coming into the garden saying, “My papa has returned.”

  Mémé returned from the hospital where she went to see Aunt Noémie (still recovering from her colostomy but still alive despite that infamous cancer this big). They wouldn’t let Mémé enter. They were in the midst of carrying in the wounded. Men in groups were talking about an engagement along the Durance where there were ten deaths. Engagement with whom? Against whom? And most importantly, why? Especially since, despite everything, these deaths and those in Forcalquier, there’s an atmosphere of general indifference, as I’ve said. Apart from indifference, there’s fear. Right now a babe in arms would understand that all of this is premature.

  Monday, June 12

  No real news about the slaughter last evening except from Dr. Petit who tells me the casualty is going to die. Last evening they said that Marg. had been killed. As in Forcalquier, it was the Germans who opened fire on the men and boys who were “guarding” the bridge. They’ve confirmed only that six are dead. There is so much confusion that this morning M. Camoin, an otherwise intelligent man, told Aline that Barcelonnette was occupied by the Italian resistance led by English officers who parachuted down. We’re used to seeing salvation descend from the skies. The Italians! Tell me that we’re supposed to rejoice over help from the Italians, when hardly a year ago we couldn’t find sarcasm enough to commemorate their national cowardice. Now they tell us, “But there are Italian resisters!” Once again we need that Chinese proverb.

  Better work on Deux cavaliers, I’m finally out of the “Clef-des-Coeurs” chapter and beginning the next one: “Conte d’hiver.”

  Thursday, June 15

  Yesterday at Margotte I heard about the atrocities committed by the armed miners from the Bois d’Asson mine. They killed a woman who was said to be spying. She was receiving 50,000 francs each month through the mail, Salomé told me. Which is the exact and only evidence for this invented charge. They pursued her for a whole day, a hundred armed men against one defenseless woman, making her cross and recross the Largue where she was in water up to her waist. Finally they shot and killed her with their submachine guns, then they undressed her and “carried her into a little cabin,” Salomé said discreetly. Then they dragged her naked body onto the road and finally they ripped it apart with grenades.

  Last Sunday, those same miners combed the countryside around Saint-Maime-Dauphin to find recruits among the farmers. Not one joined them. They were all turned away with this beautiful peasant expression: We have work to do. This is exactly what demonstrates that there truly is a peasant civilization (despite Guéhenno’s claim in Pourrat’s Vent de mars). And this is also where the sickle and the hammer part ways. Salomé has changed his tune. Armed gangs are looting the farmers. He’s even talking, already, of resisting with the farmhands, trying to seize machine guns to fire at the others. He’s also talking about all the farms joining together. At the exact moment that I had predicted (Chute de Constantinople written in 1939, published in L’Eau vive – and published expressly to mark the date) the anticipated peasant reaction is taking place exactly like a chemical reaction. Proof of a substance so pure that its behavior can be mathematically predicted.

  Alert at 11:30. Immediately, passing right over the trees and houses, ten to twelve planes flying from Pierrevert, southwest. No telling what nationality. Surprising that they are so low.

  Received four letters from Paris this evening.

  I just read Le Cabinet des Antiques by Balzac. I wasn’t familiar with this book. It’s very beautiful. It is so intensely captivating at the end that one willingly follows the whole digression on the first supreme magistracy. And even, in passing, is happy to learn that the stairway leading from Blondet’s garden to his pelargonium hothouse has thirteen steps. And had the complete history of the weaving of his cotton hood been included, one would happily go through any first magistracy again, with eagerness and ardor. So magical is the driving impulse. But, be careful: don’t imitate. It’s Balzac. Acknowledge, admire, but don’t try to do it: we are only ordinary humans.

  The letter from a friend relates Marcel Pagnol’s plot against La Femme du boulanger. I really couldn’t give a damn. If he thinks that I don’t know my play isn’t as good as his film dialogue, he’s wrong. I’m perfectly aware of that.

  Friday, June 16

  Many dead bodies are being found in the woods on the other side of the Durance where the skirmish took place last Sunday. Everywhere the dissidents seem to have randomly dropped their weapons and fled. They’re claiming about a hundred such deaths. But that seems exaggerated. This morning forty truckloads of German troops, that is, almost a thousand men, passed through heading toward Valensole, asking the way.

  Warm and humid, a storm brewing. I am hardly working at all. Nevertheless I know very well that it must be done and I can produce the ordinary whenever. It’s the extraordinary that doesn’t come. Patience, I myself seem to need the rain. I’m beginning to receive letters from Paris again. Received a letter this morning from the Red Cross pertaining to the suitcase with personal effects that I had sent to Mme. Ernst, and that couldn’t be delivered. My second mailing, on the other hand, seems to have arrived at her address.

