Roux the Bandit

by Chamson, André;

  I have sometimes encountered carcasses on my mountain excursions. They were always rotting in severe solitude and my approach has not even stirred up a flight of flies. …

  Just once I saw a solitary crow watching from a white rock, beside the swollen carcass of a sheep: at the sound of my steps it turned its head and flew off without regret, as if it were not used to feasting on carrion. …

  “But,” resumed Finiels, “the animals did not devour Roux the Bandit during this winter, and on the first fine days, when the people of the valley were beginning to go back to the mountain, we heard them talking about him again.

  “A few woodcutters ran across him in the clearings of Luzette, and the people of the heights, coming down to the market at Saint-Jean, met him on the pass of Fauvel and talked with him for more than an hour.”

  1That is, the conventional ghost.

  2“Raïou, -ole. Sobriquet of the inhabitants of the Cévennes, especially the mountain folk who inhabit the Southern valleys and slopes of Lozère.”—Mistral, Lou Tresor dou Felibrige.

  IV

  At nightfall, the women came back from Saint-Jean. Five o’clock had just sounded on the long clock, the gilded bronze pediment of which, arranged in sheaves of arms and flags in the style of the Directory, sparkled beside the bread-box. The first one, the grand-daughter of Finiels, appeared at the open door and stopped suddenly at sight of this assembly of men grouped about her grandfather and her father in the chimney-corner.

  Behind her came the wife of Finiels, with her daughter-in-law.

  “Go in, don’t stand there between our legs. You are not afraid of people, are you?”

  The two women pushed the little girl into the room and came up to the great table, upon which they placed the heavy baskets they had brought up from the town. After setting down the baskets, they remained in front of the table, their arms swinging, their heads and shoulders thrown forward, as if still bent by the effort of the steep climb under a double load. It was only then that we all greeted one another, observing in this way the mountain custom according to which we do not address one another until we have come to a full stop, with the legs firm on the ground and the chest freed from the breathlessness of the ascent or the descent.

  I know these two women well, but the greeting they gave me was not the same, and a whole world of moral and practical obligations determined its familiarity.

  Finiels’s wife is an old woman. She knew my grandmother well, she saw me when I was quite small, and she treats me with a sort of respectful irony, with a delicate abruptness, as if I were somewhat in her care, under her supervision, as if she felt a duty toward me.

  Her daugher-in-law is a young woman whom I knew well as a young girl, seven years ago when, bold and almost insolent, she answered the pleasantries of the young men and wore green and red scarfs, the ends of which flapped in the wind against her finely cut Saracen face. We talked as good comrades in those days, and we looked each other in the eye and exchanged saucy remarks when we met on the main street of Saint-Jean or on the square by the station on Sunday evenings, while the little spinning-girls sang ballads as they waited for the ten o’clock train. But since her marriage, she no longer seems to notice the presence of young men and—like all the girls of these valleys, saucy and wanton at eighteen, then silent and discreet wives— she no longer busies herself with anything but her little daughter and her housework. … She will not talk with the old men until much later, when she is an old woman like her mother-in-law. Then she will regain that tone of aggressive and ironical familiarity which she had as a young girl. But there will be no longer that sensual quivering of the nostrils to animate it, those sudden movements of the lips which seem to scorn kisses. …

  Today, her mother-in-law alone has the right to speak to us, and it is really she alone who can do it, with her mischievous authority as mistress of the house, governess of affairs, and directress of the consciences of the family.

  While her daughter-in-law, after saluting us indifferently, began to unpack the baskets, Finiels’s wife came towards us, and, looking at the table, which was still set, the dishes soiled and the glasses half full, she asked Finiels in a tone of reproach and raillery:

  “You haven’t let your guests starve?”

  “We have eaten the beast’s liver and everything that was left in the cupboards,” replied Finiels. “We also found a few bottles and I don’t think we have fared so badly. …”

  “We shall see if they leave anything on their plates at supper. … How much does it weigh?”

  “Seventy-five. It is small and gave us trouble. The mayor and the two from Bessède are still after another; they went toward Montals, but I don’t think they should be long in coming. You can set their places; they will have supper with us.”

  “So you have been out all night for nothing much, and now you make speeches at your sweet ease. … Is it Monsieur André who is talking politics?”

  “It is not Monsieur André, it is I who am talking,” replied Finiels, “and I am speaking of Roux the Bandit.”

  “A good story to leave alone; it only makes us ashamed and brings up regrets. … You don’t have to make much ado or great speeches just to tell how we spent three years without understanding that boy’s behaviour and in the end simply had to agree with him. …”

  “You were the first to cry out against him at the beginning of the war, and you would not even see Finette any more.”

