Delphi complete works of.., p.411
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 411
When I recovered consciousness, I was lying stretched on the hay in my cart before the gate of the Hermitage. The sun was setting and the wood was still. Colaquet was quietly nibbling the grass from out of the cracks in the wall. How had I got home? How had I been able to avoid the Uhlans, who swarmed on the highway. Perhaps Colaquet had the idea of coming across country and reaching the forest by the quarry road? . . . And, in truth, the good creature proudly tossed his head and moved his ears, as if to say, “I have saved you from a dangerous pass!” . . . I was in great pain, and it really required some courage to step out of the cart, unharness the donkey, and go into the house. I thought I had for the second time broken my leg. However, after an hour’s rest, I was able to rise, take a little food, and write these few pages. The pain is already less sharp, and nothing remains but a great weariness . . . Nevertheless, I do not think I shall sleep much to-night. I know they are prowling around me, that they are still there, and I have seen them at work . . . Oh! that unfortunate peasant, murdered in his farmyard, dragging himself, clutching at the walls! . . .
September 20th.
From the four corners of the horizon, in the murmur of the distant road, which the passing wind quickly snatches up and bears to my ears, there is a ceaseless and confused rumbling, a noise as of the heavy and monotonous sound of waves, which, enveloping the whole forest, slowly flows on towards Paris, to die away at the point where the wide roads are lost in the immense encompassing zone. Till now the inundating masses have spared me, and here I remain cowering in the Hermitage, listening to the advancing tide, like a shipwrecked man on a rock surrounded by the sea.
Luckily for me, if the country is invaded, it is not yet regularly occupied by the troops. They pass through and do not make any stay. Nevertheless, two or three times I have heard at night the cavalry patrols skirt the walls of the Hermitage. Often, when the shooting season was near, the forest rangers would thus pass by, pausing for an instant under the gateway to call out a loud “Good-night” to the keeper’s little home. The dogs would bark and sniff at the kennel railings, then a door opened, and old Guillard brought out a large jug of sparkling wine, in which a ray of moonlight danced, and without dismounting they drank it down. How different from these ghostly patrols, whose very approach makes my heart beat! They pass by in silence. Only from time to time the clink of a sword, the neigh of a horse, a few low-spoken words in a harsh and barbarous language, jar on the stillness of the air. This effectually drives away sleep for the rest of the night.
In the daytime the clear, shrill notes of the bugles come in gusts to the little garden, with the beating of dull and discordant drums, marking the tune in a jerky, singular rhythm, which seems to accompany a cannibal’s war-dance. It is to the sound of these barbarous drums that all the northern races, the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, are advancing over our magnificent roads of the Ile-de-France, the glorious autumn weather dazzling them by the unaccustomed brilliancy of its sun and sky. During this time I live as unobtrusively as possible. I no longer light my fire, in order to avoid the smoke which gives light and life to the roof. I do not even go out into the orchard. I am sure that already the grass is growing across my threshold, and that the invading forest is hemming me closely in. Lastly, by way of precaution, I have killed my cock. That was a cruel sacrifice. I like that abrupt awakening at dawn, that call to life and work, which the cock gives forth to the surrounding country, drawing himself up for the battle with a great flapping of wings. But the Prussians might have heard him . . . Now I have only three or four quiet and silent hens in my poultry-yard, and a few rabbits, who are not likely to betray me.
September 21st, 22d, and 23d.
I am writing this at night, by the glimmer of a small turf-fire — a sort of brazier burning on the flags in a corner of the room. I have neither oil nor candles. It is raining. On all sides of the Hermitage I hear the water streaming over miles of foliage. The wind blows. My revolver and a gun loaded with buckshot are ready by my side, and I await the return of the ruffians, for they have already been here.
Their first visit took place three days ago, in the afternoon of the 21st. The sound of heavy steps on the pavement of the cloister made me peep out of my attic window, and I saw five or six hulking fellows in forage-caps, with ruddy faces and low, brutal countenances, like those of Goudeloup’s murderers. They spoke in hushed voices, timidly advancing, like cowardly plunderers. If I had been able to fire at them, I should have put them to flight, but once the alarm given, they would return in greater numbers. I waited. Owing to the neglected look of the house, and thanks to the vines and ivy, that gave it the aspect of a ruin, the ruffians have passed by without stopping. And yet the last of them bent down for a moment to the keyhole. Standing behind my door, revolver in hand, I heard his breathing while I held my own breath. Perhaps he had caught sight of the glimmer of the dying cinders of my fire. However that may be, the wretch did not go away, and began to rummage in my keyhole with his bayonet. Fortunately his comrades called out to him: — Hartmann . . . Hartman . . .
He went off to rejoin them, and I was able to look into the enclosure through the attic window.
