The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine [1 ed.] 9781443887854, 9781443877985

Citation preview

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine Translated by

Godfrey Ashby

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine Translated by Godfrey Ashby This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Godfrey Ashby All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7798-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7798-5

CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 19 Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 29 Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 49 Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 53 Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 65 Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 77 Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 87 Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 91 Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 107 Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 121 Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 129 Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 135

CHAPTER ONE

I On leaving the pretty little town of Mâcon in the direction of the mountains to the west, for several hours you follow a road between the vineyards that rises and falls with the contours of the land like a ship on the gentle swell of the sea. The slopes are dotted with many villages with red-tiled roofs and white limestone walls covered with vines over the doorways, while smoke rises from the valley bottom. Meadows surround them, watered by winding streams, marked out by lines of willows pollarded by the billhook every three years. The faintest breeze turns over the greenery of their leaves so that they seem silvered. Their shade is just long and dense enough to provide hiding places, often discovered, for the nests of nightingales and kingfishers. Heavy belfries of dressed stone, stained by the rain and covered with the greyish moss of ages, dominate the villages like elongated pyramids. The traveller’s eye goes from one bell tower to the next as if calculating, left and right, the lines of a Roman road across this populous countryside. From the shadows of these pyramids the bell rings out for every inhabitant, the toll of his birth or of his death, while in the open light there mallows grow in the cemeteries. Only there do the hard-working vinedressers find rest after the sweat of wine making for sixty or eighty years in order to feed their wives and daughters. A certain gentle gaiety runs with the sun’s rays over the countryside, with the dark ribbons of the streams, the white reflections of the cottages, the songs of the women, the ringing of the bells. The skies are gentle, the earth smiles, the passer-by says, “I would like to live there”, and is sad, not knowing why, to leave behind this gracious and luminous scene.

II As you approach the mountains the vines come to an end and the villages fewer until they are replaced by scattered hamlets or groups of two or three cottages, spaced further apart, on the steep slopes of meadows or rocks clothed with box. When you reach the ridge of the mountain, called Bois Clair because the morning sun rising over the Jura and Mont

2

Chapter One

Blanc would inevitably strike with its first rays the higher branches of its oak woods, then you turn around to take a last look at the vast panorama over which the dark curtain of the mountain hangs: the Mâconnais yellow with its vines, the Saône sliding like a long silver snake between green fields, the Bresse carpeted with its crops and its willows, the dark Jura, the golden Alps. Your eyes go down a steep slope towards the former monastic town of Cluny, sheltered like an owl’s nest under the bronze spires and bell towers of the abbey. But at the foot of Bois Clair the road forks. One branch goes to Cluny, through the rich and extensive meadows of the well-endowed monastery that once owned these pastures and forests. The other branch leads into the mountains of the Charolais, full of woods, ponds, sombre pastures and lowing herds of cattle.

III For some time you follow that country road and meet only a few ragged children who herd goats and urge the cattle out from the bushes. Then, suddenly, the ridges of Bois Clair become lower on your left, revealing a little river called the Vallouze that springs from a green dell at your feet. It seems to invite you, with its sparkling and chattering over the pebbles under the willows, to enter that dell and explore the hidden turns of the valley that it reveals to you for the first time. You say to yourself, “Where does this water come from and how does such a narrow gorge produce such a murmuring current? Does it widen? Is it deep? Does it have well wooded sides and rocky pools that feed into it? Who knows? Maybe it hides at one of its bends some wide mere or meadows that empty into it, where the woods hang over it, where the mountain peaks rise above, where the rocks support a church, a village, the ruins of an ancient castle? Let us explore.” Then, with a pull of your left hand, you turn the head and feet of your horse up the sandy path beside the Vallouze that leads into the valley of Saint Point.

IV What is most beautiful in outward beauty, as in the moral beauty of character, as in the material beauty of Creation, is what is most hidden. The mystery of the body, of the heart, or of character is the discovery of intelligence, or of the soul, or of the eyes. It seems that God has cast a shadow over what is most delicate or divine in what He has made, in order to provoke interest in it because of its secrecy and to temper its impact on

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

3

our sight, just as He has clothed the stars with night to encourage us to follow them with our eyes in their aerial ocean and to measure the magnitude and force of these little nails of light that His fingers, touching the solid clay, left imprinted on the vault. The valleys are the mysteries of the landscape. The more you explore them, the more they turn on themselves, to bury and hide themselves. Such is the impression of the valley of Saint Point, where, with each step taken by the exploring traveller, the more you discover, the more it escapes from you.

V The valley of Saint Point is simply a great fissure made by the waters of a flood, by the subsidence of layers of earth or by the cracks caused by earthquakes between two mountains once joined together. With the weathering of ages the opposing flanks of these two mountains, running south to north, were covered with sand transported from long dried up seas. The sparse and thin soils, enriched by vegetation and the annual fall of leaves, were in turn leached by their own weight, by snowfall or winter rain into the floor of the ravine. Now woods and meadows of lush grass, like a green fleece on the ground, cover over the bones of the two parallel mountains, yet the convex and concave lines of the peaks and hilltops seem to correspond geometrically to the spaces on the opposite side, so that you seem to perceive on one side of the valley what is lacking on the other. These two mountains, like two long fortress walls dominated and upheld and marked out by their ramparts alone, leave no room on the east or the west for any transverse valley. At the south end the valley is completely shut off by a high shelf of land that permits only a view above the horizon of the sombre spires and turrets of the far-off crests of Forez. You begin by walking along the edges of narrow meadows where the stream manages to flow between the alders and under the hazels. You breathe in the moist freshness of a defile closed to the breezes of the open space. On your left hand are only sandy rockfalls of rose-coloured granite, weathered and reshaped by the passage of time. On the right are only water-loving trees, where the blackbirds take to the wing as they start at the sound of horses’ hooves. In front are the ever-more complicated twistings and turnings of the path, which does not seem to know where it is leading you. Like a snake sliding through the grass, seeking a way to the sunshine, it twists with every bend and undulation of the ground.

4

Chapter One

VI Soon, however, you breathe in more air, there seems to be more daylight for your eyes, and you can see a larger expanse of sky between the tops of the two mountains. The meadows widen, the slopes above them become gentler and the valley opens out, both sides hollow like an antique vase, to enclose more space, more light and more greenery. You pass through a little hamlet hidden in the willows called Bourg Vilain, from the name of its villein inhabitants of long ago. Originally it had only been a cluster of sheds where the cowherds and goatherds of the locality had sheltered their animals when the meadows were covered in snow. Gradually the sheds became cottages, the cottages became small houses. A country church has come to dominate them, surmounted by a large square tower, constructed in blocks of granite irregularly placed on each other. Nowadays, little gardens hedged with vivid osiers surround the cottages with greenery. The walls are neatly rendered with lime. Glass panes replace the black wooden shutters or paper frames, and shine from the little windows between the golden sprays of wallflowers. To the right of the village and some distance away a mound of red sand rises beside the water in the midst of the fields. The miller, plying his trade, has made use of this natural obstacle to make a bank across the stream and to construct a dam. The mill has, of its own volition, taken on a more scenic appearance than any that could be given to it by the capricious brush of Salvator Rosa. Nature is a great artist when left to shape her material according to her design. I never go through this village without admiring the uncontrived conformation that makes of random construction a model of ordered picturesque. Thus, in winter, as the river overflows and floods the field, buildings had to be situated above the flooding. So the mill sits of necessity on the rock from whence it can look out and be looked at. The flow from the dam has to fall over the blades of the mill wheel in order to operate the mill. The mill house has to have one of its sides turned to the river to place the wheel in the water. The leat halfway up causes the water from it to cascade against the walls so that the greenish mosses that grow on it give to the basements an appearance of ancient green hue. The murmurings and gurglings of the water, impatient to spurt from the leat, the glittering drops of foam among the branches and the quivering leaves of the old alders: the screen of poplars and planes that have grown up by themselves with their roots in the stream, their branches of various shades crisscrossed over the red tiles of the roof like a second roof. The hollow in the side of the house from which the hub of the wheel extends towards the dam and which looks like a gloomy cave wreathed in mist: the dovecote

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

5

that had to be added to the mill because pigeons seek the fallen grain: the square tower that had to be raised a storey above the roof of the house so that the woodpigeons might see from afar their haunts above the trees; the winding path that had to be dug out with pickaxe in the side of the hill, in the yellow sand, so that donkeys and carts from neighbouring hamlets could climb up it with their sacks of grain without difficulty. The dust of winnowed grain coming out of the window, the blue smoke rising from the roof through the tops of the poplars; the goats browsing, feet planted against the north wall, which is as green with stone-loving vegetation as a meadow; the flights of doves as they descend on the yard and fight over the grain with the roosters and hens; the donkey going up or down the rock stair; the miller’s wife sewing at her window, her head caught in a ray of the setting sun, reflected in a fiery glow by the pane of her upstairs room; the children laughing as they climb up towards her by means of the green ivy ladder that surrounds the window over the water. All this architecture, formed by chance or by the requirements of living, water, walls, trees. rocks, barn floor, path, well, hanging balconies, the prominent tower, the harmony of line, the light and shade, assembled as if they had been planned, yet grouped together solely for country living, displayed at various times of the day in varying colours of sombre depth or lit up from the mountain providing the backdrop—all this collection, I say, would defy the imagination of a poet or painter to vie with it in grace or rural charm. It grips the imagination by sight, the soul through its serenity. It is the thought of Theocritus expressed in rock amid meadows; it is a line of Virgil sighing beside running waters; it is a canvas of Claude Lorrain imbued with peace and vibrant with life. It is the supreme art of that architect who knows no art, this expression of beauty. It is the mill of Saint Point. I watch from here the rising sun striking down on the tiles. From here I listen to the regular throb of its bolt, the heartbeat of the house, the pulse of the mill.

VII After the mill, the valley opens out into a bowl that takes about a quarter of an hour to cross. In the middle of it rises a low hill crowned by an old château, flanked by squat towers and the denticulated spire of a Romanesque belfry. Meadows bordered by alders and walnut trees lie at the foot of the hill. Through the trunks of the trees you can see the walls, roofs and rustic bridge of a village built in the shadow of the castle, composed of twenty labourers’ cottages, market gardeners or dealers in

6

Chapter One

country wares, all clustered around the village church. These old towers, undermined by time and cracked and split by the weight upon them, their tops deprived of the turrets that formerly rose into the sky, nowadays have no purpose other than to surround a heavy mass of stone, pierced by a spiral staircase and several vaulted rooms—there is my home. I have sown turf, marked out sandy walks through the growth of hazel that surrounds it. I have enclosed with surrounding walks several acres of land and meadows that follow the irregular contours of the hill. I have saved from the billhook or the farmer’s axe some spreading trees that have rewarded me by stretching out their branches over my lawns. I have cut several doors and several windows in the five-foot thick walls of the old manor house. I have added to the principal façade a massive balcony of carved stones modelled on the old Gothic balustrades of Oxford. It is on this balcony that house guests stroll at sunrise or sit in the evening, in the wide shadow that the towers cast over the slopes of the meadow. Birdcages hang from nails there while the dogs lie at our feet on the warm flagstones. Tame peacocks live in the gardens. They remember that we used to give them crumbs when we were young, and perch night and day on the parapet of the balustrade, their tails shining in the sun and waving in the breeze. They adorn the balcony with a collection of living caryatids just as storks form battlements with their white plumage along the roofs of villages in Asia.

VIII Looking along, you see stretched out the most beautiful part of the Saint Point valley, climbing up and down. First the eye glides over the steeply sloping fields that descend into a meadow levelled by the water. This meadow is bisected by the stream of the Vallouze. Great walnut trees with bronze leaves, as motionless as metal, white poplars, their trunks twisted by storms, their leaves more bushy and hoary than the head of a vigorous old man, Lombardy poplars, those cypresses of Europe, alders, birches, willows, which for twenty-five years I have forbidden the pollarder to touch with his pruning hook, all lean over both banks of the river, over the water they love and which loves them. They form with their interlaced branches over the flow a high shimmering vault, ever changing, of leaves of various hues, a veritable mosaic of growth. The least breath of a summer breeze rocks the whole moving tapestry and sets ripples in motion, a sheen of moving leaves, flights of birds and scents of verdure that excite the eye, vary the spectacle and rise in soft sounds and faint scents up to the balcony.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

7

IX After the river and the meadow the eye begins to look gradually at the fertile expanse of land over the high line of hills that separate the valley of Saint Point from the distant horizon of the Mâconnais, of the Bresse, of the Jura and the Alps. First there are the reddish lands with deep soil, fertile for hardy vegetation such as broad beans in flower, beetroot with large glossy leaves, tufts of lucerne over which, at dawn, white flakes of dew float; then enclosed in hedges the orchards of wild plum trees with handsome speckled cows chewing the cud beneath, whose mournful lowing echoes among the hills. Two or three little hamlets halfway up above the orchards and fields send up their smoke over the fruit trees. The eye looks across the smoke and goes beyond the lines of deep gorges dug out of the red soil; further on it sees carts loaded with manure, laboriously pulled by white cattle, being taken by a peasant to clearings higher up to enrich a little his standing oats or late barley. Other carts come down laden with beech and chestnut to heat the ovens where bread is baked. The leaves dragging behind the carts sweep the floor of the ravine, as the housewife sweeps the shining doorstep of her house. These narrow tracks, like the entrances to caves, disappear and are lost to the eye in the folds of the spurs, in the very heart of the mountain or under the shadow of chestnut woods. You can no longer follow their path, but for the distant cry of the herdsman encouraging his beasts to climb higher. These cries, magnified by the arching chestnuts and reverberating from tree trunk to tree trunk, mingle with the neighing of colts in the meadows, with the lowing of the cattle lying in the thick grass, with the bleating of the sheep and of the goats, with the clucking of the fowls, with the songs of the birds in the bushes, with the groaning of the creaky axles of the plough in the furrows, with the tolling of the bell as it rings out the angelus at noon and in the evening for the labourers and herdsmen at their work. All this fills the bowl between the two ranges of hills with a sound like that made by the shells that you put to your ear in order to hear the endless resonance of the sea. Further up, a clump of chestnuts and birches dots the spurs, interspersed with purple heather and the yellow flowers of furze. Then the vegetation, in the chill breezes from colder regions, becomes sparser or shrinks back into the rocks. The ridges are almost bare, crowned by a few trunks of holly and twisted thorns merging with the blue of the sky or into the mists floating across the higher peaks. These mists, as they always cover the line of the mountain between earth and sky, cause the viewer to see infinite heights where the imagination enjoys losing itself. Mist is to

8

Chapter One

the mountains as imagination is to the senses: it expands them. Such is the mystery hovering over everything about us down below, providing thought for the eyes as well as to the heart.

