Chapter 2. Vroncourt

My childhood nest was a tumbled-down chateau. At its corners, the same height as the main building, were four square towers with roofs like church steeples. The south side had no windows, only loopholes in the towers, which made the building look like a tomb or a castle, depending on the point of view. A long time ago, people called the place the Fortress, but when I lived there it was usually called the Tomb.

To the east lay a vineyard, and we were separated from the little village of Vroncourt by a grassy stretch as wide as a prairie. At the end of it, a brook flowed down the only street in the village, and in the winter the brook became so swollen that people in Vroncourt had to put stepping stones in it to make it passable.

Further to the east there was a screen of poplars, and the wind murmured sweetly as it blew through those trees; and then, rising behind everything, were the blue mountains of Bourmont. Many years later when I saw Sydney, Australia, surrounded by bluish peaks, I recognized on a larger scale the crests of the mountains I had seen in my childhood.

To the west were the hills and woods of Suzerin. When the snow was deep, wolves would creep from the woods into the Tomb through gaps in the wall, and they would howl in the courtyard. Our dogs would answer them, and this concert would last until the frozen morning. All was well at the Tomb, and I loved those nights.

I loved them especially when the north wind raged, and we read late, the whole family gathered in the old Great Hall. I loved the wintry setting and the frozen upper rooms. All of it—the white shroud of snow, the chorus of the wind, the wolves and dogs—would have made me a poet, even if all my family hadn’t been poets from the cradle.

It was glacially cold in the Tomb’s enormous rooms. Through that vast ruin the wind whistled, as it does through the rigging of a sailing ship. We huddled around the fire, my grandfather sitting in his easy chair situated halfway between his bed and a stack of all kinds of guns. In winter he threw a big cloak of white flannel over his clothes and wore wooden shoes trimmed with fleece. Often I sat on those wooden shoes in front of the fireplace, snuggling up to the cinders along with the dogs and cats.

Depending on the circumstances, my grandfather appeared like many different men to me. When he told me of the old, great days, the epic fights of the First Republic, he was passionate, so that he could relate to me the war of the giants, the war when “whites” and “blues,” brave men fighting brave men, showed history how heroes died. Sometimes when he explained to me the various books we read together, he was ironic, like Voltaire, the master of his youth. At other times he was gay and witty, like Moliere. Still other times, when our minds traveled across unknown worlds together, we spoke of things he saw stirring on the horizon. We looked at past stages of human development, and we discussed the future. Often I cried, touched in my heart by some quick image of progress, art, or science, and my grandfather, with great tears in his eyes, too, would put his hand on my head, which was more tousled than one of our dogs.

Both my grandmothers lived with us, and how different they were! One had a delicate, Gallic face framed by a headdress of white muslin gathered into tiny pleats, under which her hair was arranged in a large chignon on her neck. The other had eyes that were black like coal, and short hair; she was enveloped in an eternal youth which made me think of fairies in the old tales.

My mother was then a blond, with soft and smiling blue eyes and long, curly hair. She was so fresh and pretty that her friends used to say to her laughingly, “It is impossible for this ugly child to be yours.” As for me, I was tall, skinny, disheveled, wild, brazen, sunburned, and often decorated with torn clothing held together with pins. I knew how I looked, and I was amused at people finding me ugly, although my poor mother sometimes took offense at it.

Many animals lived in the Tomb. We had a big Spanish hound with long yellow hair, and two sheepdogs. All three dogs answered to the name of Presta. We also had a black and white dog named Medor, and a young bitch we named Doe in memory of an old mare named Doe that had died just before we got the bitch. When I gave the old mare an apronful of hay her manner would change remarkably. The thing I remember best about her was her stealing my bouquets; she would take them and then lick my face. When she died my grandfather and I wrapped her head in a white cloth, so no dirt would touch it, and buried her outside near the acacia.

We had legions of cats, too, especially male ones. We called all the male cats Lion or Darling and all our female cats Galta. Sometimes the cats would crowd us at the fire, and my grandfather would use the tongs to pick a glowing coal from the fireplace and wave it at them. The whole pack would run off, only to make a fresh assault soon after.

My mother, my aunt, and my grandmothers usually sat around the table. One read aloud, and the other knitted or sewed. Beside me as I write now is the sewing basket my mother kept her things in.

Friends often came to visit us. When Bertrand or M. Laumont, the old teacher from Ozi£res, came, the family sat up later than usual, reading aloud. They tried to send me to bed so they could finish reading the chapters they didn’t want to read in front of me. Sometimes I obstinately refused, nearly always winning eventually, and other times when I was in a hurry to hear what they wanted to hide from me, I obeyed quickly, and then tiptoed back and hid behind the door to listen.

We called the schoolteacher Little Laumont to distinguish him from his relative, another Laumont, the doctor at Bourmont, whom we called Big Laumont. Big Laumont, the doctor, enveloped in a vast black coat that made him look like an Egyptian scarab, came on a stocky horse to spend every Tuesday with us. Little Laumont was always dressed in a short, gray frock coat and carried an enormously long cane. When he moved, his feet never seemed to touch the ground, and he was as intelligent as he was strange. He used to spend the winters with us. Long ago Little Laumont had given lessons to my aunt Agathe and my mother, and I think he had taught the whole countryside to read.

Those were the good days. My grandmother or I was at the piano, and my grandfather played his bass viol. Big Laumont sometimes carried a flute in his pocket, and when he played it, he played perfectly. All of us together would play music until we tired of it. Then in the dusk of the evening the doctor would leave swiftly, with his capacious black cloak floating around him. He looked like the black horseman of the legends.

Big Laumont asked me once, very seriously, the way he always spoke to me, why I didn’t write some prose works. Following his suggestion, I began a story, The Naughty Deeds of Helen , which began, “Helen was very naughty and stubborn.” It was a collection of my own wicked deeds, each of which I ended with an exemplary punishment for the sake of morality. For example, I described one episode in which Helen stole a small encyclopedia from an old doctor’s house, a leather-bound volume in which were found the names of everything that could be learned. For punishment, Helen was condemned to spend a month with no book other than a huge grammar, which she certainly wouldn’t have bothered to steal. “Oh, you little monster,” said Big Laumont when he read this piece, “I thought it was you who had taken my book!”

That wasn’t the only thing I took as a child. Each of us is capable of all the good or evil in his being. Without remorse I used to take money (when there was any), fruits, vegetables, and so on, and gave them away in my relatives’ names. That caused some great scenes when the recipients tried to thank them. Incorrigible as I was, I laughed about it.

Once my grandfather offered me twenty sous a week if I would promise not to steal anything again, but I found I lost too much money on that deal and I refused. I had filed some skeleton keys to open the cupboards where pears and other fruits were kept, and I used to leave little notes there in place of what I had taken. I remember one that read: “You have the lock, but I have the key.”

In the summer the Tomb filled up with birds that flew in through the broken windows. Swallows came back to their nests of former years, sparrows flew in and out of the broken windows, occasionally knocking on the unbroken panes, and the larks sang loudly with us. That is, they sang with us when we sang in a major key; when we changed to a minor key they would fall silent.

The birds weren’t the dogs’ and cats’ only fellow-boarders. We had partridges, a tortoise, a roebuck, some wild boars, a wolf, barn-owls, bats, several broods of orphaned hares that we had raised by spoon-feeding— a whole menagerie. And of course, there was also the colt, Zephir, and his grandmother Brouska. How old Brouska was I don’t know—she had been with us so long that no one could remember her age. Brouska walked in and out of the rooms in order to take bread and sugar from the hands of people she liked. To people she didn’t like, she would pull back her lips, showing all her huge yellow teeth as if she were laughing in their faces. And there were cows, too, the great white Bion6 and the young Bella and N£ra. I went to their stable to chat with them, and they answered me in their own way by looking at me with their soft eyes.

All these beasts lived on good terms with each other. The cats would lie curled up, following with a negligent eye the birds toddling about on the ground. Even more strange, I never saw a cat bother about a mouse, and mice lived in all the walls. In the Great Hall, behind the green tapestry that covered the walls, the mice ran around rapidly but unafraid, uttering little shrill cries as they went. The mice behaved perfectly, and never gnawed on papers or books and never placed a tooth on the violins, cellos, and guitars which were scattered about.

What peace there was in this place, and what peace there was in my life at this time! Maybe I didn’t deserve it. How I love to dream of this little corner of the earth. If my mother had been able to survive my prison term, I would have liked to have spent some peaceful days near her, days such as she needed, with me working near her armchair, and the old Caledonian cats purring at the hearth.

Every time something important happened in my family, my grand¬ mother would write a verse account of it. My grandfather added some pages of his own to that collection, which was kept in two large, looseleaf books. I wrapped those books in black crepe when my grandmother died.

The winds of adversity blow on things as well as people. Of all the pages my grandfather wrote, I have only one left, “A des antiquaires,” and I have only one piece my grandmother wrote, “La Mort,” which she wrote after the death of her husband. They are all that remain to me. Their sad tones are a feeble enough exhalation compared to the delicate verses that I no longer have. All has faded away, even my grandfather’s guitar, which crumbled while I was in New Caledonia. My mother cried over it a long time.

In autumn, my mother, my aunts, and I used to go far into the forest. It was good to hear through the deep silence in our woods the heavy hammer of the smithy, and the sharp blows of the ax that made the branches shiver. Then, too, there were the songs of birds and the buzzing of insects under the fallen leaves. Often we would hear the little branches breaking where some old woman was gathering a pile of fagots. Sometimes we would hear the snort of a wild boar in the thickest woods, and other times it was a few poor roebucks flashing across our vision. Maybe they sensed the autumn hunts, when men cut the throats of animals to the sound of the hunting horn. Animals kill to live; the hunter destroys only to destroy.

On the road to Bourmont was Uncle Georges’s old mill, which stood at the foot of a hill where there was an uncultivated vineyard. The grass was thick and cool in the meadow bordered by the millpond. The rosebushes rustled as the ducks moved through them or the wind pushed them. In the mill, the first room was dark even at midday, and it was there that Uncle Georges used to read every evening. How much he learned reading that way!

All those people, living and dead, here they are in this place of time gone by. Here are my grandmother Marguerite’s sisters with their white headdresses, pins fastening scarves at their necks, the square bodices— the complete outfits of peasant women, which they wore coquettishly from their youth, when people called them beautiful girls, until their deaths. Like themselves, their names were simple: Marguerite, Cath¬ erine, Apolline.

One of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Victoire, was with us later at Audeloncourt. She was very tall, with a thin face that had fine, regular features. My mother’s other sister, my Aunt Catherine, lived in the Lagny area. Like my mother, both had an absolute cleanliness, a luxury of neatness, which allowed neither the shadow of a spot, nor a speck of dust, from their headdresses to the tips of their feet.

In the first flush of my Aunt Victoire’s youth, some missionary preaching at Audeloncourt left behind a religious fanaticism that led many young girls into the convent. My aunt was one of them. She became a novice, or lay sister, at the hospice of Langres, but she broke her health by fasting and was forced to return to secular life. She came to live with us at Vroncourt, where she stayed until my grandparents died.

I never heard a more ardent missionary than my Aunt Victoire. From Christianity she had absorbed everything that sweeps a person away: somber hymns, evening visits to churches drowned in shadow, the lives of virgins, which recall druidesses or vestal virgins or valkyries. All her nieces were swept into this mysticism, me more easily than the others.

What a strange impression still remains with me. I used to listen at the same time to my Voltairian grandparents and my exalted Catholic aunt. Moved by strange dreams, I searched the way a bewildered compass- needle looks for north in a fierce storm.

My north, where my compass finally pointed, was the Revolution. My fanaticism changed from dream to reality; years later my friend Theophile Ferrd told me I was consecrated to the Revolution, and it was true. All of us were its fanatics.

I read hungrily during those years, especially with Nanette and Josephine, two remarkably intelligent young women who had never left the district. We used to talk about everything. In good weather we carried out magazines and books to read in the tall grass: Magasins pittoresques, and Musees des families, Hugo, Lamartine, and others. I have always wondered if Nanette and Josephine loved me better than their own children. I certainly loved them. One day, when I was perhaps six or seven years old, we drenched Lamennais’s Paroles d’un croyant with our tears. From that day on, I belonged to the masses.

From that moment I climbed step by step from Lamennais to anarchy. Is there further to go? Of course, because there is always more to come, there is always further to go, always progress to make in light and liberty, in the development of new sensitivities of which we now have only the rudiments. There is a future which we imprisoned spirits cannot even glimpse.

In front of me are a few handfuls of memorabilia from my childhood. I take one at random, a description of Vroncourt my mother saved. How many things this little piece of yellowed paper has survived!

Vroncourt

Vroncourt lies on the slope of a mountain between the forest and the plain. You can hear the wolves howling, but you do not see the lambs’ throats being cut. At Vroncourt, you’re separated from the rest of the world. The wind rattles the old church tower and the towers of the chateau, and it bends the fields of ripe grain like ocean waves. All that you can hear is the formidable noise of the storm. It is great and beautiful.

This work, as well as my Legendary Haute-Marne, was illustrated with my own charcoal sketches. Responsible for a piece of that work was Marie Verdet, who must have been more than a hundred years old. “Say,” she said to me, “it won’t be worth the trouble to write your book on Vroncourt if you don’t include the legend of the Three Washerwomen.”

So I drew the Fountain of the Ladies. The shadow of willows lies on the water, and from this shadow the pale washerwomen emerge, three phantoms under the trees. According to Marie Verdet, one cries about the past, another moans for the days of the present, and the last mourns for tomorrow. They remind me of the legends of the Norns.

Another charcoal sketch in the same work depicted another custom, the Diableries of Chaumont, last held more than a century ago. My sketches of the Diableries are impressionistic and try to reproduce the feeling of the moonbeams, the forest, the snow, and the night.

Here is another fragment. It comes from my Legendary Haute-Marne and describes these Diableries of Chaumont which took place every seven years.

The Diableries of Chaumont are related to history, fancy, and legend. The Diablerie is a dream which had a real existence, and traces of it were still visible at the end of the eighteenth century. Many bizarre customs disappeared at the end of the Middle Ages; the Diablerie of Chaumont was one that survived. . . . Every seven years, say the chroniclers of Champagne, twelve men would dress like devils, or as you would expect devils to dress, in all the old torn-up clothes of hell, where there are all sorts of disguises, even that of Jehovah. The devils of Chaumont got theirs at the shop of old Anne Larousse, at the sign of Brae et Joie: an immense pair of horns and a black hood. They accompanied the Palm Sunday procession to honor heaven and to represent hell there. After they had danced in the procession, for the love of God, our lords the devils spread out into the countryside, which they had the right to pillage, for the love of the devil, to their heart’s content.

Why did they choose the number twelve? The chroniclers say that it was in honor of the twelve apostles, although this method of honoring them wouldn’t have suited them. Some scholars claimed that they stood for the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and others that they stood for the sons of Jacob.

None of these suppositions was generally accepted. At each Diablerie the arguments arose anew among the scholars, clerks, and astrologers of the good town of Chaumont, who exhausted themselves in writing tracts on the question.

These men disguised as devils sang continuously “Quis ist iste rex gloriae” with as much spirit as those whose costumes they were wearing, but with less harmony, since the devil has an essentially musical ear.

The Diablerie of Chaumont lasted from Palm Sunday to the Nativity of St. John, and it ended with a representation of the main acts of the life of Saint John, presented on ten stages so that the faithful could watch.

The celebration was concluded with a ceremonial death by torture. (There couldn’t be a good celebration without that, either in their time or ours.) The torture and death were ordinarily just symbolic—an effigy of Herod, representing his soul, was burned at the stake.

The last year these holy orgies took place, an event happened which may have hastened their end. This event does not appear in the written chronicles, but Marie Verdet did not have the slightest doubt that it happened, for her grandfather had heard it from his grandfather, who had heard it from his grandmother. At this particular torture and death, the effigy of Herod had gestured so beautifully that the audience enjoying themselves at the “torture” had filled the valley of the Ecoliers. Suddenly the effigy began to moan and people went into ecstasy. The miracle was believed all the more easily since the people later found charred bones in the ashes of the stake. But, if they found charred bones, they no longer found the handsome singer Nicias Guy; it was he who had been so terribly murdered out of love’s vengeance.

Let me add here a few notes on my native region, the Haute-Marne. Plows bring to light the stone coffins of our fathers, the Gauls; the knife for slitting victims’ throats; Roman incense. The plowman, accustomed to these finds, turns them aside, sometimes making a watering trough from a coffin, or using the incense to scent the enormous stump which burns beneath his great chimney. He continues to sing to his oxen, while behind him the birds gather worms in the open furrows.

Formerly, near a ruined fortress, the chdte paiot, people used to go to conjure the spirits of the ruins with a silver piece, a lighted candle, a white shirt, and a sharpened knife.

“Why the piece of silver?” I asked Marie Verdet, and lowering her voice, she answered, “For the devil!”

“And the lit candle?” “It’s for the good Lord!” “And the white shirt?” “For the dead!” “And the knife with the sharpened blade?” “For the person carrying out the ceremony if he betrays his fealty.”

“His fealty to whom?”

“To the unknown, to the Ghost-in-Flames.”

Enough of these stories found in the stones that I walked over as a child. Let me return to the events of my own early life. I never learned to write script properly. For a long time as a child I wrote my poems in letters I had invented myself, modeled after those in books. Finally, my family realized it was time to teach me to write like the rest of the world. The Naughty Deeds of Helen was the last work I wrote with my own letters instead of writing in proper script. Because no one at the Tomb could write script properly, and also because they thought it would be better if I had less free time in which to occupy myself as I pleased, I was sent to the village school every day.

In spite of the five styles of writing taught at Vroncourt, and the beautiful English script I learned in teacher-training courses at Chaumont, I returned later to the style I used at home. I rolled my letters, disheveled my words, and let my handwriting change as my thought changed. It makes my handwriting very difficult to imitate. People have tried anyway. Two years ago, my poor mother got a fairly well-forged letter—the signature was a masterpiece—saying that I was sick and asking for her at the prison of Saint-Lazare. That was a terrible thing to do. Another time someone sent the authorities a well-counterfeited request asking that I be allowed to see my mother; the forger didn’t know that, at that very moment, I had been with my mother for several days.

Anyway, I was sent every day to school at Vroncourt to improve my script and occupy my time. The teacher was named Michel, but he was not related to me.

The school at Vroncourt was a dark house with only two rooms. The larger, which looked out onto the street, was the classroom. The other, which was never brightly lit, was where the teacher and his wife lived. It looked out on a grass-covered slope through a window at ground level which was like a vent in a cave. This window, like the window of the classroom, was made of many tiny panes and bordered by red cotton curtains.

By the light of the classroom window the schoolteacher’s wife, Mme Michel, sewed all winter long. Her profile, a little severe under her great white headdress, seemed very beautiful to me. On the days when we recited catechism, my Aunt Victorine used to come in and sit near her, so that she could hear if I had learned it well.

The tables in the classroom were arranged around three sides of the room, the fourth side, where the front door was, being left empty. There were two or three benches for the little ones who couldn’t write yet. A few of the older ones who had what was called beautiful hands also sat on those benches writing on their knees. They didn’t need to polish their style any more, and they were proud of their status.

I put my mind to figuring out ways to make mischief, and I soon discovered one way. Monsieur the teacher, as we called him, sat on a high wooden chair we called the pulpit. He dictated passages to us, telling us to write down the dictation precisely as he said it. I went to some pains to write down everything he said, not just what he was dictating. It would come out something like this:

The Romans were the masters of the world (Louise, don’t hold your pen like a stick;—semicolon)—but Gaul resisted their domination for a long time (You children from up on Queurot, you’re coming in very late;—a period. Ferdinand, blow your nose.—You children from the mill, warm your feet)—Cesar wrote the history of their resistance, etc.

Not losing a minute, I even added, scratching furiously, some things the teacher didn’t say. He finally caught me. I would have been as unresponsive to his anger as I was to ordinary reproaches, if he hadn’t said to me dispassionately, “If the inspector of schools saw that, you would get me fired.”

A great sadness fell over me. I could think of nothing to reply, even when he forbade me to bring him any more rose petals. Those rose petals, dry in winter and fresh in summer, he liked to add to his cherrywood snuff box, which he opened and closed with a little leather thong.

The next day my dictation was irreproachable. For more than a week, under his severe eye, I kept twisting in the pocket of my pinafore a little white paper full of dried roses that I had fixed for him without hope. Finally, seeing that my heart was breaking, he asked me for them, and all was well. After that, even though I played other tricks, they weren’t ones the inspector could blame Monsieur the teacher for.

He earned so little that he did all sorts of odd jobs during the long summers when the children in our village didn’t have classes, but the old teacher was always cheerful. I never heard him say a bitter word.

Although books for children and even for grown-ups give the illusion that merit is rewarded, merit is rarely recognized in this world. I first realized that truth from observing the teacher, Michel. Like my hatred of force, this perception comes from my earliest years. Since then I have seen a thousand examples, so I was astonished only the first time I saw it.

Any mathematical calculation became easy when M. Michel explained it. By nothing more than the way in which he asked the question, Monsieur the teacher provoked the right answers. He put it under your nose. When a student was at the blackboard working on some problem under the eye of the outstanding old mathematician, the teacher showed the position of the number with the end of his hazel rod. Your mind kept the whole operation in view at the same time, and it seemed to me that the questions he asked had a rhythm to them.

I told my grandfather about that. Monsieur the teacher was a frequent visitor at the Tomb, and one evening I heard my grandfather and Monsieur the teacher chatting about things far removed from my poor, little problems. I could have stood listening to them forever. That evening I discovered that Monsieur the teacher was simply a genius in numbers, as well as a great astronomer and poet. I also found out that algebra is easier than arithmetic.

“Why haven’t you written on mathematics?” my grandfather asked M. Michel.

The old schoolteacher laughed sadly and ruefully. They exchanged various remarks that I didn’t understand until I was much older, but the teacher’s laugh stayed in my memory. Later, when I read in books about merit being recognized and virtue being rewarded, I laughed the same way.

In later years, I found artlessness like M. Michel’s in other people of merit many times. I thought about him when the captain of the Virginie, on which I was being sent to New Caledonia, told me about his trip to the North Pole. The old seaman, keyed up by the day’s storm, the high seas off the Cape, and the spume left after each wave crashed down on the deck, relived for me his voyage to the North Pole and made it come alive,

“Why haven’t you written all that down?” I asked.

“I’m not a writer,” he answered. “Anyway, scholars have already written about all those things.”

How many scholars are as scholarly as the captain of the Virginie? Have they seen things for themselves? Knowledge must be presented in a manner that enlarges the horizon instead of restricting it. As long as poverty, which shackles people like my old schoolteacher, is combined with prejudice, which makes the unknown fearful and fetters people like the captain of the Virginie, ignorance will continue to imprison the world.

The development of the human race and the development of new sensitivities are thwarted because people take their point of view from the part, not the whole. Only when totality, completeness, is seen can each person rummage in his own little corner in harmony with wisdom and the development of the human race.