They had just broken open the door of the keeper’s house. Poor mother Guillard! it was indeed lost trouble to have given me her key. Soon after, shouts of joy told me that they had discovered the cellar. They brought out a barrel of wine into the orchard, so as to drink it more at their ease, and hoisted it on to a wide stone bench. Having staved in the barrel, they began drinking out of their caps and hands, shouting and jostling each other. The bent heads disappeared in the cask, and came out smeared with dregs, while others greedily took their place. The thin new wine, made of small, sour black grapes, soon intoxicated all these beer-drinkers. Some of them sang and danced round the barrel, while the others re-entered the keeper’s house, and as they found nothing tempting there to satisfy their craving for pillage, they threw the furniture out of the window, and set fire to a walnut cupboard, whose dry and time-worn shelves blazed up like a bundle of straw. At last they went off, reeling through the driving rain. In front of the gateway there was a quarrel. I saw the flash of bayonets, a man fall heavily into the mud and rise up again covered with blood, his uniform all stained with the yellow-coloured soil of the quarries. And to think that France is at the mercy of these brutes! . . .
The next day the same party returned. I understood by that, they had not mentioned their windfall, and I was a little reassured. However, I am a complete prisoner. I dare not stir from the principal room. Near at hand, in a little wood-shed, I have fastened up Colaquet, whose galloping might have betrayed me. The poor animal patiently bears his captivity, sleeps part of the day, and at times gives himself a good shake, surprised at the loss of his freedom . . . At dusk the Prussians depart, more intoxicated than on the evening before.
To-day I have seen no one. But the cask is not yet empty, and I expect them again.
September 24th.
. . . This morning a furious cannonading is taking place. They are fighting before Paris. The siege is begun. It has given me a feeling of pain and anger impossible to describe. They are firing on Paris, the wretches! It is the intellect of the whole world that they attack. Oh, why am I not there with the others? . . .
Instantaneously all yesterday’s apprehensions have vanished. I became ashamed of my mole-like existence. For the last week I have drunk nothing but the water from the cistern, but now, I hardly know wherefore, I went out on purpose to fill my jug at the cloister well, and it seemed to do me good to run some kind of risk. I looked into the Guillards’ house as I passed by, and my anger increased at the sight of this humble home ruthlessly pillaged, the furniture destroyed and burnt, the window-panes broken. I could not help thinking of the fate of Paris if they enter it . . .
I had just closed my door when I heard footsteps in the enclosure. It was one of those rascals who came the other day, the identical one who had so long rummaged at my lock. He looked if there was any wine left in the cask, and then, having filled his flask, began drinking, sprawling at full length on the stone bench, his head resting on his hands. He sang while drinking; his young fresh voice rang through the cloister with a song about the month of May, in which the words — Mein lieb, lieb Mai — were constantly repeated. He was just opposite my attic window, within easy reach of my revolver. I looked at him for a long time, asking myself if I should kill him. In the direction of Paris the cannon still thundered, filling my heart with terrible anguish . . . After all, perhaps by killing this fellow I should be saving some of my own people now fighting on the ramparts . . .
I do not know whether my unseen glance and the intense hatred I was feeling towards him, did not at last disturb him and put him on his guard; but all of a sudden he raised his head, a head covered with thick bristling hair, the eyes of an albino, and red moustaches, showing a grinning set of cruel-looking teeth. For one moment he threw a suspicious glance around him, and having rebuckled his belt and refilled his flask, he went off. As he passed in front of my window, I had my finger on the trigger. Well, no; I could not do it. To kill for the sake of killing, with such certainty, and so little personal danger, was beyond me. It is not such an easy thing as one fancies, to take a fellow-creature’s life in cold blood.
Once outside the precincts of the Hermitage, and having shaken off his undefined sensation of fear, the rascal again took up his song, and I heard him getting farther and farther away, giving forth to the forest his “Mein lieb, lieb Mai . . .”
Sing away, sing away, my lad! you have had a narrow escape of never seeing again your sweet month of May . . .
October . . .
What day, what date can it be? I have completely lost count. My brain is all confused. Yet it seems to me that it must be October. The monotonous days get shorter and shorter, the wind colder, and the foliage of the large trees around me becomes thinner at each gust of wind. The sound of incessant cannonading in the direction of Paris, makes a lugubrious accompaniment to my everyday life, a deep, low bass, always mingling in my thoughts. I think the Prussians must have their hands full over there, for my marauders have not reappeared. I no longer even hear the long, slow rumbling of the ammunition waggons, nor the rolling of drums, which used to resound on the roads outside the forest. So I have again lighted the fire in the large room, and I walk openly about in the orchard.
From day to day the difficulties of life increase. I have nothing left, neither bread, wine, nor lamp-oil. A month ago, with the sunshine, the house well aired, and the comfort of warmth, these privations were bearable, but now they seem very hard. In the poultry-yard there are only two hens left; always hiding under the rafters to escape the continual driving rain. I make faggots with the branches of the fruit-trees, which, brittle and no longer protected by their leaves, snap off and fall to the ground. The apple-trees have golden moss, the plum-trees long streaks of light-coloured gum under their resinous bark, and they make large, bright fires, throwing a sunshine into their warmth. I have also gathered the last apples, all reddened by the breath of the first frost, and I have made a poor kind of cider, which I drink instead of wine. With my bread I have been less successful. I tried, with the unfortunate Goudeloup’s flour, to knead some dough in the bottom of a cupboard drawer which I used as a trough; and then, under the ashes on the bricks, I made as well as I could, thick cakes, of which the outsides were burnt, and the insides hardly done enough. They reminded me of those little round bits of dough that, as a child, I held in the tongs, and made into rolls about the size of a lozenge.
