by Jean Giono
Oral tradition of the other day’s clumsy, lamentable venture. First they called it the Battle of Manosque. They said: The Manosque rebels held in check more than a thousand Germans who finally called on the help of the air force. Manosque brought down three planes! (with what no one says). The German soldiers had to take Manosque house by house, they were shooting through the windows, blood ran in streams!! The Germans then shot more than six hundred women. Oral tradition: A. Michel told me the story of Guy’s adventure this morning, as told to him by Mme. Jalade. Bonnet told me he was tortured for hours in Céreste and finally they marched him in front of a corpse, saying to him, “That’s how you’ll end up if you don’t confess!” (confess what?)
At lunch we were talking about the extraordinary names in this region. One especially: Exubis Abdon. Exubis is the family name. Like first names here: Marguery, Cather.
Wednesday, June 28
The sky bears fantastic castles of clouds. In the afternoon heat they bombard one another with an artillery of gold across lakes of pure blue. They collapse so very slowly; the debris takes all day to rumble down from the pinnacles of the towers to the shade of the forests that cover the gulfs at the foot of the walls. They collapse as slowly as men who sometimes take a hundred years to do so. Through gaps the sun bursts forth.
Beginning to work again.
A first name from the period of my youth. It was the brother of one of my father’s workers, an epileptic. The one legend held to be a Zouave and who made dolls for me from the lids of the shoe polish. They cut my fingers like razors. After five minutes of playing with them (because they were very beautiful, in copper-colored tin as brilliant as gold), my fingers were all bloody and I ran off to cry in the darkness of the attic. I tried to leaf through the volumes of Alexandre Dumas in the big goatskin trunk and I got blood stains on La Dame de Montsoreau and Vingt ans après. The brother’s name was Tallien. He’s still alive. He’s a farmer.
Sunday, July 2
Worked steadily all week.
Summer has arrived with relentless heat, sky hard and empty, very blue, very uniform, smooth, seamless, enclosing us perfectly.
The other night I tried to see friends. Except for Paul R. who is calm and natural, the others are crazy. G. sly and deceitful. Ludovic E. kind but evasive as water, and finally, A.Z., hysterical, nasty, bitter, fearful, and cruel. Horribly cruel and the one most influenced by the propaganda. An instrument of hatred. After that, I’ll be very careful not to try again.
The revolution continues, without grandeur, murder of defenseless people under cover of darkness. I have no pity for those who die waging war. Henriot and the others. They are waging war, they know the risk they run, their deaths are normal and logical. But more and more, hatreds are despicably acted out. It’s not a matter of saving one’s country, it’s a matter of establishing the authority of one political party and using the quickest means to arrive there, by murdering one’s opponents. That’s the sign of a vulgar idea.
Bernard’s father, and then his wife, wrote to tell me of his death. Olga Fr. told me about the abandoned corpse lying in the road all day: by evening the bees had eaten the eyes!
Monday, July 3
Now when someone’s opinion differs from yours, he doesn’t try to convince you or even respect you, or imagine that maybe you could be right, no, he kills you. Times like those experienced by Piedmont and Lombardy in the period of the Condotterie. Florence in 1150. But today it’s sadder and less chivalrous. The weapons are all on the same side. On the other side are only rabbits that can be shot without any risk. How glorious to kill this one or that one or some other one, there’s no risk. There’s no law and order, no distinctive weapons. These times without grandeur.
Read a few scenes from Voyage en calèche to Dr. Petit. Everything must be redone as I thought. Not to take anyone’s opinion into account anymore, to be free as the wind, and to invent without a care. Now to get started.
Nothing more from Gide on Algiers radio. At least it can be said that he’s not a hothead. Is he the kind of man not to get fired up when he encounters paradise?
From my window this evening, I’m watching my neighbor Maurel who’s working in his garden. He’s hoeing his rows of corn. He’s the one, of course, who must rebuild the world. But it must be him, he himself, in person, and not his representative. He won’t know how to delegate someone. He will know how to reconstruct the world, but he won’t know how to send someone in his place. He will be fooled by the tricks of politics. I have faith in him, but none at all in the one he would choose.