X Such is the view from the balcony at Saint Point of a morning. In the evening the slopes are gentler, the clefts and spurs of the hills softer, the villages nearer and more established on levels of green turf, the woods more uniform and sombre, stretched over shallower dells. The clear-cut shadows cast by the setting sun become more velvety to the eye. The wild character gives way to the shady and pastoral aspect of the cooler valleys of the Alps. When you wish to wonder, to pray, to dream, you gaze at the mountains in the morning: when you want to hope, to yearn, to rejoice, to recollect yourself in the vision of country life, then you gaze at the mountains of an evening. The former portrays a tableau of earthly happiness, the latter is an aspiration to heaven, while each is one of the most beautiful canvasses illustrating the drama of the blessing of life that the brush of the Creator has been happy to paint.

XI I have lived there since childhood and it is there that the current of my life, which has had its times of aridity and of renewal within me, places me or draws me back to this first scene of my industrious and busy life. I bless the springs, the summers, the autumns and even the occasional winters that I have been able to spend there for the last twenty years, among the memories and comforts of home. Alas! I have hardly been there in latter years apart from walking for a few hours, when my steps are hurried on by events, to cast a quick glance at the growth of the trees I had planted, to bury myself in their shade, as their leaves fall under the feet of those strange to them, and to pray for a moment at two graves.

XII One morning in 1846, returning from a long journey beyond the Alps, I came alone in the month of May to see whether the passage of time had not dilapidated everything in this family nest and to order repairs. In such a way does the idle sailor from time to time during several weeks in port go aboard his inactive ship to inspect the hull and the keel, order a plank

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

9

here, a rivet there or else a bulkhead, so that he may find his floating home in good shape on the day the ship owner tells him to go to sea again.

XIII When I walked round the garden with the old farmer who had known me all my life and whom I retained, an ancestor of the estate and the house, idle in a corner of his farm, I saw that the branches of the cedars, the larches and the firs had extended like arms, as they had grown, over the enclosing wall that separated me from a shepherd’s track. As it shook them against the top of the wall, the wind had finally damaged the stonework, dislodging the mortar and making cracks in the surround. Through these small children could climb up and rob nests. I kept the trees for the birds as much as for myself. Birds are the poetry of song, the hymn of the air. If they are killed, who then in creation will sing? I know nothing sadder than finding under the church tower, under the eaves of the house on the sand or under the tree the despoiled nest of a swallow or chaffinch or a nightingale, with the shells of its little grey eggs scattered on the ground beside the down that the father and mother birds had woven throughout the spring for their young.

XIV I addressed old Litaud (the name of this venerable old man of Homeric appearance and silvery hair, like the foam of a life that has long been driven by the winds from the hills) as “Father”, for I had the filial relationship that the son of the house has with old servants who have been longer than him in the family home. So I said, “Father, we must repair this damaged wall, take the stones off and close and parget the mortar in the joints to prevent the trees from widening the cracks by the rubbing of their branches. We must replace the ridges of the tiles that were not able to prevent damage to the top of the wall with a line of cut stones, which will surmount the wall like the parapet of a bridge. The trees will then lean over easily and their branches can play freely over the flat stones, simply polishing them as water polishes boulders. But we must do this soon for the equinox winds, when they come in September, will shake these long branches hard and knock off the rest of the tiles and mortar. Get the village stonemason, whom I saw the other day working in a quarry as I was riding through the remote ruined village of La Fée. I will take measurements and work out the cost. I will arrange for him to work in the quarry at the end of the garden, and next year the birds in those lilacs will nest in peace.

10

Chapter One

XV “Yes, Sir,” Old Litaud replied hesitantly, with a certain shade of doubt and disbelief, and I saw in how his face seemed to be thinking and how he held his head bent, as if inspecting something on the grass, that the old man did not confirm the “Yes” he had uttered at first. “Isn’t there a stonemason in the villages”, I continued, “who could well undertake these repairs?” “Yes, Sir, there is one”, the old man replied, “and a very good workman and most willing”, he added, “but I am not quite sure if he will agree to come down and work for the house”. “But why?” I replied in amazement, “Is my money not worth that of others? Won’t I pay him for the slabs of cut stone at the same price as the local peasants, and even above that because of the urgency? Why won’t he come if you summon him now?” “He is a stonemason who does not work for pay.” “All right, I will give him corn, wheat, potatoes, walnut oil, baskets of apples or plums, in fact, whatever he wants.” “But he no longer works for goods, as others do”. “What does he work for?” “For the good Lord, Sir, and for the poor of the Lord. Only for Him and for them; and since Sir is rich and the owner of woods, fields and the mansion, I fear that this man, who is gentle but as obdurate as stone in his ways, will say, ‘Sir is well enough off to have his work done by day labourers and to pay a good rate for the job. If I agree to work for him I will default on poor people who have a doorway or window to be cut. Also, Sir will want to pay me at a higher rate than I get daily that just buys me my bread. I will not be able to refuse to take his money and, if I accept, I will be breaking my rule of life’. In a word, Sir, I repeat, I fear that this man will not come”. “No, no,” I said, “He will not be able to refuse to come. He will fix his own rate of pay himself, since he is so upright, and if my money, which he will have well earned, weighs on his conscience as a charitable man, he can give it to those less fortunate than himself; that’s it! So, send via one of your shepherds for him to come down. Tomorrow at midday I will wait for him. Even if I should not agree with him, I should be very glad to see a man who refuses money in the neighbourhood of these mountains, where love of gain is so keen that to win a copper coin or to lose it seems the main aim in life for so many rich Christian people. It will be a spring of water issuing from the rock in the midst of this dust which would drink up the clouds of heaven.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

11

“Right, Sir, I will obey you and get him to come down. But I will go myself, since he won’t listen to my shepherd. I’ll reason with him better than any child would.” Saying this, with a vigorous spring in his step, old Litaud set off on the path to his farm to take off his clogs, button on his gaiters and collect his stick with the metal tip to go up the mountainside. I went back to collect my dogs and my gun to go up into the hanging woods that evening.

CHAPTER TWO

I The next day at noon, when I returned from hunting, I heard the barking of the dogs in the yard. I went down. There was old Litaud with the stonemason. “This is Claude des Huttes,” the old farmer told me with satisfaction in his voice conveying a feeling of triumph, indicating that he had experienced a success he had not expected the previous evening. “He agrees,” he added, “to come and do this work for Sir, because Madam is good to the poor.” “Good, let us go and see the wall and calculate the number and size of the stones needed for the top.” They made their way with me to the cedars. As we went I privately appraised the stonemason, because from the beginning this man aroused a certain respect in me. Although he was humble and diffident in his behaviour, you could see that he was in no way intimidated by my superior dress or by the impressiveness of my house, grander than those in the village. With each step and each expression he seemed greater and more exalted than me; his demeanour carried God in him. The path from the door of the house to the breach made by the cedars was a long way, so I had time to imprint his appearance on my memory.

II Claude des Huttes was a man of about thirty-six to forty years, of medium height and slender build, a little bent forward like a working man used to bending under heavy loads. His hams lacked suppleness, as do the taut muscles of those who hunt goats in our Alps, but bent forward like those of workmen who often kneel at their work. His right shoulder was much higher, knotted and stronger than the other, as his right arm continually raised and brought down the hammer. Although his arms were thin and the veins, tendons and muscles showed clearly below his short sleeves, his hands were long, massive, knotted at the joints and rough-surfaced like pincers. The practice of moving, turning over and shaping large stones had developed and hardened in him the first tool of man, his hands. He let

14

Chapter Two

them hang loose, like a pair of inert scales, which visibly embarrassed him as they had nothing to carry. The toes of his bare wide feet, solidly put down, bit into the ground, leaving prints before me in the moist sand of the path like the nails of my horse’s shoes in the grass of a field on a dewy morning. He held a russet woollen cap in his hand. His thick black hair was powdered with a few grains of marble dust and hung a span’s length down his neck at the back. It was square cut in thick locks by his own scissors, so it stuck out like a black fringe between his nape and his collar to protect his neck from rain and snow. He wore only a raw hempen shirt, open necked, fastened across his chest by two brass nails as pins, one of which was bent around the other to make a kind of knot to grip the cloth and clasp it to his chest. He carried his jacket over his left shoulder. For him this was only a mark of respect, carried in deference to me and not for his own needs. White woollen trousers, of the same material as his jacket, were secured round his waist by a strong leather belt with small pockets held in place by a leather thong. From these protruded the forks of his compasses and the helves of three hammers. The trousers only covered him down to his ankles. A long goatskin apron flapped and rustled against his knees at each step. He walked with the slow, measured tread of a man who thinks as he walks, whose inner being, that scale and balance of a human being, determines the movements of his body. Such was the outward appearance of the stonemason.

III Beneath this rough exterior and the rustic clothes, on the bare head of the man there was, nevertheless, a character—I will not say merely of dignity—of divinity, in the human face. This struck the eye and removed any idea of vulgarity or of disdain from your mind. The outline of his forehead was as lofty, as upright, as free from base quirks and furrows as the outline of Plato’s forehead in sculpture shining in the Attic sun. The emaciated and hollowed muscles throbbing in his eye sockets, his temples, his cheeks, his lips, his chin had, at the same time, the restfulness and impressionability of a girl convalescing from a long illness or recovering from a secret hurt. His eyelids, fringed with long lashes, opened on clear blue irises with wide open pupils, the eyes of a man used to looking tall objects up and down, and keeping them in his sight. His eyelashes cast a shade of mystery between his eyelids and his eyes. Meditation and prayer could be concealed there without interfering with his vision. His nose, straight and slightly convex in the middle, with a network of veins visible under a clear skin, met his lips by the central membrane below his nostrils,

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

15

translucent in the sunlight behind him. The folds around his mouth were supple, lacking rigidity or wrinkles. They drooped somewhat at the ends under the weight of an unconscious sadness, then turned up with the elasticity of purpose. His complexion had the healthy, even pallor of marble exposed to the air. The pronounced shadow of his black hair, waving over his cheeks with a few drops of sweat, took the pallor away. He bent his face forward a little, from the force of habitual thought rather than from his customary position at work. As you walked near this man and looked at him sideways, the sunlight concealing me while giving him a halo of sunbeams, you were conscious that you were walking beside a living soul. In that head was a world all of thinking, feeling, hoping, separate from the rustic frame that carried it. You thought you were looking at the picture of thought against the morning sun, shining in a blue sky. I dared not speak a word for fear of upsetting the recollection of his thoughts. His voice, when he replied briefly to the old farmer, was modulated, deep and bass, like the sound of a thin, uncracked slab of marble under the polishing hammer. He did not converse: he sang. You would have said that everything from his throat was a hymn, even ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

IV Old Litaud glanced covertly at me from time to time to tell me, “You see, that the stonemason is as I told you”. He then shook his white head as if to tell himself, “I doubt if Sir can persuade him”. We reached the cedars. I pointed out to the stonemason the damaged top of the wall. He unfolded his fan-shaped measure marked in feet and inches to calculate the number and width of the stones I was asking for. “It’s quite a few lengths,” he said, coming back to me. “Sure. Make them for me as soon as possible. You have my quarry, a dozen steps from here, from which you can cut. But first, tell me how much you charge per square foot.” “I know nothing about that”, he said with visible and touching embarrassment. “But who will know that apart from you”, I said. “Must I make an offer on my own?” “No, Sir,” he replied timidly with yet more embarrassment, which swelled his veins and reddened the skin of his lowered forehead. “Neither you nor I, but God will”. “What do you mean, God will?” I exclaimed.

16

Chapter Two

“Yes,” he continued, “only he knows how long it will take me to cut the stones from the quarry and shape and polish them. When that is done, I will work out what I need for my food—nothing for my labour, Sir. As for the labour, it is not man but God who prescribes and pays for it. You, in your room, on your horse or with your books under the shade of these trees, will have more experience than I”. These words impressed me, uttered without affectation, flowing as naturally as breathing from his lips, spoken without defiance or superiority or insolence, with simplicity and even with gentleness. I did not try to rebuff or argue, or embark there and then on a discussion to which he would react. I showed no amazement or hurt in my expression. “Well,” I said to old Litaud, “take him to the quarry and set him to work.” I went back inside. Half an hour afterwards, I heard through my window the echoing blows of the pick and the muffled sounds of the blocks of stone as they rolled from the top of the quarry to the bottom of the ravine. I left Saint Point that evening.

V Three weeks later I returned there to settle in with my family for the rest of the summer. When I awoke the day after my arrival I heard no pickaxe or hammer blows from the quarry. I went there and it was empty. There was only a small heap of grey stones recently detached from the quarry side and two or three rough-hewn slabs. I ran to old Litaud to ask him why the work so quickly agreed upon had been abandoned. “I don’t know anything about it,” he told me.” Claude des Huttes worked for several days. One morning I did not see him. He had different ideas. I did tell you, Sir, It does not do to trust these saints. They walk with God, who overrules their walk with human beings. Perhaps he will have said to himself, ‘I work for the poor. If I work for gentlemen, the poor will have no one to work for them. Winter is coming, the barns will not be repaired, the cattle sheds will not be weatherproof, the grain will be ruined, the cattle will die, children will cry in the cold of their huts. That will be my fault. God will hold me accountable. The château will always be able to find workers for pay. The work for the owner of the garden is not urgent; if the stones fall down, they will not suffer. Let’s go’, or something like that—how should I know? You cannot hear what a man’s head says to him privately, can you? And he left with his tools. If you like, Sir, I will go up there once again and speak to him and ask him to come

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

17

down again.” “No”, I said to the old man, “I will go myself. Just point out to me where he lives”. He raised his arm towards the highest peak of the chain of mountains to the east and indicated almost the end of the ridge, to the right of a clump of chestnuts, on the left of a grey boulder, a spray of light mist as at the foot of a waterfall, two or three white specks in the yellow furze. “Those are his goats, Sir,” he told me. “The house is not far away, but you can’t see it from here. The roof is hidden by the outline of the hilltop and the hazel branches, which are higher than the wall and grow over the thatch. You only see smoke in winter when he burns a bundle of heather to keep the young goats warm.” “Right,” I said to him, “I know the mountain. I don’t need directions to take me there. Didn’t I look after goats when I was a boy?”