From time to time I get a windfall. For instance, the other day, as I was rummaging in the keeper’s house, I found on a damp and mouldy cupboard shelf a few bottles of walnut-spirit that had been overlooked by the plunderers; and another time I found a large sack, which I opened with a beating heart, thinking it contained potatoes. I was quite startled on pulling out from it magpies’ beaks, vipers’ heads, dry and dust-coloured, squirrels’ tails, with their bushy red fur, and field-mice’s tails, as delicate as silken twist. These are the keeper’s perquisites, as they are given so much for the head and tail of destructive animals. They therefore keep these trophies of the chase very carefully, as they are paid for them by Government once a month.
— It always buys tobacco, as good old Guillard used to say.
I must confess that at this moment I would willingly have given up all these old bones in exchange for a few rolls of tobacco. I have only enough to last me two or three days, and that is really the only privation I dread. To me the forest is an inexhaustible larder. When my poultry-yard is empty, I shall be able to snare some of those fine cock-pheasants that come round the Hermitage to pick up the grains of buckwheat hidden in the wet soil. But tobacco! tobacco! . . .
I read a little, and have even tried to paint. It was a few mornings ago, in the light of a beautiful red sun, shining through the air thick with mist; under the shed was a heap of apples, tempting me by their lovely colouring of all shades, from the tender green of young leaves to the ardent glow of autumnal foliage. But I was not able to work for long. In a few minutes the sky became overcast. It was raining in torrents. And large flocks of wild geese, with outstretched necks and beating against the wind, passed over the house, announcing a hard winter and the approach of snow by the white down shaken from their wings.
The same month . . .
To-day I made a long expedition to Champrosay. Reassured by the stillness around me, I harnessed Colaquet in good time, and we started. Failing the sight of a human face, I longed to gaze on roads and houses.
I found the country as deserted and silent, and far more dreary than before. The Prussians have only passed through, but they have left their mark everywhere. It seemed the very picture of an Algerian village after a swarm of locusts, a bare, devastated, devoured, and riddled scene; the houses with doors and windows all wide open, even to the little iron gates of the kennels and the latticed shutters of the rabbit-hutches. I went into some of the houses . . . Our peasants are rather like the Arabs. They are seen in the fields, in the courtyards, on their thresholds, but they do not often admit a Parisian inside their doors. Now I could thoroughly search into these unknown lives, these forsaken homes. Their habits still clung to them, and could be traced in the mantelpieces dark with soot, the hanging ropes in the courtyards where the washing is dried, the now empty nails driven into the walls, and on the walnut table, by the marks idly cut with a knife, and the notches made between each mouthful. All those village households were alike — I came upon one, however, that possessed one luxury more than the others — a parlour, or at least what was intended for a parlour. In a small brick-floored room behind the kitchen, a green paper had been put up, coloured glass had been let into the window, and a pair of gilt fire-dogs, a round tea-table, and a large arm-chair covered with worn chintz, had been placed in it. The ambition of a peasant’s lifetime could be felt there. Certainly that man had said to himself, “When I shall be old, when I shall have slaved and laboured hard, I will become a bourgeois. I will have a parlour like the mayor, and a comfortable arm-chair to sit in.” Poor devil! They have made a fine mess of his parlour!
I left Champrosay sad at heart. The desolation of those abandoned houses had struck and chilled me like the cold damp falling from the walls of a cellar. Instead of going straight hack to the Hermitage, I went a long way round by the woods. I felt a craving for air and Nature.
Unluckily all this side of the forest bears an aspect of wildness and neglect, which is not very inspiriting. Old and now unused quarries have left there piles of rocks, and a scattering of pebbles, which make the soil both dry and barren. Not a single blade of grass is to be seen on the paths. Wild stocks, brambles, and ivy alone spring up from out of these large gaping holes, clinging by all their roots to the uneven edges of the stones, and through the bare and interwoven branches, the quarries appear still deeper. For a short time we had been winding our way among the rocks. Suddenly Colaquet stopped short, and his ears began to tremble with fear. What is the matter with him? I lean forward and look . . . It is the body of a Prussian soldier that has been pitched down head-foremost into the quarry. I must confess it gave me a shudder. Had it been on the highway or in the plain, this corpse would not have horrified me so much. Where there are so many soldiers and so many guns, the probability of death seems ever present; but here in this hollow, in this out-of-the-way part of the wood, it bore an appearance of murder and mystery . . . Looking more attentively, I thought I recognised my robber of the other day, he who was singing so lustily about the month of May. Has he been killed by a peasant? But where could the peasant have come from? There is nobody left at Champrosay, Minville, or the Meillottes. More probably it is the result of some drunken quarrel between comrades, like the one I saw from the windows of the Hermitage . . .
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