Horribly difficult days, without joy and without hope. Much worse than my days in prison. No rest, no food. Nothing. Nothing to delight either body or mind. Stripped of everything, I am working on Deux cavaliers.
Aunt Noémie has yet to die. Three weeks ago Élise and her mother went to see her. She was supposed to die then. Her debt’s come due and she won’t pay. It’s like the saying goes: She’d rather owe it to us her whole life than have us waste it. And this despite the surgery.
Friday, July 7
Completely exhausted, I returned from the Criquet farm last night. It was ten o’clock, just at curfew. I rang the bell. Finally they could stop worrying. Élise came to the door at the same time as the children who opened it for me. She said nothing at first but greeted me tenderly and fiercely. As tired as I was, I didn’t see her tears. A little later she said, “I’m going to tell you something that will cause you great pain.” Then she said, “They killed Jean Bouvet.” My dear Jean! Purity and peace. Killed by machine gun in Mâcon. Marthe wrote the very day it happened, June 27. We didn’t receive the letter until yesterday. I still can’t comprehend that it’s true. Haunted all last night and all today by his voice, his gestures, his good smile behind his glasses. I can still feel his prickly beard when we embraced a year ago. I see him alive. I see him riddled with bullets, “drained of all his blood.” Rotten world! Rotten men, dirty rotten men! Jean! No, I truly can’t believe, can’t comprehend it.
Monday, July 10
Horrible days, Friday and Saturday. Haunted by Jean Bouvet’s death. I can see him as if he were still alive and I imagine the terrible murder, the appalling spectacle that Marthe and the children had to witness, and the grandmother. The first sentences of Marthe’s letter, so beautiful, keep coming back to me and give me physical pain. The whole dependable, loyal soul of Jean Bouvet has disappeared. It’s impossible to express the sadness of these two days. On Saturday Germaine Bellec came from Céreste, overwhelmed as well, her eyes full of tears. Thinking of her husband’s death, too, in Mollans last year, she told me that she will no doubt end up as a believer because “it’s not possible that everything is here.” Oh yes, Germaine, everything is here. Everything is in this life. The truth is that there is no death. But as you mean it, yes, it exists. Egoistically for you, for us, yes, there is death. In the face of life, no, there is nothing; there is no opposite of life.
Sunday evening I was able to refocus on things a bit. Today I’m feeling better. I still haven’t dared to work but I think it won’t be long before I get back to the chapter in Deux cavaliers entitled “History of Arms.”
Last Thursday the Germans shot two young men against the cemetery wall, eighteen to twenty years old, found carrying weapons.
Robert Berthoumieu had Jean Bouvet killed to save the lives of the Braumans.
Wednesday, July 12
This morning Élise woke me at six o’clock. Someone could be heard walking or rather wandering about upstairs in my office, above my bedroom. He was dragging his feet. At first we thought it was Guy doing who knows what. Guy sleeps in the bedroom next to my office. “What is he doing?” Élise asked me, “it sounds like an old man.” I put on my clothes, about to go upstairs barefoot, but when I opened the bedroom door, there was Uncle coming down. He was barely conscious and couldn’t speak. I took him by the hand and led him to the kitchen. I tried to unders
tand him or make him understand me, but without success. He was still a bit responsive and tried a few times to explain something to me as well. I got Guy up and sent him for the doctor. Before the doctor arrived, Uncle had a glimmer of consciousness and heard and responded to me. The doctor drew blood from Uncle’s arm. Then, as I was holding the basin I felt strange and I stepped out for air in the garden but I just had time to make it back to the terrace before I blacked out, stupidly. Still conscious, I heard the doctor say, “Lay him out flat, he’ll come to in a minute,” and I answered, “Yes, I’m alright,” and I was. Sensitive and even squeamish. Why? Because of the blood? But that’s stupid, I saw plenty of blood from 1914 to 1918. It’s perfectly ridiculous.