CHAPTER THREE

I I buttoned my leather gaiters over my hobnailed boots and took the bells off my dog so he would not scare the goats or warn Claude by running in front. I took my gun, staff and badge of a hunter. I crossed the valley fields, putting up the thrushes, and began the gradual climb across country, up gentle slopes at first, then the steeper mountainside. It was a Sunday morning. I met nobody in the fields; the whole day was before me. I turned around from time to time and sat on the roots of a chestnut to take a long look at the valley, opening out more from one pause to the next before my eyes. The sun had lazily passed over half of the sky, which it seemed to be measuring as it leaned towards the opposite mountain, as I approached the ruined hamlet of Les Huttes that had doubtless given the stonemason his surname. I had not been up there since the age of twelve, when my mother had taken me from the company of the local small children to put me into the common, run of the mill, world of masters, schoolboys and books. I used to go up there with the household servants once or twice a year, in that happy time of childhood, to buy kids in the springtime and shell chestnuts in the autumn at the two or three huts comprising the hamlet.

II I well recognised the trees, the springs below the cresses and the periwinkles, even the mosses on the grey boulders that stood out from the carpet of heather like the bones of the earth. But the huts were no longer there. From a distance I could see just a few fragments of crumbling stones where they had been; a few brambles bearing blackberries were climbing over them. An old elder, which is called a soyar locally, a domestic tree that attaches itself of its own accord to a human dwelling, as the mallow and the lattice of ivy attach themselves to the graves in cemeteries, studded its blossoms among the broken tiles. A magnificent holly clung with its twisted branches to the ruin of a wall broken by a window open to the sky, a sturdy and immortal tree whose sap rises under snow and whose outside is always green. Its leaves remain glossy and seem to survive the

20

Chapter Three

years and to take pity on the fleeting generations of human beings who pass by and lay themselves at its feet. The sight saddened me, but I became accustomed to it. I scanned with my eye for the path descending the ravine beside a trickle of water oozing from the granite that had previously led to the third hut. I discovered it under the dry leaves of last winter that the warm winds of spring had brought down on the slopes of the ravine, I walked for a time with the murmuring of the stream, which dripped rather than poured as it came down.

III The ravine, at first full of moisture and darkness, sometimes narrow, sometimes wider, twisted between two sides of crumbled granite that dissolved into earth of different colours, red, greyish yellow, greenish, like the dark green pebbles you find on sandy beaches in Syria. Trunks of geans, gnarled plane trees and larches, hard and cold trees, bent towards each other from the higher sides of the gorge and, overarching it, formed a lofty canopy of still leaves. Footsteps echoed as in the nave of a cathedral. A gentle shiver ran up my skin as if I walked up a mysterious avenue. Occasional blackbirds crossed the valley in alarmed flight. But it soon grew lighter, as though a lamp had been lit above the transparent leaves. You saw some small patches of blue sky through the leaves, like pieces of mosaic in a ceiling. The trees fell back and the path climbed onwards to the right, towards the edge of the gorge and up a steep slope into daylight. On my left side I passed pools of green water at the bottom of what is called an ‘abyss’, in mountain parlance. When I reached level ground, the stonemason’s home lay before me.

IV It was an irregular hut of dry stones without mortar, backed on to a large square patch of greyish rock on which could still be seen standing the walls of the third hut of the hamlet of Les Huttes, without door or window or roof. The platform of that rock, which had been the plinth for the goatherd’s hut, was strewn with tiles broken into fragments by the hooves of animals and the stumps of joists, the end of one still attached to the wall while the other hung unsupported near the ground. Old wisps of straw from the roof eddied around in the wind. Black soot on a patch of bricks, formerly mortared, marked the hearth where the family of mountain folk had lived and loved, and come to an end. Behind the ruined walls, the rock was worn away by the bed of a torrent running from its source or from

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

21

rain, forming a sort of natural channel from which issued the little waterfall, with gentle plashing, into the ravine. On the near side the low window of the hut was open to the north face. A huge ivy, its roots in the water, used to frame that window and wall. Now it entirely filled the opening with a mass of tufted leaves and black berries, as if it had dressed itself in mourning for the ruin of the house that had nourished it. It clung to the beams, the jambs of the chimney and the doorframe. It stuck out as a cornice along the top of each wall, even over the edge of the rock, like a dog lying beside his dead master, clasping him with his paws, covering him with his body, seeming to defy anyone to remove the remains of him who had loved him.

V Claude had not attempted to rebuild the fallen house of his family to make a refuge for himself. Nothing would have been easier while the stone, the wood and the tiles were still intact. Why he had preferred to settle at the foot of the rock in a sort of hollow, which had previously served as a stable for the goats, and lie down there like a beggar at the door, God knows! Doubtless, it was because of a secret superstition in his heart towards the roof under which he had lived and loved, or a horror of finding himself alone and feeling it so empty, after having known it so full. For it was not for laziness; he did more work for nothing than he would have needed to do to maintain his mother’s cottage in good repair.

VI Whatever the reason, his little house, or rather cave, was merely a cellar hollowed out by either the water or the collapse of part of the walls at the very edge of the rock. Since this hollow was not deep, he had added two low drystone walls, mostly triangular stones of turned granite. These were placed without design, one on the other, yet so one was inserted into the concave angle of the other, like the Cyclopean walls you see in Tuscany without knowing who built them, nature or man. These two walls extended from the rock for several feet on the pebbles of the slope, together with some clumps of box. A similar wall joined them together. It was pierced on the valley side by a low door and a dormer window, closed in on one side by a bundle of gorse still in flower. The door, made from three wormeaten planks, evidently borrowed from the debris of the hut above, had no lock apart from a wooden latch, lifted from inside the hut by a string that hung outside in daytime and taken in at night through a little hole above it.

22

Chapter Three

The part of the roof that was built into the rock jutted out a little way and was covered, not with thatch, but little bundles of furze tied together by great ropes of twisted oat straw. The rain ran down over them and across the clumps of vegetation in the walls. The rock itself formed a natural roof for the rear of the hut. You could still see at the edge of the protruding rock the remains of a balcony and one or two steps that had once been the rustic porch. The strands of ivy that I mentioned had invaded the whole of the old homestead climbed over this ruined balcony onto the roof of the present hut. A gnarled wild quince, some junipers and a huge hawthorn bush, rock-loving plants, set their roots in a natural crevice of the rock, their branches, mistletoe, fruits and flowers hanging over the roof. Practically the whole surface was covered with dead leaves, green leaves and a fragrant drift of dog rose. I was amazed to see two or three nests of small montane birds among the branches. They were still sitting on their eggs as they looked at me from a canopy of leaves and did not fly away at my approach, as if instinctively feeling trustingly secure; neither did the lizards scurry away from the wall.

VII I pulled the string of the wooden latch and went into the hut, calling out for Claude des Huttes. The hut was empty. I looked quickly around to get an idea of the customs and habits of the man from the look of his home. At a glance I took in the way of life of this humble solitary man. The back of the hut was a few feet higher than the floor. It was a kind of bed hollowed out of the living rock, the size of a man. This bedroom had the arching rock as a ceiling. It was covered, for want of a mattress, with a litter of oat straw, mixed with hay and scented herbs from the mountains. A bunch of broom served as a pillow, while three or four black sheepskins rolled up at the foot of the bed acted as a covering in winter. At the side of this alcove a woman’s dress, laced with velvet at the seams, hung from a nail with a little gold or brass cross on its bodice, the only decoration in the hut, its household charm. A little further against the rock was a small hearth covered with a drift of white ash from the sweepings. The smoke that had blackened the greyish stone of the place escaped through a gap between two fortuitously placed blocks of granite. It was sealed with a bunch of dry herbs when the hearth was dead. The remainder of the floor of the hut was covered with a thick litter of fresh heather and green ferns. On it were imprinted the indents made by the weight of the goats and their kids in the night. As for provisions, there were rows of the previous year’s golden maize cobs hung from a roof beam, for grilling in ashes as the peasants of

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

23

the hills do. There were peeled and oven-dried chestnuts that had been cooked in milk, a few little goats’ milk cheeses, as hard as the stones they resembled, and a large loaf of rye bread, broken into, on which damp spots had begun to spread a white film. A knife, a stoneware pot for boiling potatoes and a shiny leather pouch furnished with a long iron handle to dip up drinking water from the spring were the only furnishings and utensils in the hut. I looked from out of the door at my house on the horizon, shining in the sun in the valley, with its extensive walls, its roofs, its towers, its large rooms full of useful and useless pieces of furniture, housing all the servants and the necessities of a civilisation, never satisfied with its needs and with satisfying its invented needs. I looked back at the furnishings of Claude de Huttes and went out, saying, “There you have the total needs of a man”.

VIII I closed the door again and shouted outside, but only the cleft in the rock echoed the name of its tenant. Then I climbed up higher, hither and thither, to find the man and his goats. A track that only the eye of a hunter could make out, marked by a slight bending of the grass by footsteps and by occasional fronds of bracken bruised by the goats’ horns, took me up behind a hill crowned with grey boulders, about a hundred steps above the waterfall. A huge rock like the one that supported the house below jutted out from the middle of the hilltop like a giant tower. Fine, soft grass like velvet grew around it. I walked slowly round this rock, whose summit seemed unscalable without a ladder, then I found a kind of crack in its side, with natural and irregular ledges allowing a way up. I climbed up to discover from above what could live on these hilltops and ravines where earth, stone and water seemed to have opened out into so many folds of ground. Reaching the summit, a gentle slope took me to the foot of the southern side of the rock that I had assumed to be inaccessible from all sides. Level with this side was a little patch of flowery turf, bounded by mossy boulders piled on top of each other like a garden patch accidentally preserved within the ruin of an old building. As I stepped onto this lawn and looked around I saw all that I was looking for.

IX The grassy patch sloped like a thatched roof to allow the winter snows to slide off and the rain to run off. The midday sun, directly above, was reflected by gritty pinpoints of granite that lay all over the surface,

24

Chapter Three

radiating the warm rays that are rare at such altitudes, high above the valleys. Spring was in the air. A cloud of insects floated and buzzed in the rays, making them tangible. You could feel that other visitors apart from man had discovered this shelter. Plants also grew in profusion at the base of the rocks. Pinks took root on the mosses of the wall and fluttered there, like cherries picked open by the birds. Their stalks, long and flexible, cast a thousand arcs of greenery, at their ends a star of five-petalled rosettes that dropped onto the grass. Though unplanted, the grass looked as if it had been combed by a rake. The hunter, discovering this place with a solitude both austere and gracious, radiant yet pensive, walled in yet flowering, would not be certain if the patch of land before his eyes was an orchard, a garden or a burial sanctuary provided with flowers by the devotions of a deserted village: it was in fact a place in which the two purposes came together , a sort of funerary garden where life and death disputed over the ground, and where you saw at the same time grass, flowers, grazing animals and singing birds—and hummocks of turf that resembled the folds in the sheets of a man’s last bed. You hesitated between joy and pleasure, and finally contemplated in silence without knowing whether to be happy or sad. That was the first impression made on me by this charming retreat of sunshine, silence and restfulness.

X Scarcely had I set foot on the grass with its blossoms to walk round it than my glance was drawn to a strange and inexplicable sight that kept my feet still. Twenty or thirty paces from me, three great worn blocks of granite stood out at the top of the lawn against the blue of the sky. One of them rose out of the ground like a standing stump of a demolished column, while another was placed over and balanced on this stump. The third rested like a cap on top of the centre of the second horizontal block, whether by accident of nature or by design of the constructor forming a massive elliptical cross. Its size and weight seemed to be beyond the strength of man. One of the stone arms of the cross leaned over on the left at such an angle that seemed to indicate in this semi-druidical monument an erratic and uncontrived quirk of the elements rather than a purposeful arrangement. Had this rude cross attracted to itself the seven or eight graves from the huts grouped around it? Had the inhabitants of former days rolled these separate blocks together to make of them the emblem of their death and the sign of their immortality? Impossible to say. The tiny white and grey scales of lichen, the dark stains of the rain, the green mosses of springtime, the accidental growth sown by the winds with the

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

25

dust from the soil on the plants on the boulders, carpeted these three granite blocks with all sorts of living growth in fine textures and various colours. Bunches of purple heather hung, their flowers facing downwards, from the arms of the cross. Climbing ivy and vigorous brambles crossed over in every direction and formed at the top a crown of tufts of leaves, of twining branches of flowers, fruits and thorns, reminiscent of the symbolic crown of torture on the very forehead of the Crucified One. Two snowwhite goats, through the instinct that draws these animals to steep places, were lying facing each other on each of the horizontal beams of the cross, with their forelegs folded under them and their bearded heads standing out like a classical cornice against the blue of the sky. I pulled back my dog’s leash and signed to him to keep quiet so as not to disturb that pleasant scene before my eyes, thanks to the caprice of the goats and the fortune of nature.

XI At the foot of this group of stones and animals, Claude des Huttes was lying asleep on the grass. One elbow was bent behind his head to serve as a pillow. His other arm was stretched out, resting on the back of a black dog with a long silky coat that lay asleep beside him. You could see that he had fallen asleep stroking him. The sun, cooling a little as it moved away, fell directly on the man and his dog and seemed to enter them and melt them with its rays as if the grass, stone and flesh should equally bless its rays. Beside the dog, five or six sheep whose winter fleece was not yet sheared stood in a circle, their heads lowered, facing each other like the spokes of a wheel towards its hub, so as to shade each other with the shadows of their bodies. A fine nanny goat, blotched black and white, her udder full of milk and rounded like a leather bottle, lay at Claude’s feet in an attitude of repose, of wellbeing and complete security. She nonchalantly rested her head, furnished with two long shiny horns, on the neck of a third white kid with no horns that lay between her legs. The hooves of these delightful creatures, polished by the grass, shone like black stones polished by water in a brook. The wide eyes of the nanny, vague, far away and dreamy like the eyes of deer and camels, seemed to be engaged in thought. They looked in turn from the master to the little ones, from the dog to the sheep, from the rocks to the grass, as if surveying pleasurably the peaceful scene of which she was a part. Rabbits grazed the wild thyme in the turf beside the dog, the goats and the man, not startled by my footsteps. You could see that Claude had taught his dog to treat them as a herd. Seven or eight plum trees and two cherries, with

26

Chapter Three

thin trunks bent by the wind, grew a few feet away in the shelter of a row of granite blocks that lay above the rest of the area. Their late flowers had begun to drop, raining down petals with every discernible movement of air. They gave a gentle shimmering shade mingled with clear light on the grass. Nature knows that mountaintops are cold and windblown; she has only grown scanty bushes whose light and changing shade is merely a thin and transparent fan over the ground. The shadows of the plum trees and flowering cherries just reached to the feet of the sleeping stonemason. Opposite, behind the three blocks of stone, were seven hives with tiny pointed thatched roofs, placed on plinths of stones to keep them from being swamped by the rains. Full of swarms of bees, these hives murmured dully like flames in green wood. The bees, warmed by the sun, came and went in crowds, flying around the man and even settling on his arm and forehead without stinging him: for they, like the domestic animals, know the hand that feeds them. A huge ant heap rose, just by the peasant’s head. His stick had refrained from demolishing it, so as not to destroy a town built laboriously by God’s tiny architects, as he told me afterwards. Companies of tame little lizards showed their heads, peering between the cracks in the stones, or chased each other in the sparse grass, fearlessly running over the feet, hands and even black hair of man and dog. You would have said that a spirit of gentleness and friendship had brought confidence and peace among all things and all creatures in that little mountain colony.