  “I don’t deny it: I behaved like everybody else. I must say that we had some excuse, in the first place because when a thing begins one can never properly understand it, and in the second because we had our reasons for thinking this war was different. … We believed it was going to make an end of all bad things, and that is why we thought everyone ought to go into it. … But if we had known that this war was like all the others, just good for getting people killed without changing anything, we should have said, as they said in the old days, ‘Let who will go.’ That was the way it was during the Crimean War, and it was the same in 1870, as my mother has told me again and again. War came, but in the country nothing changed. If there was a rascal in the valley, somebody who worked from one farm to another, without doing much, and slept in barns, he could go and seek his fortune in the army, but the others, the farming people who had their families and their regular work, remained quite peacefully at their tasks, with their families, as if there were no war. Even in 1870, when the Prussians came up to Paris and beyond, all those who set out that winter went of their own free will. Nobody was obliged to go, and whoever wished to stay behind did so. …”

  “You would have liked everybody to refuse to go?”

  “No, indeed, for we believed the war was going to change everything. But what I mean was that Roux was quite right, and that he had understood everything at once. … War is never a good thing, it has never led to better times for anybody. That was where we were mistaken, while he saw clearly. Now, in spite of all the misery we have been through, there are in the town well-informed and capable gentlemen, like Monsieur Rolland himself, who are already talking about the next war. … If it were to come back, I should like to have all the honest men climb up on the mountains together: those who were Christians would offer prayers there, and the others would talk together, like good people who do not wish ill to anybody. I can assure you, if the war begins again, I shall pack up the boy’s things so that he can climb up to Aire de Côte, and I myself shall put him on the right road.”

  The vehemence of this old woman, the brutal decision of her words, seemed to embarrass these men. Their backs bent forward, their hands clasped and almost touching the ground, they leaned over, as if to escape from the tempest. Were they perhaps more conscious than she of the social complexity, the material difficulties, of their responsibilities? They had been soldiers, they had gone to the city, they had seen other men, commanders and judges, they felt themselves tangled in the social organism, incorporated in the nation.

  Seeing them bent over in th
eir chairs, one could not have said whether they disapproved the anger of Finiels’s wife or shared it. Before these peasants of France, mountaineers of the Cévennes, loyal and sincere in character, any ringleader of men whatever might experience a pang of anxiety and doubt. The patriot who wished to call them to the national defence would probably be afraid of finding them resolutely indifferent and refractory, and the pacifist would despair of being able to lift them above their usual point of view.

  Incomprehensible in the silence, they sat there, close together, watching the fire of great logs, in which the green twigs and the wet stalks were crackling.

  It was, nevertheless, this question of principle, this stark problem, that aroused all their interest in the story of Roux. It was because of it that they became excited over the speeches and the adventures of this refractory soul, but, anxious to pass upon it without uncertainty, they did not wish to reach a conclusion too quickly. If they set themselves up as judges of the exigencies and institutions of men, they wished at least to respect the procedure and to safeguard all the forms while conducting the trial.

  But Finiels’s son broke the silence. He lifted his head, held out his hands to the fire, and in a clear voice—that businesslike voice in which he said, “Pull hard, pull to the left,” when a tree was being felled, or “Hold tight” when he had to place a heavy load on the cart—he replied to his mother:

  “They are not going to make us live like beasts again for five years. If there is another war I stay on the farm!”

  The words fell into the silence. The most authoritative of these old mountaineers, old Finiels himself, doubtless did not feel that he had a right to contradict on this subject a young man who had fought through the whole war. They remained motionless, as if struck by the play of the great flames on the green twigs that did not catch fire easily.

  Only the two sons of Liron, who had also been through the campaign, approved their comrade’s words with a simple nod of the head.

  Finiels’s son looked at his wife and his daughter, then he turned to me and added, with that slightly distant air which he assumed only when explaining to me the details of the field work:

  “You know that a peasant is made to remain on the soil. I have no desire to go running about the mountain with the gendarmes at my heels, trying to make me go back and fight. I must stay with my vines and my beasts, and if I have to do any shooting it will be in front of my door and at the first man who comes to tell me anything.”

  Finiels began talking again, but he avoided addressing his son. It was evident that he did not wish to contradict him, or even to pass sentence upon his words. So it was to his wife that he still pretended to reply, but he did not succeed in mastering a sort of awkwardness, a hesitation that seemed to trammel his gestures and his words:

  “All these reasons are fine to talk about, but we did not think of them at the beginning of the war. Roux was the only one of the whole countryside who did not want to go, and if we had admitted he was right, we should have thought we were saying all the others were wrong. Besides, in order to understand him well, it was necessary for us to know his ideas, and, as I have just explained to you, we only heard them spoken of from time to time and always as things repeated by someone or other. As far as I am concerned, I have already told you that I lost all my anger with him on the day when I learned that he did not want to enlist because of his beliefs. But I continued to think he was wrong just the same, because I still had too many unanswered questions in my mind.

  “You can understand this, even today, when the war is far away and men’s minds turn less frequently toward these questions. When a man does not wish to fight because his beliefs forbid him, there is nothing to say, but when he refuses to share the suffering and the hardships of all men, that is another matter. I did not find any fault with Roux for not wishing to fight, but for living uselessly, like a wild beast. … In this connection, there was a story that went all over the countryside and gave me still more to think about.