Alert at ten-thirty. But this time we could hear the planes and suddenly the sound of two dull strikes farther away. Those were bombs on the Valensole plateau. We could see smoke rising and then a huge squadron, wings glistening in the sun against the blue sky. They went around Manosque, to the south. They were very high. Bombs on the plateau again, with tremendous smoke. I made the women go inside and stand against the main wall of the house. But I was reassured by the course the squadron took. It headed toward the southwest side of Pierrevert, where huge plumes of red smoke rose in the distance not long after.
This time they were bombing very close to us and from all sides. While we were eating lunch at one o’clock, enormous mushrooms of white smoke erupted from fifty kilometers south. At three o’clock, the postman told me that the countryside was burning southwest of Pertuis.
Uncle is still barely conscious but wanders stubbornly about the house nonstop. He doesn’t recognize anyone anymore, except me, apparently. His pants are full of excrement and urine. He’s covered with flies. There’s no way to convince him to get undressed or to let us undress him and put him to bed. I must get him to the hospital, absolutely. We can’t take care of him here.
Hundreds of times I’ve been called to come deal with Uncle, who can’t keep still, goes into the garden, bangs his head against the wall and insists on wanting to go through it or remains rigid there as if he’d had a stroke. Hundreds of times he’s listened to me. Then this evening when I was worrying about how to make him go to bed, he went up to his bedroom all by himself and began to get undressed. I was too upset after my queasiness that morning. I unlaced his shoes and pulled off his disgustingly soiled pants. Undressed and lying down, he looked at me with, it seemed, a bit of intelligence and tried to explain something that remains a total mystery. But I thanked him for thinking of me in that way. He was the plague of my father’s life and for more than thirty years my own most serious worry, but this evening his look touched me.
It’s very strange; at first it took a bit of effort to touch those soiled pants, but then I helped him out of them with less effort and disgust than I would have thought. It’s easier than one imagines. Finally he’s undressed and in bed. I only have to watch him one more night, and tomorrow I think that I’ll move him to the hospital where he’ll get more regular care.
Thursday, July 13
I’ve just taken Uncle to the clinic. They put in a catheter to discharge his bladder. There’s no question that I was right to make this decision and to make it quickly. At home he can’t be kept clean, he would have ended up cutting himself, getting an infection, and suffering. He might have had a bit of apprehension, if he understood, because his generation is afraid of hospitals (although he’s at the clinic, not the hospital); I looked into his eyes to see if there was any anxiety. I was afraid of that. I pondered this a long time, but I’m sure that, without considering our interests, I’ve made the best possible decision on this matter, in his own interest.
Saturday, July 15
I’ve just come from seeing Uncle at the hospital. Yesterday he was able to say, “sit down.” Today he could only pat my shoulder slowly with his hand. When I left he said goodbye to me with his hand. Suffering has given him a kind of tenderness to which I’m extremely sensitive. I take pleasure in going to see him each day. I brought him a bottle of good wine, a jar of jam, and some milk. He’s not really such a bad fellow either, at heart. He wanted to play the braggart all his life. In the end he’ll lack nothing, whatever he did. Suffering ennobles. He looks very beautiful with his beard.
Uncle destroyed my peace all my life, but he just gave me the greatest joy that anyone could give me: he had faith in me. When the attack came over him, with the little life and intelligence he had left, he immediately made his way to my office to find me. When I took his hand on the stairs, he followed me. Just a little while ago, he awkwardly tried to thank me. It was the most moving thank you I’ve ever received. And it’s thanks to him that I’ve just now regained confidence in myself and the certainty that I’m right to forgive everything, and that I’m worth something. If I were to do nothing else in my life, it would not have been useless. In his unconscious distress, I represented to him help, salvation, protection from pain, from the mystery of his pain and fear of death. He was certain. That certainty moved me as never before. When he came to find me upstairs in my office at five in the morning, and when he didn’t find me and stayed there pacing about until, asleep below him, I was finally awakened by his pacing, he had at last decided to come down without me. He was lost. I opened the door of my bedroom. He was in the stairway. He stopped and looked up toward the office where I should have been. I called him. He didn’t hear me. He was still looking up, moaning, expecting to see me emerge from above. I took him by the hand. There, he said to himself, finally, there he is, and he followed me. I see his poor face again, the trail of saliva running down his beard, the extraordinary trust in me that overwhelms me; I may never in my life see a face more consoling to me than that one. I am repaid beyond all that he owes me.