XII I remained still, involuntarily affected as I gazed on that whole scene. I was afraid now to disturb Claude by waking him to question him. If I had been able to withdraw in silence without being seen I would have retraced my steps but, just when I was turning to go and wait at the door of his hut for the stonemason’s awakening and return, his dog scented mine. He sat up on his hind legs and looked in my direction and, raising his muzzle skywards as dogs do when worried or startled by something unexpected, he let out a long howl of distress and fright that woke his master. Claude sat up, looked at me, recognised me and took a few steps to meet me in visible embarrassment. I came forward, smiling to reassure him and, grasping his hand, said to him, “I understand, Claude, you think you have offended me and are afraid that I have come to reproach you for abandoning your work. Be reassured and sit down again where you were, amid your family of goats and sheep, lizards, bees and the dog. They

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

27

belong to the same family as we do, do they not? I know them and love them as you do. Since God does not consider Himself too grand to have made them, we should not consider ourselves too grand for their company”. The dog quietened down, the goat did not move from its hollow in the grass, the sheep went on bleating with their heads between their legs, and the lizards kept running around while the bees buzzed. We sat in the sun facing each other, he on his clump of grass, I on mine, our heads in the sunshine, our feet in the grass of the edge of some closed and forgotten grave in its green shroud of turf embalmed in flowers. And I had the conversation with him that I wished.

CHAPTER FOUR

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

But why did you break off from my work, Claude? Have you been sick? Or have you broken your tools? Or did you find the quarry too difficult or the slabs crumbling under the hammer? No, Sir, I have not been sick, I haven’t broken my tools, the quarry is fine and the stone is sound. For all that, I have not dared to tell you why I slipped away furtively like a thief without thanking you, without warning, without presenting my bill, because I felt dishonest and would not have known how to find good reasons. Pardon me if I have caused you trouble; that was not my intention. On the contrary, I would want to serve you if I could, for your mother was much loved in the mountain and is still spoken of in the evenings. So! In the name of my mother, I ask you to tell me why you do not want to work for me. Come, feel free. The reactions of men are like bells of the same resonance. Whether high up in the mountains or lower down, they give the same sound. What is right for you will be right for me. Speak to me as you would speak to God. How did your conscience make you pull out and leave me embarrassed? This is it, Sir. I said to myself, “Claude, you do not want to work for money; that is your secret, your plan, nobody need know it, in truth. You work for the poor when they have nobody to do their work. At this time there are no poor people who have called on you to work for them; you are working for the squire at the château, you will receive from him your food only. That is fine”. So I happily kept on working for five days. My stone slabs are at the edge of the quarry, you can see them. But nevertheless, as I worked I was not at peace with myself. Something reproached me from within and I did not know why, and on the sixth day as I ate my bread in the morning, seated on my stone, a thought came to me

30

MYSELF

CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE

Chapter Four

like a flash of light in my eyes. I said to myself, “You are doing a job cheaply for this wealthy house. That is fine for them, it is fine for you who only have to provide food for a dog. But in the countryside, in the villages on the other side of the mountain, there are stonemasons who have father, mother and children to provide for with shelter, warmth, clothing—they must feed them and bring them up with the money they earn. Who will employ them? The rich. Now, if you work without wages for the rich, who will provide work for the poor workers in your trade, the sons or fathers of families? And if they do not have work, who will feed their children? If you act generously here, then you are stealing the bread and livelihood of your comrades.” That struck me like a stone thrown at my head, Sir. I threw down my piece of bread, I put my pick, my hammer, my bush hammer in my sack and escaped for home as if I had committed some wrong act. Was I wrong, Sir, to think of my poor married comrades? And was it not their bread I was eating? No, Claude, you were not wrong. You thought it out correctly, your sentiments were right and I freely pardon you. But tell me also who has made your reasoning so clear and your conscience so tender that your duty of justice towards your neighbour always affects your own interest in this way, and that you think of others before you think of yourself. I don’t know, Sir. I think the Good Lord has made me like that. Did you study and learn your religion in your childhood from some priest in the district, a relative of the family, or at some seminary, from which these ideas about God, about your neighbour, concerning Christian perfection, will have penetrated your soul, so as to develop afterwards in the practice of love? No, Sir. I have never studied, either under a priest or at a seminary. My father and mother were too poor for that. In any case, when I was at the age for schooling, there were not even any priests in the parishes or bells in the belfries. All I know of religion was the three or four prayers my mother knew by heart and made me repeat

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

31

after her when the fire was put out at our home. I cannot even read or write, and I do my sums with straws or pebbles. But how, then, has your character been formed on its own? Is anyone on their own when God is always present, above or before you? I have never felt alone in my life. You are right, but how did you bring yourself up and accept the presence of God who provides company in the desert and communicates with you as an invisible friend? I have no idea, Sir. I think that the graciousness he has for me, since I live so high up here without wife or children, without father or mother, is that he comes and visits me more often and more intimately than anyone else to bring me solace and prevent me being bored with life. Don’t you get very bored, then, in this hermitage amid the fogs, the snows and the strong winds, in the silence and the solitude? Oh no, Sir. I am never bored. How can one be bored in the company of Him who knows everything, says everything, hears everything that we say to Him and who is never weary of listening to us and replying to us in our hearts? No, but you need great spiritual concentration together with a great uplifting of the soul not to be distracted from this interior conversation with God, not to be deafened by the noises of the world and carried away in the stream of lesser thoughts. In a word, you need to be endowed with a special awareness, common to mankind but not developed to the same extent in everyone, a sense that is more intellectual and divine than all our other senses, the sense of the Infinite; in other words, my dear Claude, the sense of God. It seems that you have this sense of God to a high degree, the gift of all gifts, the sovereign intelligence for the wise man or for the ignorant, the sovereign riches for rich or poor, the sovereign happiness in the fortunate or the unfortunate. I doubted it when I met you the other day when I saw you and heard tell of you. I appear in the world’s view to be

32

Chapter Four

better educated and more important than you, but I respect you, I envy you and admire you, and it is to hear of this higher awareness from the lips of a simple artisan that I said to myself, “Let me climb up there. God revealed Himself in burning bushes on several occasions. You always find more peace, more light and more serenity the further you go from the valleys, where people swarm, and climb the heights where their noise ceases”. Ah, Sir! You are indeed mistaken. I do not have a word to utter. Quite the opposite. I often spend a week without saying anything. God would have done well to create me mute, since, except for calling my goats, my sheep and my dog by their names, I have never felt the need for speech. There are some souls so full of thoughts and perceptions that they cannot express them. Perhaps you are like that. Oh, I don’t think so, Sir. I say nothing because I have nothing to say. It is indeed partly because of that that I do not go and live down there with the others. I say to myself, “What would you do down there? You can’t even reply to the children when they watch you working and ask the names of your tools”. But when something occurs to you when you are silent? For God has given to each soul the need to express themselves, the need to listen and respond, just as He has given to the air, to the water, to the fire the need to nurture or to increase, instead of dying out or being exhausted. True, Sir. There is someone who breathes, moves, flows, burns, speaks to me unknown to me. I sense it well. I hear it well. I sometimes even reply to Him in my heart. But it is speech without words, which you understand without having been to school and which you read without having learnt to read books. It is muffled and confused, like the sound of deep water, but which you hear without seeing from here, in the deep well springs. Nevertheless, that keeps me company and consoles me like a wife or a friend would do by night at the fireside. Without this communication, wouldn’t I be dead years ago, since…. .

CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

33

(He stopped and sighed, involuntarily looking towards the green mounds that had struck me when I entered the enclosure. I understood that there was a memory under the grass and that he was reluctant to feel it in my presence. I did not want to violate his secret at the first encounter. I pretended not to have noticed his pause or to have heard his sigh.) MYSELF What does this interior voice that converses with you usually tell you when you are alone? CLAUDE We speak to each other about everything I see on earth, Sir, and up above, (he added, indicating with a gesture the canopy of stars above our heads.) We speak to each other mostly about Him. MYSELF Who is He? CLAUDE God, Sir. MYSELF But if you have never been to school or learnt the catechism, which was not taught when you were a child, nor read anything in the books that tell you about God, then how do you know that there is only one God? CLAUDE Ah, Sir. First our mother instructed us well and, then, afterwards when I grew up, I was acquainted with good souls who took me into houses of prayer where people used to gather for worship and serve Him together and listen to the words He had instructed His saints to reveal to men in His name. But even if my mother had said nothing about Him and if I had never listened to the catechism taught in the parishes as I went round France, is there not a catechism in all around us that instructs the eyes and soul of the most ignorant? Does His name need letters of the alphabet in order to be read? Does not the idea of Him come into our eyes with the first ray of light, into our spirit with the first thought, into our heart with the first beat? I don’t know how other men are made, Sir, but, as for me, I could not look at, I won’t say a star, but simply an ant, a leaf, or a tree, a grain of sand, without saying, “Who made you?” MYSELF And you reply, “God did”. CLAUDE Of course, Sir. That thing cannot have made itself, since before creating something it is necessary to exist yourself, isn’t it? And before existing it was not. So it could not make itself. It is as simple as that. At least that is how I told it to myself. But you must know it in many other ways that are wiser than that.

34

MYSELF

CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE

Chapter Four

No. All ways end up with yours. You may use many more words to tell it, but not more reasons. Results without cause: an immense chain that goes up and down from the infinite heights and depths of space that would carry worlds and suspended worlds from innumerable spheres and would have no first link—such would be worlds without God, my dear Claude, a darkness that you would not speak of out loud to your dog, for fear of upsetting the instincts of a brute, would you not? Those who do not see God have never seemed to me to be human beings. They are, in my eyes, beings of a different species, born to contradict creation, to say ‘no’ where the whole of nature says ‘yes’. They are mental shadows that God has created in human form, the better to bring out the glory of the evidence for Him by the absurdity of their blindness. They do not offend me: they sadden me. I do not hate them: I pity them. They are the blind in soul: God will give then eyes. Are there people like that? So they say. I have never thought thus. But haven’t you heard spoken of people who are alive whose skin is dead, who do not feel either heat or cold, or water or firs or the thousand effects of the atmosphere upon us, as it makes our skin shiver or relax? Yes. Those unfortunate people are called lepers, in our hills. Well, since there are those people who have not received the sense of touch physically, we must accept that there are those who have not received the sense of thought inside. Those who do not see God, if they exist, are the lepers in spirit. God is too good to leave them in that darkness. How do you know that God is good? Because we love what is good, and if God were not good we could not prevent ourselves from hating Him. May I ask of you, Sir, who appear to understand these things better than I do, what sort of creation would it be where the creature could not help hating the Creator? It would be a contradiction in terms. The creature would by nature love the good and the Creator who had made it, in order that it might return to Him and love Him—and that

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF

35

would be evil. You clearly see this as an upside down state of affairs with ideas confused in the brain. You do not arrive at that point except when you are overcome by suffering, and lose the justice and hope that is in Him. But it is a cry that escapes from our lips, and afterwards the soul runs fast to recover before God might have heard it. Then, Sir, He who is immense in every way—is He not by nature immense justice and immense goodness? And since He has planted in us, who come from Him and who are simply distant and obscure images of Him, justice and goodness as things we love despite ourselves, is not that the proof that He Himself possesses them without limit? Isn’t it of necessity that He should be infinitely good, since He wishes to be infinitely loved by everything that comes from His hands? At least, that is what I say to myself when life is hard and I am depressed. But I do not often need to think like that. I see Him too well, I feel Him too well, I touch him (if I dare say it), too closely, heart to heart, to offer Him the insult and ingratitude of believing Him evil. But consider now a little what it would be if I, miserable earthworm, was good and God was evil. The sun’s reflection would be fire when it was ice! Indeed, I am ashamed of comrades who have sometimes spoken to me of such wretched things. Are you, then, aware of an immense and perceptible love of God? Alas, Sir, not as much as I would and as I ought. I haven’t enough learning to understand the perfection of the invisible Father and to submerge my spirit in the depths of His goodness. I live quite contentedly, like one of these natural black stones that receives the sunshine shining on them. If I was one of those mirrors that I see shining at the back of the books in your château, I would become warmer still; that is to say, that I would love much more. Love must be in proportion to the spirit. I am a poor man. I could not have the wonder of a scholar. How so? He created me. But that cost Him nothing.