  The newspaper is reporting executions of resisters, 180 in Lambesc, 110 in Valréas near Nyons, 30 in Vaison, and here, who knows how many when the truckloads of troops that came through this morning reach the countryside?

  Already excessively hot. And the irritating drone of cicadas. And this burning yellow country that I hate. The need for water, for rain, humidity, blue, deep greens, the scent of mushrooms.

  I’m continually reassessing my old friendships. Lucien Jacques’s visit was only a flash of l
ightning, and the tone of his note to thank me for sending him La Terre du voleur is certainly not what I’d expect after the last twenty years. Have reached a point (or he made me reach it) where I will surely strike him from my heart as well, and be relieved to do so.

  Thursday, June 22

  A few letters from friends in Paris with information on the conspiracy of critiques mounted by Pagnol regarding La Femme du boulanger. What I can see most clearly is that he has exceeded his goal, having pushed too far. Too much unanimity – which Jemet points out in his article in Germinal – clearly the party line since one of the critiques says word for word what Cocteau said to Alice Cocéa a few days before the premier and what J. Cuisine quoted to me. And this doesn’t really affect me.

  I must rework Le Voyage. Instead of telling, show it, so end the first act where it used to end, and begin the second act with the scene of the informer at Prina’s. Show what John the servant tells in scene three of the second act. I’m going to do that work very quietly without telling anyone about it. My first act is good because I did it quietly without opinions or advice, unhurried. The rest is bad because I was pushed around, tormented by deadlines, requests, suggestions. But first, finish Deux cavaliers.

  Gustave R.’s tales of the resistance and the botched “Sicilian Vespers” were going down well outside the café yesterday. He didn’t mind at all speaking right out. He saw it, he said, the cowards in the bushes, the drunks. The resisters who gathered on the Gréoulx square and who finally cheered for the marshall after a short speech by a German officer. This pettiness and spinelessness I really want to believe is purely regional. Too bad that R. is a collaborator (so they say): he’s Paul Reynaud’s cousin. No: he is a true adventurer; he knows all about it; he doesn’t acknowledge his own. Like me, he says that all those brave men thought they were going on some giant picnic with circus games. But when they felt that they’d become part of the circus, they let out such a cry that no one would give them back their seats in the bleachers, under the tents, or in the hammocks for afternoon naps.

  Gallimard is always ready to do me a favor, with unfailing kindness. He answered my letter immediately and sent 20,000 francs that he may not even owe me. Grasset hasn’t sent me the 70,000 that he almost owes me, I say “almost” because he is about to release the special edition of Que ma joie demeure and Pan that will sell for 2,500 francs a copy. I asked him to pay me the royalties a few days in advance. Gallimard paid me for Le Chant du monde, and not just a few days in advance but maybe a few years.

  A dream the other night: someone says to me, “Look, this is your son. You’ve just had a son.” I don’t know if it was Élise. The boy is astonishingly handsome, already grown like Sylvie. So beautiful! To shout about! Gold like the sun, slender, with the face of a god.

  “Let there be positioned at the four corners of Europe four energetic men, knowing what they want and having determined what means of action to employ, and let them raise their voices and arms at the same time, and the whole place will go up in dust like a cloud of smoke.”

  Metternich

  (Vienna, January 6, 1832)