Monday, July 17
I’ve just come from the hospital. They operated on Uncle this morning. I was there. Once more he looked at me. He is going to die. I am losing him like a beloved being.
Tuesday, July 18
Uncle died last evening at six o’clock.
Wednesday, July 19
Yesterday they arrested the gang that was committing masked, armed robberies under the guise of resistance. They would come to your house, sometimes even in broad daylight, search you, demand a few hundred thousand francs. In extreme circumstances they took checks that they made you cash for them at the bank, accompanying you there concealing a pistol. During this time, they held your wife, mother, or children to threaten you. Then they took off. The gang was arrested. There were thirty-five of them, including two policemen, two chauffeurs from the Grands Travaux, and to everyone’s astonishment, many classy, well-heeled, well-raised citizens of Manosque, “gentlemen.”
Another thing. Another thing altogether. There’s a rumor circulating that Martin-Bret was arrested, by the Germans. So a meeting could be held with the whole Oraison Resistance Committee.
There have been three days of oppressive heat, sad sun; without joy and without hope of joy. Uncle was buried this morning at ten o’clock. At nine-thirty I went back to the hospital where they had kept him. He was in a small chapel laid out stiff under muslin. His friend Raymond had made the coffin. It was also Raymond who, with the help of the hospital gardener, had laid Uncle in the casket. He had folded a sheet over him and propped him up with wood shavings. He had taken exquisite care to put shavings on either side of his head, densely packed, and he had flattened them with his hand so that they didn’t fall onto his face. Uncle’s blue eyes, closed when he died, were open again. He has come to look very much like his father, the Zouave. His hooked nose. Raymond is Uncle’s old drinking companion. It was very beautiful the way he had (in his fashion) taken great care over the dead head. Everyone said to me that Uncle had a millionaire’s funeral. They don’t know the whole story, the last (last and first)moments of tenderness, and the hand that gently smoothed the pillow of wood shavings. But behind the hearse, and crossing the market square, I really felt that
, with regard to the life of the senses, all this sentimentality is a fool’s game and that a poor man’s life is worth more than a millionaire’s funeral. And now under what magic sail does he navigate? A hundred billion times nearer the treasures than we are. Even if he is only matter, he is on the magic side of matter.
July 29
This evening, Champsaur, passing through on his way to Seyne to see his family, came to pay me a visit. He never fails to do so anytime he’s passing through. I like Champsaur very much, for his intelligence, his heart, his qualities. His faithfulness to our friendship touches me deeply. I gave him a good explanation of Les Grands Chemins. I should be able to write it as well as I explained it to him. How easy it is out loud. I must transfer that ease into the writing. (The idea of the cobwebs is good and the weapons that allow for his freedom at the end. Maybe he’ll leave dying; maybe he’ll take two more steps and then die, but he has left.) We’ll see, it’s an idea in any case. And it makes the book into something closed, constructed.
I returned to fishing yesterday. All day in the sun and in the sands of the Durance. I learned very quickly to gather up the line in my hand. In fact, I’m quite good at it. We caught three kilograms of fish, but with great difficulty. Toward evening the fishing was better, with fish being caught by the dozens, all very fine. Nothing but roaches. Not a single barbel. The other day in the same spot, nothing but barbels and five kilograms without any effort. I came back last evening completely exhausted. But I’m fine today, physically. Mentally, still very anxious, bouts of deep sadness, waves of dark despair, and then I regain strength, regain hope.