36

CLAUDE

Chapter Four

It cost Him a thought, one of God’s thoughts, Sir! Don’t we consider that enough? As for me, I considered it often and grew as proud as a god in my humility, as great as the world in my smallness. A thought of God! That is worth as much as if He had given me the whole universe. For in fact, although I am a small thing, to create me He had first to think of me when I did not yet exist, to see me from afar, to plan my childhood beforehand, to reserve my little space for me, my little moment, my little importance, my little part to play, my birth, my life, my death and, I believe it, Sir—my immortality. What! Is that nothing, to have occupied the thought of God and to have occupied it sufficiently for Him to have deigned to create us? Ah! I tell you again, that melts me with love for God more than anything, when I think of it. He stopped, as if out of breath with enthusiasm, and put his head between his large hands to reflect. His eyes were moist when he opened them. I myself was taken aback, as I listened to him, to see so strong and right an argument, be it so simple, lending expressions to such a dull person as myself, an accomplished man of letters, that I would have been hard put to find more expressive and perceptive. MYSELF But what perception have you conceived of the God whom you love so much, my dear Claude? CLAUDE Ah! Sir. I think of it, I think of it, I think of it, ever since I came into the world, and I have not been able to be satisfied with the least shadow of perception. My weak spirit sought room in my head in vain, as if to break out of the walls of my forehead to escape from its prison and to stretch itself to the extent of whole worlds, which is nothing in comparison. It does not amount to a mere grain of dust in size, a moment in time, a drop of water from the sea, in His perfection. Its weight is like a hundred thousand granite mountains to the wing of one of these midges, making the poor human mind dizzy. That would give Him to the combined souls of all the creatures that have ever lived, who are living and will live to eternity. You do not only have to think to get an idea, Sir, a perception of God. Yet, if you did have it, you would be God Himself? I don’t speak of an image; from time to

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

37

time I make thousands of images for myself, now one, now another, which satisfy me for a moment and console my spirit, just as a plank supports for a time a man who is drowning on the seas, yet does not support you for long and sinks under you, like the others, and your spirit drowns forever in that contemplation. Which image comes back to you most often, Claude? Sir, rather count the specks of dust that my hammer scatters from the stone in the course of a summer’s day as the wind blows them in your eyes. Sometimes I see Him as a limitless sky, studded all over with eyes that encompass worlds, expanding the more you add to it, seeming always empty yet ever full. Sometimes I see Him as a sea with no shores at all from which He brings out endless lands and islands. Sometimes I see Him as a giant on whom are piled mountains, seas, worlds heaped upon top of one another, and He does not even feel their weight. Sometimes I see Him as a compass dial marking out in figures the suns in the sky, and the needle lengthens endlessly, lengthens and lengthens on and on towards the rim of the dial yet never reaches it. Sometimes I see Him as an infinite eye, you could say, opening wide as the sky on His works, which he contemplates as it expands to take them in as He creates them. Sometimes like an immense hand that carries all of us into his view to enlighten us and to warm us with His breath. Sometimes like a heart beating in all His works, from the greatest to the smallest. Finally, what shall I say to you, Sir? When I relate to you these ignorant follies of a humble man to the limit of his inspiration, they will always be, will never be but follies, the shadows of a bird across the sun, glow-worm lights in the dark. That explains no more than nothing. I feel everything as you do. I only pause there for a moment. But there is only one thing that satisfies me a little and that is so foolish that I hardly dare mention it to you. Be assured, dear Claude, we none of us have any more wit than anyone else when it comes to expressing what is impossible to express and impossible to describe. There you have it. I lie down in summer time at midday on the grass on the ground, on my back, eyes half-

38

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE

Chapter Four

closed, looking into the sunbeams that fall on my face from the sky. So the dazzling rose pink rays like the petals of a dog-rose seep through my eyelids and into my soul. That flows into me, enlightens me, warms me to the bottom of my heart, as if I had been plunged into a lake of light that had penetrated my limbs and veins, through to my very being. So, Sir, I guess that these beams, this dazzling, this warmth, is the sea of God and I am swimming in it, being wafted delightfully though space, light and transparent as the air, whither I know not…. That worries me when I open my eyes again and see only the sun. I believed that it was He and I wanted to weep at having lost that feeling. But I make you laugh, Sir. What would you? We are all children when we seek our Father. He is hidden too high for our hands and our eyes. We all stammer as we call for Him and we never catch but his shade! What does it matter (he continued, as he glanced at the green mound I was sitting on) if we deceive ourselves, since that is still loving, is it not? Yes, Claude, we can only reach what is within our grasp, we can only understand to the extent of our wits. God wishes you and me to feel the immeasurable distance between Him and us. Whenever we try to grasp it in our dreams, or images, we seize on our follies, our temerity or our idols. It is enough to experience Him and to love Him. As for comprehending Him, the sun itself, if the sun were the intelligence of the sky, would exhaust itself. Well said, Sir. The sun would exhaust itself, so how much more would we? Let’s be content to do His will for every little moment on earth. But, Claude, how do you know for certain that you are doing God’s will? As for that, Sir, that is different. I do not know, but I am sure of it. But, once again, how are you sure? How, Sir? In my breast and not in my head… my head goes dizzy, my head ‘sings’, as we people say, but my heart never wavers and my conscience does not sing... because I have it there (striking his chest). I have a heart

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

39

and a conscience that have two muffled but clear voices, which say to me, “This is well, this is evil, this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad”, and what is well, what is right, is the will of God. Again, how do you know it? I tell you again, Sir, that I don’t need to know it, since I feel it. When I hurt myself with my hammer and my flesh cries out and bleeds, I don’t need proof that I have done myself an injury, do I? I simply feel it. So! In the same way when I injure my soul by disobeying God’s will, I don’t need to prove it. I feel it just as strongly and my soul cries out and bleeds within me, just as my flesh does under my hammer. What you feel, Sir, is much surer than what you know. It is humans who reason things out for themselves, but it is God who makes our feelings. A feeling, Sir, is a reality made into a reason. A gentleman like you put it well to me one day: “Human beings think,” he said to me, “but nature feels. Question your thoughts but believe firmly in your feelings, because nature knows more about it than you or I do. Nature heard God before we did and more closely than us, you see?” He was right, but can you, Claude, carry out as far as possible the will of God? On the contrary, it is heaven and earth for me. And what is this will, for you? To love everything he has made, Sir, so as in this to love Him in His works and to serve everything so as to serve Him in all the world. But to love everything and to serve everything is sometimes difficult, since there are many people and things that are difficult to love and we are tempted to serve ourselves, instead of serving others. Indeed, Sir, they often say that to me down there in the towns and up here in the villages. It must be true, though, indeed it isn’t a matter for boasting that I have never understood that. How so, Claude? Has it never been painful to love all the world and sacrifice yourself as another Christ for all the world? Are you not in self-denial?

40

CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

Chapter Four

Me, Sir! But I am only the lowest of the low among men. I really feel it and so I hide myself as I can here with my poor animals, so as not to bring shame for my poverty of spirit on my life in the district. But as for having difficulty in loving, I would tell a lie if I said so…. It seems that the good Lord, who has denied me intellect and many other things (he added with a barely concealed sigh), has done me the goodness to endow me is this way with what is lacking in the other. But I have never felt hatred of any sort for my neighbour. What do you understand by your neighbour? I understand, Sir, that I mean people, things, animals and every tree and plant, everything that is related to us in body and soul. In fact, Sir, on this earth, everything near to us, everything that lives or partakes in this world where God has put us, as I have put these animals in this enclosure to live in peace and friendship around me. Do you love all that? Ah! I would love many other things in it, too, if I knew more. I do not know how the good Lord had made my heart, Sir, but it is always full yet empty. You mean that it is infinite. Perhaps yes, Sir, that means what you call it. Whatever it is, nothing can ever complete it. The good Lord would throw in worlds for me to love, so that there is still room to hold them and to love others, besides. Of all the graces that God has made for us, above all for those of us who are poor and solitary, the greatest is that ability to love everything. It is like a warm spring that flows continually from the heart and, when it has watered here, it goes on to water there and never ceases. That is the quality from God that good souls call ‘compassion’, Sir, compassion for the afflicted, for the guilty, for the poor, for the rich, for the old men, for the widows, for the children, for people, for animals, for plants, for the earth itself, and for the stars in the sky, as if these elements themselves had a mute or intelligent sensibility and if it all felt, cried out and suffered in its own way, like us. Alas, Sir, I truly believe that the good Lord asks and inspires us the most. For without that compassion for

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF

CLAUDE

41

each other, what would become of us all on an earth so shaped by affliction? God forbid me from gainsaying you, Claude, You see, in all the religions the most holy and godly victims are those who have experienced this compassion the most, which is simply the tenderness of that love for our fellow men, and who have sacrificed themselves to recover truth or virtue for the human race. What is most generous in the human heart, Claude, is compassion. To weep at the afflictions of others is to bleed in your heart over others’ afflictions, to bleed in your heart over the ills from which you could avert your eyes. After his blood, a tear is what a person can give more of himself. If not that, a drop from his true heart, shed in order to heal someone else’s heart. The compassion you speak of is the most beautiful form of love; for there is a love that seeks to live in you, love that is felt, yet there is a love that pursues you to suffer with you and share your troubles. That love is a beautiful quality, but it causes those endowed with it to suffer deeply. That is true, Sir, but it makes for joy as well. For my part, the friendship that I have always felt for those in trouble has frequently kept me up late and woken me up before daybreak. I say to myself, “You are calm and warm in your house with your dog and your goats, you have bread on the table, there is hay in the mountain or in the rack for them. Your roof, while made of furze, is proof against wind and snow. You do not have to care for a wife or children. But there is someone with broken tiles on his dilapidated ceiling, leaving his bed and his little ones' cradles exposed to all winds. There is that poor widow whose house burned down last week and who has but a farthing to pay the carter, the mason and the tiler to rebuild her shelter; there is the old man who no longer has his son to dig his piece of ground; there are those three orphans with neither father nor mother to harvest their rye or beat their chestnuts. There is someone’s chimney that has collapsed; there is the door, the sink, the stairs, the window of this or that person that has fallen down , sending them running for the stonemason, with no money from now or next year to

42

MYSELF CLAUDE

Chapter Four

pay for his day’s labour. What are they going to do in the approaching bad season? Who will go to their aid for the love of God? So, I do. Let’s take the trouble to relieve theirs a little. Let’s cart the stones for this one, make a door jamb for that one, set the steps of the stairway right for one, replace the rafters and tiles for another, dig the vine for that sick neighbour, cut the barley of the old blind woman, present a goat to the poor nursing mother whose cow has fallen ill and has no more milk for her little ones. The little that I can do for them cheers my heart. They will have less sorrow at home, they will sleep at night, they will eat that evening, and they will have shelter to sleep under before winter comes. Then I go there and nothing more than seeing me set to work, often without saying anything, that reassures them, it cheers them. They come and watch me working, they sit down at the side of the quarry or the yard. The children play with my tools or with my dog when it has followed me. They think, “Providence has not abandoned us, Claude saw our problem. The poor fellow cannot do very much, but he has done what little he can”. That lifts their spirits, for a neighbour is carrying part of their misfortune. As for me, Sir, the thought that this encourages them makes the hammer lighter in my hand. In the evening when I climb up here again at nightfall and I say to myself, “Claude, what have you achieved today?” I reply to myself, “I have profited from a good day’s work, because the poor pay me in friendship, my heart pays me in contentment, and the good Lord will pay me in mercy”. Isn’t it true, Sir, that it is well worth the thirty sous it would have hurt them to give me and hurt me to take? “There will be,” as I say when I go to sleep, “one problem less in the village tonight.” And that makes you happy, to feel that you have merited well from the One who told us to help one another? Oh, Sir! I have merited nothing from that, since it is a delight I made for myself. I have told you, I cannot feel suffering of any sort without it wrings my heart and I long to bring happiness around me. It seems that I am

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE

43

only making myself at one with others, since they are a piece of my own flesh and I am a piece of theirs. I think that is what is called love, is it not? Exactly, in the purest meaning of the word. Oh! If that is so, Sir, I don't know if I should boast of it, but I have enough of it for two. And for a hundred, my dear Claude. You should surely give some of it to those who are cold in heart. But perhaps I have too much of it, Sir, and it is not good to love my neighbour so much? And who then do you love so much, after God and people, that we should not learn to love too much? I will not presume to tell you, and that is how it is. Tell it boldly. To love too much is hardly an evil with God. There is no vase full enough that a few drops do not spill on earth. All right, Sir, when I have well served the good Lord and people as I am able, dare I tell you? I feel a stupid affection, but an affection I cannot suppress, for the whole of the rest of creation, above all these living creatures of another kind who live beside us on earth that see the same sun, breathe the same air, drink the same water and are made of other forms of the same flesh, and indeed seem less perfect members, less well endowed by our common Father, yet are still members of the good Lord's wide family. I wish to speak of these animals, these dogs that are such faithful and good servants that, even if they were offered wages a thousand times higher, would never leave their poor master to whom they are so devoted, of these goats and these kids and these ewes that climb up every evening to this rock to watch me return from far away to this hut, calling to me as if they thought that their bleatings hastened my return. They dart down to greet me as soon as I have crossed the fields and walk into the heather where I allow them to graze and gambol at liberty. Also I speak of these birds that have seen me, when they were tiny and featherless, respect their nests and put crumbs of bread out for the brooding birds within reach of their beaks, and these honey bees whose winter food I leave, taking only a little honey for sick people. And these

44

Chapter Four

lizards that are attracted to the sun by the noise of the stone resounding under the hammer like a bell around me throughout the day, and I never crush them underfoot; finally, all the little insects that live in the leaves, the stones or the grass, to whom I never do any harm, because I see them as the good Lord's work, which it is forbidden to hurt for no good reason. That amuses you, Sir, but if you were watching when we were alone, as we converse with each other and how we understand each other by voice, and look! How the goats lying at my feet mingle their deep and thoughtful gaze with mine; how this dog is in the same way both severe and gentle with them when he watches over them while I am away, barking at them without harming them to stop them jumping over the wall of the enclosure; how the bees stroke my face and hands with their velvety feet without ever stinging me when I handle their swarms or when I lie down on Sundays on the grass of their table, as we are doing now; how the rabbits in the evening follow the dog that rounds them up to the hut; how the lizards wriggle prettily right over my arms and neck and lift their little heads towards my eyes to see if I am annoyed when they eat my bread. If you were to overhear our conversations in the evening in the hut, when the dog, the goats and the ewes play amicably among themselves and with me to entertain ourselves together. If you were to see these confiding heads resting beside one another on my knees and these eyes communicating with mine, so many things not said but understood, I put it to you, Sir, that you could not wish me to love these poor beasts as well. For love is worthy of love, Sir, whether it comes from high or low. Does God not allow us to love them, Sir? Is there more distance between my goats and me, than between me and the good Lord? Yet I would be told that it is silly to love the good Lord's beasts and make them happy in their lowly condition. It is stronger than me, but I would not have it otherwise. The heart is like water: it flows where it wills. But don't think that this is the product of my simple mind. I know many others. Would you believe that, not

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

45

content with feeling this affection for the beasts that can move around, who have feelings and in their way have a soul, I also feel with these trees, these plants, which appear not to think but which live and die there, around me on the ground, and especially for those I have known, like these ferns, that heather beside the rocks in this enclosure when I was little, and above all (he added more tenderly), for this purple clover with leaves brimming with the drops of morning dew, as if they had shed tears with us, during the night, that have grown in the ground from those that grew before them. (He had an audible catch in his throat as he spoke these last words. I pretended not to notice it. He went on in an artless way, but as one truly inspired.) Yes, Sir, there is not one of these stars in the sky above, just rising over the rocks in the half-light, not one of these outcrops, not one of these hilltops glistening in the setting sun, not one of these ravine beds hidden in the depths of these gorges with their streams tumbling at the bottom under cover of night, not one of these clods of earth turned over and over again by my mattock in the sun in my childhood, for which I do not feel a deep affection in my heart that sometimes moves me to tears when I look at them as I climb back up to the huts. Is it then surprising, as I say to myself many times? Do we not have a genuine physical relationship with this earth from which we come, to which we shall return, which bears us, which waters us, which nourishes us like a wet nurse from her breast? Is our flesh not of its flesh? Is our blood not from the waters of its veins? Is there not between it and us a real physical relationship causing us, when we take a handful of soil in our hand or a clod of earth from the hills that support us, to say, "You are my mother or my sister"? And does not the earth seem to reply to us and love us, we humans, and say to us, "Yes, I know you, you are from me; each of your limbs and your bones, did I not give them to you? I am proud of you as a mother of her children, as I am proud of this beech tree, of this pine or this chestnut you have just been admiring on my slopes. You would be ungrateful if you did not love me, if my memory and image did not

46

Chapter Four

haunt you when you were a long way away from me in other lands and did not remind you in your dreams at night of the hills that saw your childhood." Is it not true, Sir? Isn't that a little of what in the towns they call 'patriotism'? Isn't it also the reason why people make pilgrimages to faraway places to visit the land where greater men than they, names more famous or holy than the rest, used to live and to kiss the dust of their footprints on the ground of the hill where they trod? Excuse me, Sir, I speak as an ignorant man, but since you ask me what I think, I must surely tell you. So there are times, on Sundays, at seasons when at sunset this ground feels and seems to respond to my heartbeats, when my hand is buried in the mallow and clover of this little patch and there is the buzzing of a thousand insects in my ears during that season. There is the scent of this horde of tiny invisible spring flowers in the mosses, then I feel the trembling of life and death all over my body, as if the good Lord had actually touched me with the point of one of these sun rays, as if my father, my mother, my sisters and everyone I had loved had come back to life and were throbbing under the grass, in the earth to know me again and draw me to their heart. Oh! Who would not love, Sir, a land where your treasure was entrusted and is looked after until the resurrection? (A great tear fell without him knowing it down his cheek. I saw that he had a love within that love, some special concern and belief within this allembracing and devoted respect for creation.) MYSELF But since you love the way you do, Claude, does not this solitude without wife, without children, without neighbour, up here where only the wind comes up here with you, does it not depress you? CLAUDE No, Sir, quite the opposite. I am depressed when I am down below. I become happy and contented once I climb up again. People make too much noise for my frail spirit, which hears itself only in the silence. The noise chases the good Lord away from me. It seems that I am not with Him any more when I am in the midst of the villages. I really believe that the good Lord loves the mountains.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF

47

Yet, He has made the valleys and the plains as well. True, but the mountains are nearer to the heavens. But, Claude, is there not another reason that you have not told me that causes you to live alone here, with your goats and sheep, and to cover two leagues every day to go down and two leagues to come up to your old home? CLAUDE (Getting up and looking at the green mounds.) That is true, Sir, but let us not talk about that; it would upset you, and me, too. See, the sun has just gone down behind the mountain where your woods are getting dark. You have just time to go back down before night falls on the valley and makes it dark. MYSELF I had forgotten that as I talked with you, Claude. When you have discovered a good spring in the shade as you walk in lonely places you sometimes forget that the hour grows late. I will come back again, if it does not bore you, to speak with you from time to time about God, even to pray with you, in your way of speaking, Claude. I am a long way from living in constant communication with Him as you are, further again from keeping a sanctuary for Him in my soul that is as pure and as empty of human vanity as that kept in your solitude and repose. My soul runs along with the stream of a busy and noisy life. As it runs along it foams. But under that foam on the surface of my life I have still kept, like these boulders at the bottom of your ravine, some clear drops of the water of my soul where I like to see the reflection of a chink of heaven and to contemplate, like you, the moving shadows of God. I do not use all my energies as you do. But I love Him and pray to Him with all my heart and mind. Sometimes I sing hymns, but my song does not match yours, Claude. My song has words that strike the ear; yours is the deeds you do for people. I am not worthy to communicate with you, other than that I have always had an attraction to souls where God dwells in simplicity and goodness. So farewell, until chance or hunting brings me to Les Huttes. I left the enclosure. He came with me to the threshold of Les Huttes. His dog, his sheep, his goats, even the rabbits, followed him as if he had summoned them. These tame animals seemed to attend him and understand his friendship for them. I would not have been surprised to see

48

Chapter Four

him being followed by the bees and the insects from the enclosure. That man would have tamed the rocks and the trees. All of animate and inanimate nature and he seemed to understand each other, living and loving each other in a mystic and holy understanding at the feet of their God.

CHAPTER FIVE

I I went into a reverie akin to that from my childhood after an interview with my mother at dusk in the garden, where she had performed aloud her devotions to God with her small children. I heard in my heart the simple words, but so full of godly feeling, of this poor, solitary disciple. Even the sound of his voice echoed in my ears like the sound of village bells high up in the Alps, as they echoed above the mists of the valley, their only purpose to revive in people’s souls thoughts of God; the sursum corda of the woodcutters, the reapers and the shepherds in the mountains. I felt better, my heart warmer and more inclined to goodness, for no reason but for having spent a few minutes at this shepherd’s shelter hidden behind those bushes and rocks. Each person has an ambience giving out good or bad influences of warmth or ice, according to how his soul is to greater or lesser degree directed from above, and to a greater or lesser degree reflects divinity in himself. Repulsion and attraction are but our sensing of people’s ambience of persons. Some attract us like a magnet, others repel us like a snake, without us knowing why; but nature, she knows it. We must listen for these repulsions or attractions, as feelings and warnings of the soul. Almost always an attraction reveals a hidden virtue, and a repulsion a hidden vice in others that alerts us. People have their appearances: you do not analyse them, you experience them. Who has not said to himself on meeting with certain men, “I feel better in his company”?

II For a week I suppressed my impatience to see Claude again and converse at ease with him, fearing to interrupt his labours during working hours and to spoil the good deeds for his neighbours that filled his days. But, when Sunday came, I went up by instinct to Les Huttes and I came upon Claude in the same place as I had left him, in the enclosure, only this time he was not asleep in the sun among his flowering grasses. He had cut his sparse lawn during the week. He had managed to rake up the dry scented hay into small heaps that, in time, he would carry off to the shelter of his hut to

50

Chapter Five

feed his beasts in winter. Because a heavy dew had fallen that morning, he feared that storm showers would fall by evening or the next day and was piling his hay together so that it would not get sodden with water. He seemed glad to see me. I laid down my hunting jacket on a stone and helped him finish his work, as if it was my profession. He did nothing to prevent me. Before midday all the hay was in little haycocks here and there on the mown slope of the tiny meadow. He offered me a piece of his barley bread and one of his small goats’ milk cheeses, peasant fare in our hill country. I gladly broke the bread of my childhood with him. The meal, washed down with icy water drawn up in a gourd from the spring, together with the juice of the early cherries, nibbled by worms and fallen prematurely from the tree, increased our fellowship. When you have eaten and drunk together, you are comrades in the language and customs of the countryside. We sat down by one of the haycocks, whose heap gave our heads some shade, and took up the conversation of the previous Sunday.

III MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

You have not told me, Claude, how the hamlet of Les Huttes, of which you are the sole inhabitant, came to be abandoned in this way to the briers and ivy and how all the men, all the women and all the children have drifted away like water from a dam when a storm carries away the dyke, leaving the fish dead on the dry ground and the bottom. You have not told me, either, who rolled these large boulders around this little area of deeper soil in the past, constructed this cross from three stones and raised up these five hummocks of turf that are not mown, as is the rest of the meadow, but like the graves in the cemetery of Saint Point that I see flourishing green beneath my window. What do you want me to tell you, Sir? We people do not have life stories. We only have our place in life and our bread to earn. One blow of the hammer sounds like another. One piece of bread tastes like the next. What of that is of interest to you? True. Your life is of one texture and your bread is kneaded from the same dough. You do not have adventures, but you have a heart and soul. It is the story of your heart and soul of which I would wish to know something, you see, so as to understand how time has

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

CLAUDE

51

made you so sensitive and compassionate to the afflicted, so as to glorify the good Lord as in the sublimity of a great genius yet in the simplicity of an obscure being. Well, Sir, since it is to praise the good Lord, in no way may I refuse you in His Name. I will tell you all. It will take no longer than the time it takes for the sun to cross the valley and pass from the bell tower of Saint Point to the edge of the firs you have planted above your woods.

CHAPTER SIX

I Claude seemed to search his memory for a moment while his eyes gazed at the sky above the black cross, and he recounted to me the following, almost verbatim.

II “Our hut was below the one where I live today, where the byre used to be. You will ask me, ‘Why have you not rebuilt the house, but sleep in the shed that is as dark and damp as a cellar?’ I will assure you, Sir, it is because to rebuild the room on the rock and raise the walls again, remaking the ceiling and the roof, means cutting back and tearing down the creepers that have grown into the stones, the joists and the beams since the tragedy to our family, taking the opportunity to grow as they found it. This fine ivy, when I saw it again on my return, gave me the impression of a cloak that the mercy of the wilds had thrown over our ruined fortune. I said, ‘I won't touch it. There is enough room for both of us on this rock. You look after the upper part; I will take the lower, and the blackbirds will lodge and whistle in peace among your clusters.’ So, Sir, I am telling it to you, like a fool, just as I thought about it. You see, a poor solitary being carries on being attached and loving everything that has loved him.”

III “My father’s name was Benoît La Hutte. I never knew my mother’s family name: she was simply called ‘Mother’. They were cousins, brothers and sisters, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, to all those people, men and women, of the two other huts whose remaining fragments you have seen and with the little patches of broom and scrub that stretch up towards us. The cleft of the gorge, the slope of the mountain, the heather, the gorse and this enclosure had always remained undivided between the related members of the three houses. Each took one or other field and cultivated it so as to have barley or

54

Chapter Six

potatoes that year. The animals grazed together where they wished. When the season came to beat the chestnuts, the men and boys climbed the trees, the women and girls stood below to collect. They filled three roughly equal sacks of the crop, according to the number of children of each household, and each took their own. That is how we lived at Les Huttes, Sir. The head of one of the families used to keep poultry and he would trade chestnuts and plums in the villages and at fairs. Another was a grinder. He would leave after harvest time with his grindstones mounted on four pine uprights, with his iron winch on top. In autumn and winter he used to go and sharpen the billhooks, scythes and knives in front of houses. He was given soup and a place in the hayloft at the home where he was working and came back with several sous in his leather purse when the snows melted. As for my father, in order to enable my mother to support and clothe the children like me, he would go and mine or quarry stone in the villages around Saint Point. He used to come home every evening for supper with mother and us four children, for he loved his life and home so much that he would say ‘I could never be a poultry farmer like Baptiste or a grinder like François, because when I cannot see from the quarry where I am working the roof of my hut smoking when my wife lights the fire, time hangs heavy on me and the world seems too vast.’ Ah, he was a good man, so gentle, so gentle, in spite of working with pickaxe and stone, that in the evenings he sat us little ones on his leather apron, my brother, my sisters and I. We loved that apron as much as our mother’s.”

IV “Misfortune struck our home precisely because of my father’s excessive kindness. One day my brother, who was a year older than I, had gone down to the quarry. It was autumn and it was cold. The infant had lit a small fire of dry bracken to warm his little hands in the flame. My father told him, ‘Be careful, Gratien, don’t touch the black powder over there by my haversack; it will fly into your eyes when you get near the fire.’ But the poor child, who had never been scolded, wanted to see how the black powder flew into the eyes. He went and took a handful of it while my father was not watching the little boy, engrossed in his work, and threw it on the brazier. The powder erupted in a great flame and blinded him. “From that day Gratien could no longer see where he was going. Nevertheless, his eyes were fine and clear; the powder only destroyed his sight. You would not have called him blind, yet out of doors he could only see the sun and inside the house the fire. That was a great misfortune at Les Huttes. Everyone came to mourn with my mother. The child was

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

55

seven years old. He could not find his way around. He was always tied to his mother’s apron or to his father’s hand, or to mine. Our poor father grieved so much for having caused the accident that he became heartbroken, as we say in our district, and died the following winter.”

V “My mother had a hard job to feed us, even though she was still young and could work, and did work as hard as a man with a pick or a billhook or a rake. But I, my blind brother and my little sister at the breast and a thirtyyear-old woman, however careful, were too many mouths to feed. I was heart sore when I saw that poor woman chopping logs, carrying them on her back to the house, weeding the barley, scything the meadow, tying up the sheaves, threshing with the flail by the yard, kneading the bread, lighting the fire, making soup, leading Gratien by the hand, breastfeeding the baby. On top of all that, at that time the fever invaded Les Huttes and carried off the grinder, his wife and children. Nothing was left of his family save one of his daughters, the same age as me, called Denise. The poulterer, in fear of the sickness that had ravaged Les Huttes, pulled down his house in order to take away its planks and went off to build a room with a shop for himself by the church, beside the road in the village, where trade was better. You would not leave a child of eleven or twelve years on her own at the home of her dead parents. My mother went to look for her and brought her to our home. The grinder’s empty house became a home for swallows and lizards. It fell to pieces winter by winter—as you have seen. Denise used to go there on her own, sometimes, on Sundays in summer, and sit under the wild quinces or gather the holly berries, which she called her mother’s necklace, and weep on the doorstep where nobody went in or out. Gratien always followed her, for my mother told Denise, ‘I am putting the little blind boy in your care whilst I am in the fields. Take care that he does not fall into the crevasse’, and those two children were never separated again.”

VI “I was ashamed and troubled to see so much labour, so much poverty and so many mouths to feed at home. I felt that I was already able and strong. I said to my mother, ‘The barley field is sparse, the chestnuts have barely any husks this year; give me my father’s tools’. She handed them over; to see them again made her cry. I went down to the villages below and I said, ‘Who wants me to cut stone for them? I will work for nothing but my

56

Chapter Six

bread.’ Several said to me, “Go to the quarry. We’ll see if you are worth your bread.” I began to work for this one and that one. To extend my working hours I slept under some planks that were lent to me to build scaffolding against the rock face, or better in the oxen’s manger in a cowshed. I only went back up again to Les Huttes on Saturday evenings and brought back to my mother the small sums I had earned and the small amount of bread I had saved during the week. My mother would hug me and say, ‘What a pity you don’t have the muscles, because you have the heart of your father’. I used to go to the fields with Denise and Gratien whilst she cradled my little sister or made buckwheat cakes for Sunday supper. This went on for four or five years. I gained strength. The stones were like haycocks in my hands. I was no longer content to cut stone from the quarries just for walling. I began to cut it according to my own methods for windows and doors, moulded square-edged, and sometimes I even sculpted in bas relief a rose or a tulip with outspread leaves, a hen, a cock, a cat or a dog, according to whether the stone was for the garden, the cowshed or the hen house, for the yard or for the living room of the house. Hunger is a good teacher, Sir, and above all the hunger of your mother, brothers and sisters. I had never done anything else, but you can go here and there in the district and see how they say, ‘Who crafted that barn door, that dovecote skylight? It was little Claude with his hammer and chisel.’ I also cut stone benches for the old women and children to sit on by their doors in the villages and I put on them the name of the head of the family; or also stone troughs to water the animals at the well. I carved on them an ox’s head with its huge eyes and horns, as if it had come out of the trough after drinking. “All that work brought me some fame in the hill country, Sir, and although only seventeen I earned my living by stone alone. But, of course, at the seasons of sowing and reaping, and of threshing the barley I went back up and did the hard work again with my mother and Denise.”

VII “Those were blessed days for me. I loved my mother so much and my poor blind brother. I also loved Denise very much. Who would not have loved her, Sir? She was the third child of the house, my mother’s obedient daughter. She did all the duties that a good servant or a strong maid would have done for wages. But no, there was no question of a wage. When my mother mentioned that to her sometimes, the young orphan would reply, ‘Isn’t your kindness a good wage? Who has given me shelter, but a mother and two brothers in the mountains? Isn’t a place at your fireside and a

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

57

trencher at your table a wage, not to mention the care that you have taken of me before I was old enough to be of use to you?’ And if my mother insisted, she would go out and cry with her head in her apron, behind the bush in the garden. Then my mother and Gratien would go and comfort her, saying, ‘All right, do what your heart tells you, Denise, and since you want to lose your youth and remain with poor people like us, then stay!’ And nothing more was said for a time.”

VIII “So, from the age of three or four she grew to be the fairest slip of a girl on the whole mountain, and when, three or four times a year, my mother would take her to see her cousins, the daughters of the poulterer in the village, all the girls and boys who watched her go by would say to each other, ‘What a pity that she is growing up in obscurity and never coming out among people, like the blue-eyed periwinkles under the bushes’. As for her, she took no notice of the complimentary remarks that they made down there. She did not have the vanity of rich girls from wealthy homes. She did not even know whether she was ugly or pretty. She walked by with her arms lowered at her sides, with her eyes on my mother’s footsteps, and when someone spoke to her she blushed cherry red for no reason and her skin shivered like still water when the wind blows over it. Only with my mother and Gratien was she was as wild and timid as the young hinds as they romp around in our clover in the morning and dart back into the trees at the sound of the dew falling from the branches. Even with me, Sir, she was not as relaxed as with the others, because she was not used to seeing me every day as she saw them. However, we were as brother and sister when we were together. Yet in truth there was a little difference in the sound of her voice when she spoke to me and in the way she looked at me. Her voice trembled a little more in the throat and she looked down a little more at her bare feet. You could say that with the others she felt herself to be a child, whereas in my presence she felt attractive.”

IX “Ah! She was happy with that, too, and became more and more so from month to month, though the water of the spring where she used to draw water was the only mirror in which she could see herself. She could be seen on Sunday mornings, when my mother sat at the doorstep in the rising sun and made her sit beside her to comb her long hair, glossy as the

58

Chapter Six

shells of the chestnuts when they are taken fresh from their prickly husks. She would rest her arms on my mother’s knees and lay her face back on her bare arms emerging from her coarse smock. Her face was quite hidden in her hair, spread out like filaments of maize on a ripe cob. It looked like a carelessly wound skein or a brown lamb’s fleece just washed at the waterfall. You could not tell where her mouth and forehead were. Then, if a breath of wind parted this fair covering, you first saw her rosy lips, then the slightly pale cheeks, then her wide blue eyes dazzled by the sun, looking straight and gentle into Mother’s face, just as a daughter, had she been such, would have looked at her. That made us laugh, my mother and I, and we murmured under our breath to each other, that poor Gratien could not join in our amusement or see what we were seeing at those moments. He would ask me, ‘What’s going on? What are mother and Denise doing to make you laugh?’ and I would tell him, ‘She is sitting down with her face hidden in her hands and her eyes covered with her hair and the wind has lifted her hair like a handful of dead leaves. The holly has dropped one of its red berries on her mouth’. That would amuse him, poor child. When Denise’s toilet was finished and she had put on her shoes and her black woollen dress, the three of us would walk through the barley and gather poppies, or instead sit down, our arms at our sides, under the chestnuts at the edge of the gorge where the water spilled over. For the blind child loved to hear the water gurgling and the chestnuts that were left on the branches dropping on the ground in the warm gusts of the spring breeze, or the blackbirds starting up and brushing his face with the draught from their wings as they whistled past.”

X “I used to find her just as comely on working days when she did not have her Sunday dress on or her summer shoes but her winter clogs, and her hair not smoothed and tied up behind her neck with her red velvet ribbon. Her smock of black sheep’s wool, woven by herself with the shuttle during the winter, bound round her figure with a horn clasp, fell in wide folds to her ankles; her shirt of hemp cloth with short sleeves to the elbows puffed over her chest and tied under her chin with two cords knotted at her breast; her hair hanging down, sometimes over one shoulder, sometimes over the other; her bare feet sometimes pink with cold, often powdered with sand and always washed in dew from the plants; her eyes lowered under the shadow of her long eyelashes; her face serious, but her lips always ready to open and show her pretty teeth, small, white and arranged like the first teeth of kids; sometimes the helve of a pick over her shoulder, sometimes

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

59

an earthenware pot on her head, carrying goats’ milk to the house; sometimes both arms stretched out and raised above her head to support a bundle of hay bigger than herself that she had just weeded out from the corn or from among the vines, yellow and blue flowers escaping from the bundles, falling over her forehead, hiding her but for the eyes; sometimes with one knee on the ground in front of the house, milking a ewe with one hand while with the other letting it lick salt to keep it occupied. In sum, whatever she did, you could not keep your eyes off her. But the time I used to love the best, Sir, was when we used to go up into the broom bushes in the mountain and cut faggots for the winter, which mother would load on to her back—as much as the trunk of a cherry tree with all its leaves and flowers on its twigs—to speed her on her way down to the house. When you saw the face of the young girl bent under the weight of a long branch that swept the ground for ten paces behind her as it rustled and shed its twigs, stripped of leaves, on her trail, you would have thought that a fairy had suddenly sprang up from the ground to carry away that carpet of grass on which she had slept that night. Or rather you would have thought that you had seen one of those beautiful peacocks that you have in your garden, with the face of a woman, trailing and unfolding a long green tail in the sun, with blue and yellow eyes shining on the grass behind.”

XI “She was also pretty in winter, when she lit the faggots in the winter evenings at the fireplace, kneeling before the big copper andiron, when the flame from the kindling suddenly brought colour to her pale face and her cheeks turned quite pink and transparent and you looked across her at the flame so that your eyes seemed warmed as by a coal. “What was so special about her, Sir, was not so much the gracefulness that illuminated her whole face and body, as her gentleness, her obedience, her affection for everyone and her timidity, which put her in voluntary submission to anyone who had a task to ask of her at home or in the field. We all of us loved her, Sir, and the animals loved her at least as much as we did. “You should have seen, when she opened the door in the morning to go to the spring, even the sparrows and swallows joyfully ruffling their feathers, some taking off from the roof, others from the branches of trees, some from their roosts, some from the dovecote, to fly around her as if they had not seen daybreak until they had seen her. And you should have seen the sheep and goats, the lambs and fowls come out of the shed when she lifted the latch, bury their heads and horns in her apron, their feet on

60

Chapter Six

her arms and shoulders, jostling for a stroke of her hand, a word from her lips, a lock of her hair to sniff or bite, before even thinking of spreading out into the heather. When they were faraway by themselves on the hilltop with the dog we would call them back in vain, for they would not come— but when they heard her voice they would all of them be seen leaving the brambles, the thyme or the flowering clover, running and bounding down from the hilltop like snowballs rolling to her feet.”

XII “However, the one who loved her most of all at that time and whom she appeared to love in return, because of his disability, was my brother Gratien. From the time when my mother had gathered Denise into our home, that poor child never left her, as if the good Lord had given him light through her. Denise, for her part, thanks to her tender heart, had attached herself to him for his need of her help and company. She was, though a child, like the mothers of several children who have a heart and eyes for the weakest and sickliest. That is another of God’s gifts, that He bestows a counterweight of good where he had put a weight of misfortune. My mother had said to Denise when she took her into the house, ‘You will care for your blind cousin, you will keep him amused at home, you will lead him to the fields with you, you will teach him the names of the animals, you will set him on the right path when he mistakes the fence, you will bring him back to the furrow when he wants to hoe or work the vines with us. You will find a handful of hemp for him in the barn, when he has finished his stripping’. Denise did what was asked of her from that point, when she was quite young, in obedience; then, when she was older, by habit. They were like a pair of twins who had never been separated from birth.”

XIII “Gratien could no longer do without her, and she without him. When she went out in the morning, half-dressed, to milk the ewes and the nanny goats he would follow her and sit on the stone bench, facing the rising sun, the bench I had cut out on Sundays for my amusement from the boulder of grey rock by the door. He would say, ‘Denise, what can you see in the sky and in the valley? Is there a mist over the meadows near Bourg-Villain? Are the windows of the château of Saint Point on the big balcony closed?’ Or even, ‘Can you see the gentleman walking along the paths with a book in his hand, as I used to see him when I could see clearly? Are the fat

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

61

white cows in the orchards on the slope behind the gardens? Are there pink or grey clouds over the sun? Is there blue smoke rising from the roofs of the houses and dispersing over the meadows, like flights of pigeons buffeted by the wind? Are the mallows and great mulleins in flower? Are there fruit in bunches on the morello cherry trees? Were the thorns in the bushes snowed on overnight? Do the hazels have catkins like green caterpillars? Have the hanging bunches of the lilac opened on its branches like ripe bunches of grapes? Have the lambs cut their teeth and have they begun to leave their mothers and crop the tender moss? Tell me if the last kid has black patches either side of his eyes like his dam had, in my time, and if he is beginning to peel off the bark from the willow sapling, with his horns just appearing?’”

XIV “And Denise did not tire of replying to all this with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘if’ and ‘but’, and always with good grace in her voice and her speech, and she would add in all the small details of the shapes of the objects, of the light in the sky, of the colours on the mountain, of the nature of the animals, that she thought would interest the child. She always took care of him in every way and employed him to do this or that in her tasks. Sometimes she had him hold the goats by their horns while she milked them; sometimes to hold the sheep on the ground while she sheared their wool, sometimes to hold the basket under the chestnut trees while she gathered the chestnuts brought down by the pole or the wind, sometimes to carry her mattock or her hoe or her rake as she went up into the fields in front of him, as she spun from her distaff and guided him by voice or by hand, so that he did not miss the plank bridge or the ford at the brook. She would put the edge of her pinafore in his hand, as a real mother does for her tiny children before they can walk by themselves. When there was digging to be done before sowing she would hand him a mattock and set him at the bottom of the field beside her, so that he knew he was making his contribution of work with the others. And when he went too far over to the right or to the left of his line, she would grasp him gently by the elbow and bring him into line with us. If that part of the field was poorly worked, if he left clods of grass or stones involuntarily, she would say nothing to upset him and the next day she would rework my brother’s task. Far from telling him that his work was useless, she would encourage him as if he had been a good worker. She would tell him, ‘Between your work and mine, Gratien, there is no difference’. And she was not lying, Sir, because she had in fact done both their shares.”

62

Chapter Six

XV “She always cared, whether in the fields or in the house, keeping within reach of him to help him in everything, slicing his bread for him, handing his mug to him, filling his glass, making a place for him on the bench. When she was alone with him you would have said, Sir, that she was devoting half of her life to him. There was not a lizard in its burrow or swallow in its nest, nor leaf on the vine at the well, a fly on the window pane, an insect on the leaf, a spark in the grate, that she did not tell him about it, so that time never hung on him, poor disabled boy, so that he thought to see clearly with his inner eyes what she caused him to see outside of himself by her voice. So he did not think of himself as blind while she was there—and she was there the whole day. His sight was not lost, but transposed from him to her. She was his eyes, his perception, seeing and living in another being than him, so precious, even more precious than it would have been in his own self. Indeed, Sir, I think that if you had said, ‘Gratien, would you like your sight back or have Denise taken away?’ He would have said, ‘Keep my eyes, I prefer to see through her than through myself. I can see quite well and I have her voice and company as well.’”

XVI “So you see how Denise’s voice made him go, come, turn round, get up, sit down, stoop, walk, follow or halt, as if an interior spring operated from the same impulse in him and in her. To be just, Sir, the habit of speaking kindly, gently and sympathetically to the disabled boy had been part of Denise’s voice from childhood, a note, a friendliness, a tenderness, a soft cadence and reverberation of the heart that I have never heard in another girl’s or woman’s voice in my life. It was like the tinkling of the bell at Saint Point, at the same time gay and sad, at the end of its peal at the baptism of children as its sound is lost as it rises to the head of the valley and sets the leaves of the ash trees trembling slightly, right up to this place. But the church bell does not have a heart within its music, within each word of Denise was, as it were, a sonorous heartbeat that lived with feeling in her voice. I think that the guardian angels spoken of in the village have speech like that when they speak to little children asleep in their cots, or to those poor people in agony during their last dreams at the gates of Paradise.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

63

XVII “Sometimes Gratien, after she had told him about everything around her and him, and he appeared to be reflecting about all the things she had described to him, would say to Denise, ‘But you, Denise, tell me how you are. I saw you well enough when I had my sight and you came hanging on your mother’s apron, bringing soup to your father as he sharpened the mattocks, the scythes and the billhooks in front of the houses. But I no longer know how you look and, apart from your voice and your gentle hand, I know nothing of your face now. I would like you to describe it to me. You see, it worries my soul not to see you as I listen to you. As for everything else, it’s fine. I see it through your eyes.’ “And so, to tease him and to thwart him, Denise would say, ‘I have red hair like the squirrel that we took from its drey in the fir sapling when I was a child. I have eyes no larger than the tiny flowers that peep from the grass under the bushes; they are grey and sombre like the water in the gorge when it is in the shade and the dead leaves begin to fall into it. The skin of my face is spotted with freckles and quite sunburned brown. I have this, then that, then again that’, so as to produce an ugly picture for the poor boy, as she covered her mouth with her hands so that he did not hear her muffled giggle. “But he would say, ‘But that is not possible, you are tricking me. Your voice and the skin of your hands do not match that description. You want to catch me out, you want to mock, Denise, and that is not right. You know that you must not play tricks with blind people, since they cannot see whether you speak true or false’. Then, turning to me when he heard the little girl’s laughter, ‘Tell me, Claude, what she looks like.’ Then I would say to him, ‘She has hair the colour of dead leaves when the wind makes them shimmer at the tips of the branches after the frosts of October. She has brilliant eyes like the panes of glass in the windows of the château when the morning sun shines on them and penetrates the rooms full of objects that reflect and you can hardly look at it without being dazzled. She has skin that is rosy and changeable like the summer apples that our uncle the poulterer takes to sell in the villages and we used to pick up in play at the doorway when one of his baskets tipped over. She is as tall as the door of the house and she has to lower her head when she goes in and out about her work. She has feet as smooth and white as the pebbles at our spring. She walks barefoot as proudly and gracefully as a lady crosses a church when you catch her passing by in her elegant shoes. Her neck is slender and round, and supple like a pigeon’s as it preens its wings on the rooftop. She has lips like the petals of a carnation and teeth like apple pips

64

Chapter Six

before they ripen. She has a gentle air, like our mother, and she is as devoted as our dog when it looks at us.’ “Then she would blush with shame or pleasure, Sir, without knowing why since, as for vanity, she had no more of that than a bird preening itself in the sun to make its feathers glossy—and she would hide her face in her hands to laugh. And Gratien would say to her, ‘Naughty! Why do you want to hoodwink me? It can’t be bashfulness, since I would love you just as much if you were so ugly that the lads of Saint Point would not look at you if you went to the fair and you would not leave Les Huttes to get married down there some day.’ “And she would become serious and we three would talk of something else.”