  Yesterday I sent Guy to the Criquet farm to get supplies, especially milk and maybe a hen. As usual he went there with his friend Henri Bonnet. I advised Guy to get back early. But by ten-thirty he still wasn’t here, which made me nervous, but I assumed he’d gotten held up at the Bonnets’ and I went to bed. By eleven o’clock (and by then I was very worried because the curfew is at ten), the bell rang. I heard Guy come in, very excited, and I heard what he was saying, “Do I have some stories to tell.” He began talking loudly in the dining room below. Immediately Aline and Sylvie ran up to my room. They said that Guy found a corpse on the road near Criquet and it was Roger-Paul Bernard! I can’t believe it! I got up immediately. Roger-Paul Bernard! The gentle young poet, with a great talent all his own, that young printer in Pertuis who was so devoted to me, whom I loved so much, so touching in his young enthusiasm for art, that boy with the face of a girl who was married a year ago to a woman so thin that between the two of them they had only forty years and weighed hardly eighty kilos. At the time when he was called to leave for Germany, he put his trust in me and came from Pertuis by taxi with his father to ask for my advice. If he had followed the advice I gave him, I have the sad satisfaction of telling myself, he wouldn’t be dead. He was shot point-blank with a revolver, the bullet entering below his eye near his nose. He was splayed across the road, dead, alone, near the Viens train station. He’d been killed about nine o’clock that morning. It was ten o’clock when Guy and Bonnet found him. They had just been stopped in Cereste by some Germans who searched them, saying that they’d killed one of their comrades (because Guy and Bonnet are the right age and look like resisters) because he had a pistol in his bag. The pistol was lying there on the café table. Finding everything in order, the Germans released Guy and Bonnet and it was when they set off again down the road that they found Bernard whose abandoned body was already covered with flies. Bonnet took the risk of unfolding the dead man’s arm from across his chest and removing his wallet. He had on him coded messages similar to those broadcast on dissident radio, Guy said. At the moment I wondered if this wasn’t simply one of Bernard’s poems, it’s so hard for me to imagine the young boy I knew taking this stand. But according to what Guy maintained, there’s no doubt, they really were coded messages. That and the pistol! Poor young, sensitive, enthusiastic boy; so open, so ready to trust, to believe, to offer himself; so bright, so beautiful when he came to introduce his little wife to me. She has a two-month old baby now. He’d rented a little house near the Criquet farm. He was living there with his family, his wife and baby, with forty-five years between the three of them now and maybe ninety kilos altogether. Writing poems and a novel with his great, amazing, extremely individual talent. The most distinct among all the young writers I know. With a beautiful, astounding future, going out among the people and destined to become a great poet. I can just see him, the day he came to ask my advice. A little surprised that I advised caution, which his father approved. And him unyielding, and me saying to him, “Now that I’ve told you what I think you must do, I remain your friend whatever you decide and will help you as much as I can.” Advising him to stay out of it all. Above all, no weapons, I insisted. And he said to me, “Oh yes, of course, no weapons. I simply want to write.” And now, the pistol, the messages, a bullet through his head, his corpse abandoned on the road near the Viens station.

  I wanted to retain a little doubt about the identity of the body. I kept telling myself that maybe it wasn’t Bernard, the identification having come through hearsay and no one seeing the body except Guy and Bonnet who didn’t know him. But this morning Bonnet came and showed me the photo he’d taken from the wallet and yes, I’m afraid it really is Bernard.

  We are in a kind of ghastly China.

  This morning a visit from Champsaur. We talked about this war that has already been won by Russia socially and by America industrially. All that remains is to see who will win militarily. We should have been able to claim the great spiritual victory. But we never realized that for great victories, M. Déroulède isn’t a great enough philosopher.

  Make France into a quality Switzerland. When a Frenchman puts three words with three words, it isn’t long before he creates something of international value. Likewise if he puts red next to green or if he arranges the notes of the scale in his own style. Unrivaled products with which France could (and perhaps will)dominate the other victors. In any case, share in the victory. All other industries could be dominated by its slogans. It could seize hold of the minds of the people as they leave the factories, could dominate all their free time, could offer spiritual pleasures worldwide. What more could one desire. That is the highest place. That is the top position. Others work; France expresses and therefore dominates, creates, directs. Regiments and armies of invincible artists. But don’t let the poets waste their time playing wit
h pistols and secret messages.

  Sunday, June 25

  This morning at ten o’clock the alert sounded. At the same time you could hear the roar of big squadrons. The sky is heavily overcast; you look and can’t see anything. It seemed like the squadrons were just passing over the Rhône valley, to the west of us. Flying south to north. The noise increased rapidly and then diminished and died. Fifteen minutes later the noise began again north to south, still to the west, but closer to us this time. A few planes passed right over our region. The noise died. Then it started up again from west to east over the Valensole plateau, fading in the east. Sunday alerts are so frequent now that there’s an expression for them: the American is going to mass.

  Luckily, I’ve relocated the article that Wullens wrote against me. I will not write a single word in response. If all my friends whose quotes he uses against me are fair-minded, it’s up to them to respond. Alfred Campozet, H.V. the postal worker in Marseille, all those who were part of the Contadour in September 1939. Gogois, the comrade in Nice who was waiting for his wife. Those who left for Switzerland and in general, all those mixed up with me in September 1939. I haven’t said a word. But they must speak. It’s very simple. When they’ve spoken the honest truth about what happened, there won’t be much left of Wullen’s claims. But I won’t say a word. I’m keeping the article with my documents and simply noting where the truth can actually be found.