  “Perhaps you have already heard this story: it is about the pastor of Anduze, Bertin Aguillon, who went and got himself killed in the war taking care of others, and who wouldn’t touch a gun or harm anyone.”

  I knew this story well. They had told it to me again and again in the evenings, at the time of the autumn reunions. The wounded soldiers spread it about the country during the first months of 1915: repeated by all the old people of the high valleys, it immediately entered the cycle of the moral tales of the mountain. It soon took on the aspect of a legend because, with the actual fact of the death and the official reports, there were mingled the mysterious interpretations of simple souls. … Now the little Protestant communities of the Cévennes have finally received it into their golden legend of the martyrs and confessors of the gospel: humble tales that will never emerge from the narrow circle in which they were born and which are very often nothing but family traditions accepted by a few neighbouring families. …

  With a nod, I indicated to Finiels that I knew this story, and, while he went on with his tale, I admired silently the sureness with which the similitudes and comparisons were brought about in his mind. The story of Roux and that of the pastor of Anduze seemed in fact to compose two parallel lives centring about the same problem and each offering a different answer. But this identity, more subtle than that of the parallel lives of antiquity, could only be felt by an intelligence habituated to weighing the problems of the conduct of life. Without any effort and through a natural application of his taste for morality, Finiels had understood the lesson that the comparison of these two stories offered.

  “Since you know the story of the pastor of Anduze, you will understand all the ideas it put into my head. This pastor had had, at bottom, the same ideas as Roux, but he had put them into practice in another way, and so well that everybody was obliged to do homage to him. So I wondered if Roux could find an excuse for himself if he were faced with this man. … To tell the truth, I didn’t believe it, but, before considering the thing as certain, I wanted to hear what he would say for himself in his own defence. I felt sure that I should meet him some day or other on the mountain, and I was awaiting this day to make up my mind finally about his behaviour. …

  “As I had thought, I ran across him; at the beginning of the spring of 1916, near Roquelongue, one day when I had gone to gather a little bundle of faggots.

  “I was still up above the meadows when night began to fall: the wind drove the fog from Luzette and whirled about my bundle as if it were going to throw me into the valley. On that side, the short cuts are steep, and it is a bad place to go down by. … One false step and you would go rolling into the depths of Roquelongue.

  “So I stopped a few minutes on the Col du Pas for a breathing space. As I was getting ready to set off again, I saw a man come out of the forest and walk toward me: it was Roux. His clothes were all torn by the brambles, and he had a canvas bag over his shoulder and a long beard that reached to the middle of his chest. He was thinner, and he bent over more than before his misconduct, but he had a more determined air, as if, in the meantime, he had become the head of a family, with burdens and authority.

  “We wished each other good evening, and Roux came and sat down near me on the grass. I said to him:

  “ ‘The winter was bitter.’

  “ ‘Still bitterer on the mountain than in the valley.’

  “At that, I looked at him without answering, and for two minutes we did not know what more to say.

  “But during this silence, I turned everything over in my mind and tried to find a way of making him explain his behaviour.

  “ ‘Roux, the pastor of Anduze has been killed in the war. He did not want to fight, either, because of conscientious reasons. But he went just the same, like the others, in order not to put himself in the wrong. When he reached his regiment, he went to find his colonel and told him that his conscience forbade him to fight, but that it commanded him to go and care for the wounded, in the most dangerous places. Th
e colonel listened to him. Nobody made any trouble for him, and he set out with the others, but without taking a gun. In the campaign, he shared the sufferings of those who were fighting, he even comforted them by being always in the thickest part of the first line in order to pick up those who were struck, and he ended by being struck himself and dying, while still giving a good example of courage and calmness to all who were near him and who also were exposed to death from one moment to another.’

  “I had struck the right note. Roux the Bandit had listened to me, bending toward me as if he had been stunned by my words.

  “It was more than a year since the pastor had been killed, but Roux had not yet heard of it and his ignorance was understandable, for he had not talked with more than five or six persons, and they had quite enough to do questioning him and talking to him about the people of our valley, without trying to give him the news of the whole countryside. If I told him this story, it was because I had an idea in the back of my mind, and you must know what it was. …

  “Thus Roux the Bandit remained as if stunned by the news. You would have said he had just learned that some misfortune had befallen a member of his family. I don’t know whether he was whispering a prayer, or whether he could not collect himself, but he remained all of two minutes without saying anything, half-bending toward me, his face deeply agitated. Then, after a moment, he made an effort to collect himself and asked me to tell him the story in detail.

  “Whereupon I took up the story again, explaining to him everything you know: the decision of the pastor not to fight, his departure as a hospital-attendant, his devotion to the soldiers, and his calm death in the midst of battle. I repeated to him everything the men on furlough had told us about this death and the good example it had set them; I repeated to him also the last words of the pastor, who had sent a message to his wife, asking her to teach his son to detest war. … When I had finished this story, Roux said to me: