Deep in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, a man called Roux refuses to heed the call to duty at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, returning only occasionally to the farm where he left his mother and sisters.
The people of the valley condemn his desertion and hope the police will find his hideout and force him into the army. Then, as the months and the years go by, and the horrors of the trenches become known, the locals begin to understand Roux’s actions—but it is only at the end of the war that his fate will be decided.
In an atmospheric and often witty novel of life during wartime in a rural French community, André Chamson explores the questions of perception and morality, as well as the roles we play in the great historical events of our times.
Deep in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, a man called Roux refuses to heed the call to duty at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, returning only occasionally to the farm where he left his mother and sisters.
The people of the valley condemn his desertion and hope the police will find his hideout and force him into the army. Then, as the months and the years go by, and the horrors of the trenches become known, the locals begin to understand Roux’s actions—but it is only at the end of the war that his fate will be decided.
In an atmospheric and often witty novel of life during wartime in a rural French community, André Chamson explores the questions of perception and morality, as well as the roles we play in the great historical events of our times.
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Overview
Deep in the Cévennes Mountains of southern France, a man called Roux refuses to heed the call to duty at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, returning only occasionally to the farm where he left his mother and sisters.
The people of the valley condemn his desertion and hope the police will find his hideout and force him into the army. Then, as the months and the years go by, and the horrors of the trenches become known, the locals begin to understand Roux’s actions—but it is only at the end of the war that his fate will be decided.
In an atmospheric and often witty novel of life during wartime in a rural French community, André Chamson explores the questions of perception and morality, as well as the roles we play in the great historical events of our times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504042215 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Casemate Publishers |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2016 |
| Series: | Casemate Classic War Fiction , #8 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Roux the Bandit
A Novel
By André Chamson
Casemate Publishing
Copyright © 1938 André ChasonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4221-5
CHAPTER 1
ROUX THE BANDIT
I
"Roux, he is the man who has done time. In the country everybody calls him Roux the Bandit, and I can't give him any other name now, I'm so used to it. But, just the same, if he were here, I'd be happy and proud to shake his hand."
The listeners approved. ... All these men of the mountain evidently knew the story of Roux the Bandit. ... They had undoubtedly heard it many times already, but on this afternoon of rest they were all willing to hear it once more, and they even lent it the respectful and passionate attention which they could give only to symbolic events.
Their attention manifested in advance the moral value of this story; for, Cévenols of the valley or the mountain, ardently submissive to the discipline of the sacred parables, voluntarily poor in tales and local legends, occupied solely with biblical memories and with a few stories of confessors and martyrs who revived and eternised them, they were unable to be deeply interested in a simple romantic story. When they fastened upon some legend, it was always because they found in it a moral teaching, a logical continuation of the gospels, a sermon that had been lived and upon which they could meditate and argue, as they loved to do with the verses of the Bible.
There is something in this tendency that recalls the Roman custom of the gloss, and these simple keepers of goats and cattle, these thick-set labourers of the north of Gard, make me think of the subtle doctors of the Middle Ages, who carried on unceasingly a debate on the fundamentals of problems without thinking of giving them a new form.
Finiels went on: "We all know him, for he came from Sauveplane, the last farm of our valley toward the mountain. ... You will find this farm on the left hand, going up to Luzette, beyond the big fields of the estate of Puéchagut. It is just on the border of the chestnut woods, beside a good spring where you will find the only three poplars of this mountain. Roux lived there, with his mother and his two sisters. He had some property of his own, and his father left him enough to see him through the winters without anxiety if he worked hard. He had this farm, a few vines and a few mulberry-trees over by the valley, and a pasture for his beasts on the mountain. But at Sauveplane the winter is hard, and during the bad season you can do nothing, so that the vines, the beasts, and the few fields of rye, were not enough work for this boy, especially since his two sisters and his mother took charge of the animals and all the work on the farm. So Roux worked most of all on the mountain, in the State woods, where he bought trees to cut down: he did his heaviest work there, and that was the best part of his trade. On the mountain he cut his wood, made up his bundles of faggots, loaded them on his cart and then, when the weather was fine, when the forest roads were firm, he carted them to the station with his pair of oxen, which before the war were worth all of a thousand francs. ... In the good season, he spent every week here: my boy would whistle to him as he went by and go down with him as far as Saint-Jean. They had been to school together and taken their diplomas the same year, and it was always a pleasure to them to meet again for a little."
This detail snatched Roux the Bandit out of his legendary setting. I had thought I divined in him some half-fabulous personage of the ancient local legends. He revealed himself, on the contrary, as a young man like the "boy" who, standing beside me, nodded in approval of his father's words....
Thirty-five years old, short in stature but solid, a peasant from his childhood, a product of the elementary school and of wild rambles over the countryside, used to animals — horses or cattle — accustomed to tools and accustomed to the soil. But beneath this completely peasant appearance, you divined the marks of another existence, the long habit of another service than that of the earth, the harsh experience of servitudes harder still than those of labour, of a parsimonious and always anxious life, and of the semi-solitude of the mountain.
Looking at the son of Finiels and the other mountaineers who surrounded us, I replaced Roux amid his fellows and, thanks to these men, I could imagine him clearly and form a good idea of his manner of life. ... The vagabond childhood in the narrow circle of a valley between two lines of mountains: the care of the beasts, the search for mushrooms, the carting of dry wood, the gathering of chestnuts and grapes; the general gravity of this childhood, the daily spectacle of the stern peaks and sad valleys, the poverty of the landscape and of the villages and the houses; the river, the highway, the four roads, the thousand paths of the mountains; the austerity of the old people, their authority over everything, the teaching of the home, more dogmatic than that of the school; the religious traditions, the custom of sermons and prayers, the observance of the great rules of Christian morality envisaged with a cold, Protestant, and mountaineer resolution. ... Then suddenly, in the midst of these customs, these traditions, this material and moral solitude, the war: and the five years of service, the fatigues and the dangers, the life of war learned as a second trade.
Finiels went on: "On Sunday he would go down to Saint-Jean with his mother and his two sisters for the afternoon service. He could not go to the morning service because of the distance, but he always arranged to have dinner early and to go and be present at the service in the great meetinghouse or at the Methodist chapel. He went more often to the chapel, by preference, having nothing in common with those pillars of the Church who seek above everything to make themselves seen and to insinuate themselves everywhere.
He was a straightforward boy who enjoyed hearing the word of God, and although he did not attend all the prayer meetings and all the services, he knew his Bible and respected good morals.
"I would have answered for him as for my own boy and even more so, for he had never been foolish. He paid no attention to the girls, and although he drank his wine heartily nobody ever saw him take a drop too much....
"To sum it all up, he was a little shy, a little aloof, and I don't think people saw him laugh very often. He also had an air of severity and a sort of natural pride that kept him from talking to people whom he did not know very well, but if he lived a good deal within himself that was because of the mountain life and the habit of his trade as a woodcutter which left him entirely alone for days at a time, and not because of ill nature or malice.
"Things were drifting along in their usual way when the war came. You know how it caught us: people had been discussing it for many days when, on Saturday, the mobilisation was announced. We all went down to Saint-Jean as if we were going to market and betook ourselves to the Town Hall. There we found the public notices. Drums were beating and the bells of the church and the Protestant chapel were pealing.
"I met Roux on the square, with all the others: the young people were singing, the women were weeping, and we old folks were concerning ourselves for the crops, the livestock, the houses, and other property of the families. ... Amid this confusion the mayor passed and shouted to me:
"'Your boy is going off, Finiels, but mobilisation isn't war. They'll be afraid at the last moment when they see that we are ready.'
"'Of course they will,' I said to him. 'Of course they will.'
"'If nobody were willing to go to war,' said Roux to me, 'it would be still more certain.'
"My blood boiled and I lost my temper.
"'Would you rather stay behind and let the others go in your place?'
"'What I wish is that men wouldn't kill one another.'
"Just then my boy, who was passing with a group of young men, called out:
"'Well, Roux, so we are going off together?'
"But Roux began quoting Scripture and making a sort of sermon on war and on righteousness. All around us the young men listened to him. But this was not a day for patience. They called to him:
"'So you'd like them to come here and take your farm and your sisters and your mother away from you?'
"Everybody knew Roux. They were all his friends, but for a moment I thought they were going to give him a bad time of it.
"'You're talking nonsense,' I said to him, and thereupon we ended the conversation and went up to the farm to get the boy's bundles ready.
"Roux went up with us and did not open his mouth the whole way. When we arrived he left us and went on his way to Sauveplane.
"'See you soon,' my boy shouted to him.
"Roux turned around and made a gesture with his arms, like this, as if to say 'au revoir,' and was gone.
"We made up the bundles, the accounts, everything that had to be done, and went down with the boy to the station. ... You know Saint-Jean: it is just one long narrow street, so small that the tradesfolk have only to come out on their doorsteps for the town to seem full of people. The square they have made at the end of the street, just this side of the station, is scarcely larger, and the boys and girls almost fill it on summer evenings when they come in bands to wait for the ten o'clock train. ... But this day was indeed the greatest day that people had ever seen in this place. The townsfolk, the people of the three valleys, and even those from the mountain were all there together. ... We looked for Roux in this crowd, I asked everybody for news of him. Nobody had seen Roux of Sauveplane.
"'I'll find him again at Nîmes,' said my boy. 'He has followed the short cuts down and ought to be in the train already.'
"After this we thought no more of Roux. ... You understand that we had plenty of other things to talk about.
"When my son was gone, I went up to the farm again. There was no lack of work to be done there. ... The young men had left us all alone for the heavy work of the summer: on the hills the harvest was not yet entirely in, and down in the valley bottoms it was already time to think of gathering the grapes.
"Some time afterward, I was in my terraced garden above the road, when the policesergeant from Saint-Jean passed with a gendarme.
"'Good day, Finiels.'
"'Good day, gentlemen.'
"I came down from my terraces and asked them if they were going up to Sauveplane.
"This was no sort of question to ask them, for by this road you can go only to Sauveplane or to the mountain, and surely I thought that at that season there was nothing to take the gendarmes to the mountain.
"'Exactly,' the police-sergeant replied. 'Roux has not signed up. We are going to see if he is at his farm.'
"I thought of my son who had left us without news for two weeks, and anger seized me. I began to say: 'The monster ...' The sergeant answered:
"'He is a deserter.'
"Deserter? That is not a word that means anything to us. It is a school-teacher's word, a school-book word. I said to the sergeant:
"'Deserter, if you wish, that is quite possible; but he is a monster.'
"The sergeant, who was not from this neighbourhood, looked at me stupidly, then he replied:
"'Exactly, he is a deserter.'
"But as for me, I repeated in patois to the sergeant who understood me very well, since he has been in the canton for more than ten years: Daquéu mounstre, ai, daquéu mounstre.' After a moment the sergeant asked me with an air of embarrassment:
"'There is nobody at Sauveplane but his mother and his sisters?'
"'So far as I can tell you.'
"I reflected a moment, then added:
"'If you wish me to go with you, I am your man. I know the family and the ways of the house.'
"'Come along then, Finiels, you can speak to these women. You will frighten them less than we would.'
"'Of course we are neighbours, and in a way it is doing them a kindness.'
"Saying this, I took my jacket and we went up together.
"It is our custom to have a finger in everything that goes on at Sauveplane, and the people of Sauveplane do the same with us. It has been so from old times, and of necessity because of our solitude: let a misfortune happen at Sauveplane and we go up there at once, and when something happens to us down come the people from up there.
"The first time I went up to Sauveplane it was with my grandfather, when I was not yet eight years old, and because of an accident that had befallen Roux's great-grandfather. While cutting down his wood, he had been bitten by a snake, in his side, through his shirt.
"At this time, there was another family at Sauveplane, who lived in the abandoned hut beside the spring. ... Since then, these people have fallen on hard times, they have gone off to die in the towns, and the daughter has ended by selling herself to men for a trifle. That day this same girl came running down crying:
"'Roux has been bitten by some poisonous creature.'
"My grandfather, who knew a lot about plants and remedies, took his jacket and called to me:
"'Come with me; you can come back and get things if necessary.'
"And I set out with my grandfather. We reached Sauveplane: the old man lay on the straw, in front of his door, all blue and puffed up like a toad, with his shirt unbuttoned and a great wound in his side. The women had burned it with a red-hot iron, but too late, for he had been twenty minutes running home with the creature's poison under his skin. He was already losing consciousness. My grandfather looked at him and said to me:
"'Go down to the farm and tell your father to come up and tell the women not to wait for us this evening.'
"Of course he was already thinking of putting the dead man in his shroud and watching beside him. ... So I took the road down and came back alone from Sauveplane for the first time, which was not very difficult since there was only one road that always followed the course of the valley....
"The same evening, Roux's great-grandfather died of his snake-bite, and my grandfather and my father watched beside him, while I did not sleep from fright. And since then it has always been the same: we do not go up to Sauveplane except in time of trouble or, now and then, for festivals, such as the marriage of a daughter....
"Moreover, at the change of the season, we always go by with the cart to see if the roof of our sheepfold still holds and to carry up a few straps. ... At other times, when we go up to the mountain without the cart, we take short cuts, going straight up over Sauveplane through the midst of the beeches and over the meadows of Roquelongue....
"All these stories bring me back to my story today: I went up, then, with the gendarmes as I had done at the time of the other misfortunes. On the road we talked about the war, and the police-sergeant, who knew a great deal, had a far from confident air. Eight hundred metres from the farm, at the last turn before you reach the fields, the police-sergeant said to me:
"'Go on ahead, Finiels; the bird can't be in the nest; go and talk to those women a little...'
"No doubt he was sorry for them and did not wish to upset them too much. I hastened my steps and reached the farm. The old woman was on her doorstep and the two sisters were working in the garden. I said to the old woman:
"'Where is the boy?"
"'Do I know?'
"'Perhaps not. But there may be others who do.'
"'What others?'
"'The government, perhaps.'
"'Well, let them look, the boy is where he should be.' And not another word was to be got out of her.
"The two daughters went on with their work and were carrying greens to the rabbits. I thought to myself: 'They are hiding him; they know very well that he has not signed up.' And I felt myself losing my temper again.
"Roux's mother is a saintly woman, pious and upright, a hard worker and kind to the neighbours: she had taken care of my wife during an illness which she had got from a chill, but in my anger I was already forgetting these things....
"All of a sudden up came my two gendarmes.
"'Good evening, ladies and all the company,' said the sergeant politely.
"'Good evening, gentlemen,' replied Finette (the name they gave to Roux's mother). 'Are you going up the mountain?'
"'Not exactly; we are coming here for something. ...'
"After a moment's silence the sergeant asked Finette:
"'The boy isn't here?'
"'Of course not. ... He went off long ago.'
"Anger and also pity for these women went to my head. I felt that now I was embarrassing the gendarmes a little, so without saying good evening to anyone I took the road down and set out. The gendarmes remained behind to tell these women what they had to tell them....
"I was going down then without haste when, about half way, the gendarmes overtook me....
"'The boy is not at Sauveplane,' the sergeant said to me, 'but he has not signed up either. He must have gone over into Spain, or perhaps ...'
"'Or perhaps?'
"'... he is hiding on the mountain. ... In any case the women know where he is, but they will not say anything, and there is no way to make them....'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Roux the Bandit by André Chamson. Copyright © 1938 André Chason. Excerpted by permission of Casemate Publishing.
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