CHAPTER SEVEN I “In this way, we three reached the time when the poultry keeper’s children, those of the grinder and ourselves reached our majority, and a division was made of our common land on the mountain. This, as I told you, had never before been divided up. This caused my poor mother considerable concern. She would tell us, as she was beating the chestnuts, ‘Who knows if this will be ours in two years’ time? Even though it was my grandfather’s father who planted it and for two years it yielded no more than a mule load of chestnuts.’ She would ask as she sowed the field with corn or potatoes, ‘Who knows if it will be we who harvest them? Yet it has the sweat of your poor father and me since the day we were married! And if everyone took back a crop from this land that they had cultivated for forty summers and forty autumns, many of these clods would answer to those who turned them, as you return to your own bed.’ She would ask us as she sat on Sundays by the spring you see over there, in the watercress under the overhanging boulder, ‘Who knows if it will gush out next springtime beside our meadow or someone else’s? Yet it was your father who discovered it one day when he was digging a hole in the ground in order to plant an ash there. He built that pool to collect and keep the water so the cattle could go and drink there as they came back from the heath. And he dug these furrows where it issues out foaming and spreads over the whole orchard and runs away over there, among the osiers and rushes.’ “You could tell that the plan worried her all the time more and more as the year advanced, just as the shadow of that rock creeps forward unnoticed towards our feet.”

II “Gratien appeared to be more concerned about it than she was, but not on account of the chestnuts or the barley field or the spring—he only knew about those by name. A ray of the sun on his body and Denise’s footstep or voice nearby was for him, that brave boy, his whole life. What was the rest of the world to him? He loved his mother and me as well, and that was all. What a pity that this misfortune had come upon him at eight years old! He would have made a strong worker, a good labourer, or would have had a career like mine. He would have bent the red hot iron on the anvil to

66

Chapter Seven

make nails, metal felloes for the carts, teeth for the harrows or shiny ploughshares for the villages below. Or, again, he could have been a weaver, as he had the leanings of a girl in his character. He would have thrown the shuttle to and fro all week in the cellar under the house, and on Sundays he would have come down with his measure in his hand and his roll of grey cloth over his shoulder, to return to the housewives the yarn that they had spun. When you looked at him, Sir, you would not have said that the fire in his eyes had in any way been extinguished. They were blue, like Denise’s, only you did not read in them his profoundest thoughts— those you saw only in the corners of his mouth, which were mobile like his thoughts, which were a little sad though he smiled habitually. His features were fine, his skin white, his hands small and delicate, his body slim and slender and somewhat stooping, like that of a child whose eyes have been blindfolded in sport, who stretches his hands out in front of him to grope for support and find his way. In all that he was more comely and good looking than many of the boys on the mountains. Moreover, he spoke so softly and tremulously that you would have said that he was praying and always giving thanks. No question about that, Sir. He remained on the stone at the spring, on the bench at the door, on the root of the chestnut, wherever he had been told to wait, without ever budging. Many women would have been able to love him, believe me, as they would love a child who could not do without them.”

III “As for me, Sir, I had neither the same eyes, nor the same hair, nor the same character. You could say that when my mother carried us, she had dreamed of two different timbers, he of willow, me of pine. He was as supple as the former, I as straight and solid as the latter. I had black hair and eyes, a long face, pale complexion, downy cheeks, lips more often closed than open, strapping arms for my work, and an often dreamy look, as if I had lost something that the stars were keeping for me, as Denise used to tell me, gently teasing me. In fact I was thoughtful, though young. I did not like company, as my brother did. I was only content when on my own in my quarry or indeed with my mother, my brother, my little sister and Denise. Apart from them, when I saw someone passing by the side of my quarry I would start whistling so that he would not speak to me and when on the mountain a girl took a path coming towards me, I would take another. I was as unsociable as Denise. Down below, they used in jest to call me the boy kid and her the girl kid. That stayed with us for a long time. Yet Denise and I never spoke a word louder or softer than any other.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

67

I used always to leave her with my brother out of concern for his disability. When I went to the fields, the woods or the bracken, or to water the sheep, she always spoke to him, never to me. She would have been upset if he had been jealous of her attention or speech to someone else. She had a happy air and used to blush just a little when I came back on Saturday evenings and said ‘Good evening, Denise’ to her. But apart from that she came and went as usual at home, in the yard, around my brother. She had no word or expression for me, no more than for another. On the contrary, she trembled a little when she replied to me as if she were not as close or familiar towards me as towards the rest of the family. She avoided, as if naturally, being alone with me. In spite of that, Sir, there was the embarrassment of a pretty young girl beginning to fear to appear excessively bad tempered. Gratien used to say that she was much happier and pleasant on Sundays than on other days and he knew by her voice that it was the day when I used to come up again.”

IV “That is how we spent our time, Sir. Since St John’s day I had made a ‘find’, as we say, between the last little villages and Les Huttes, just below the path through the bracken. It was an old abandoned quarry for fine millstones, soft as butter and true as gold, echoing like a bell to the pickaxe. When I was not under the pressure of building work in the villages, I would return to my quarry. I always dug there, always with good result, to find better veins of stones. I rolled the rubble into the bottom of the ravine below, so that after a couple of years I had finished emptying the old quarry of the rubbish that might well have accumulated since the time of the people called the Romans. Then I had excavated below with crowbar and gunpowder. It was work for giants. There were layers like stairs rising two toises per tread, vaults, caves where I wedged myself in like a coalminer to get at finer grained stone, walls of rocks piled up and abandoned like town walls. The floor of the quarry into which I rolled my stones to cut them was so deep that where you looked down into it from the bracken that hung over the edges, if shepherds were to throw down a pebble it would take a moment before the echo came back. My brother, my little sister, my mother and Denise would occasionally come to watch me at work. They raised their hands and exclaimed with astonishment to see what ravages one man alone, with patience and his crowbar, had made in the bones of the mountain. Also, when the path was slippery for my brother’s feet. Sometimes Denise would come alone to bring me my bread and milk in a basket for my day’s food. But she never

68

Chapter Seven

lingered, Sir. She would call to me down there with a voice quavering with fear and would escape with her hands covering her eyes as if fearful of seeing me as I clambered down from the heights.”

V “It was there, Sir, that I was happiest, because nobody apart from Denise came to interrupt my work by watching me and questioning me, as they did here and there in the villages. My father’s job contented me all the more because it had not been a richer or more academic profession. I told myself, ‘You are doing what your father did and, perhaps with time, you will do it as well as he did. He would be pleased if he came back to see you at work. Also, this is not a demanding job, like others. You can leave it and take it up again as you wish. It does not prevent you from going up on a Saturday to watch your mother, Denise and the animals or to cart the hay or to scythe the corn or to dig the mountain or beat the trees with them. Then, even if you do not sell your grindstones to the grinders at a high price, or to the blacksmiths or the reapers, you are nevertheless earning your daily bread and that of your brother and little sister at home, who cannot work.’ These thoughts encouraged me. There was no longer any bedrock hard enough to resist me.”

VI “Furthermore, to be frank, I loved that way of life. I loved the depths of the quarries, the bosom of the mountain, the hidden entrails of the earth, just as those sailors I met at Marseilles loved the trough in the waves, the sea bed, the spray on the reefs; as the shepherds love the mountain tops, as the woodcutters love to plunge their axe, bleeding with sap, into the split trunk of old oaks or chestnuts. God gives to each their taste in life so that they may live their lives contented. What has kept me in mine is that it is a solitary life. You can whistle, sing, think, dream unhindered, and pray to the good Lord. Work goes on in your hands, while your heart and soul go on their own way, as they will. That is the advantage of the life of a stonemason.”

VII “Moreover, it is a pleasant way of life for the ear, Sir. When I kneel before a well-quarried stone, borne on the two fir rollers that enable me to move it as I want; when, in a corner of the quarry, deep in the summer

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

69

shade, I take off my jacket and roll up my shirtsleeves; when I take up the chisel in my left hand, the hammer in my right hand; when I begin cutting at my groove or rounding off my moulding with sharp, even blows like water falling drop by drop from the spring above into the basin, then a continuous melody issues from my stone, if it is free standing. It lulls the heart and head as gently as distant village bells. You could say that my hammer is the tongue and my stone the brass sides of the bell. You cannot imagine how that sound encourages my work along. Soldiers need a drum beat to encourage their marching. Sailors need to sing to work up strength to hoist the anchor or pull at the ropes. We others, Sir, do not need that; the sound of the hammer blows makes all the music for us. Ah! It is a beautiful sound, mark you, the ring of a marble tile, of granite, of sandstone or of a soft stone trough, gouged out to receive water and polished with a bush hammer. It seems that you expect to hear the tread of godly men as their footsteps echo in the sounding vaults of a church, or the bubbling of running water as it foams into the trough for the flocks.”

VIII “But you will tell me that I am deluding myself. I don’t deny it. It is true that, whether for a short or long time, time is only time. When it has passed, it is as if it has never been. Yet delusion though it may be, you experience a certain satisfaction when you say to yourself, ‘What I am doing will outlast me’. Those who write books think that they will be studied by eyes that will not see light until perhaps a thousand, thousand years from when you speak now. The carpenters who make cupboards and cabinets are glad to tell themselves, ‘If it is well waxed and cared for, and kept dry, it will last and bear the imprint of my hand for generation after generation of newlyweds’. Those who plant a chestnut tree or an oak say to themselves, ‘The little nuts or acorns in the palm of my hand that I am sowing contain hidden inside much more life and time than all the men who have been born, or will be born, for five or six centuries across this vast country. They will send down their roots into the earth, they will bore through the rock to draw nourishment, they will give leaves and shade over the place I choose for them after the shadow of my own body, and the shadow of twenty or thirty successive men descended from me, will have been swept from the earth’s surface like the leaves at their feet are swept away by the November wind’. But what is that, in comparison to the length of time the stonemason reckons for as he lifts and brings down his mallet on his chisel? He tells himself, ‘This blow from my bush hammer will remain scored in the granite until the mountain itself dissolves in the

70

Chapter Seven

fire of the last day of the Earth. This grindstone that I cut or raise in relief with my chisel, this shape I decide to give to the stone, will not wear out or disappear or ever be obliterated until the world is no longer. The imprint of my will and mind; that is eternity. Those yet to be born in a thousand years’ time, when they see this cornice, this rib, this frame, this plinth, this column, this basin beneath the spring, into which the water bubbles endlessly, will say to themselves, “Who made that?”’ God Himself, when He recalls this earth to Himself and takes it back into His own hands at the end of time, will examine it and say, when he sees these excavations of the quarry in His mountains and the marks of the tool on these broken stones, ‘An insect has gnawed my ground, has touched and modified my design.’ Have you thought of that, Sir? And in some way will not honour be given to the stonemason in his profession? At the last, this applies to things that are not ephemeral. Rust wears out the iron of the blacksmith, but granite or red porphyry—of which you see bits over there in the stones from the spring—nothing will. We are told that in a country called Egypt there are piles of hewn stones as high as mountains, without anyone knowing why or by whom those stones were raised in such tiers, one upon another, nor at what incalculable period of time. Peoples, kings, priests, mysteries, histories, bones themselves, all have disappeared from our sort of memory, everything has flowed away with the waters of a river called the Nile, all has flowed away with that sand we call the Desert. Indeed, Sir, a soldier who returned here from Egypt and told me about the Pyramids said that quarries had been found as wide as the sea bed from which the stones of that size had been taken, which can still be seen in the workshops only half-sawn by the Egyptians’ saws or those of the giants of those times. And he had even seen a brick showing the imprints of the foot and hand of one of the workmen building and fashioning these monuments. That shows the passage of time, doesn’t it? Are there many kings and queens who have left in the world a single trace of themselves so much of themselves and so lasting as that of that poor labourer? “So, what I tell myself sometimes is, ‘Are you leaving anything such as that on your stone?’ That consoles a man for his frailty, does it not? Now that makes you think how much a small fragment of stone cut off under my hammer will last for so many centuries after my own dust. But it also makes you think that the spirit of humankind, which is greater than all that and survives all that, is quite a different work of the good Lord! This leads to thanking Him, glorifying Him and blessing Him in the short and long time, in smallness, in greatness. I think about all these things as I prepare my grindstones. Furthermore, solitude makes for thoughtfulness. Man alone seeks the company of God. When I was over there, buried in

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

71

the fold of the mountain, resting for a moment in the sun in the afternoon with my little dog lying on my jacket, my heart would rise up as if on wings. I would look up at the blue of the sky above the firs where the eagles circle and I would say within me to the good Lord, ‘Do you hear the prayer of the man rising up to you from the fold of the hill; you, O Lord, who hears the noise of the fly’s wings and the heartbeats of these midges drenched in a ray of your sun?’ “Then I used to think of Les Huttes, of my mother, my brother, Denise, in fact everything. I was happy and yet also I sometimes became sad, and on getting back home my mother would ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ I would reply to her, ‘I don’t know’. And truly I didn’t know, then. It was like a shadow on my heart that prevented it from blooming in its springtime.”

IX “It used to seem to me that Denise had something against me. When I entered the house, she would go out to the spring or to the cowshed. When I spoke to her nicely, she would reply with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, as if she were impatient to escape from a conversation with me. When on Sundays I joked with her and with my brother, she did not laugh with good grace, or rather she would laugh with her lips in a forced manner. But she did not laugh with her eyes. She put nothing of her own feelings into her expression. She would move a few steps away, apparently to go and gather hazel nuts or pick periwinkles along the gorge. By contrast, when it was only my brother, my little sister and her together I used to hear them playing and laughing as before. One day, when I asked why she was formal and silent with me and whether I had offended her in some way in which I was not aware, she denied it and said she loved me well, like the others, and that I was imagining things. She then turned away from me, but without rancour. She left us, my brother and I, and climbed up to the hayloft as if she was going to throw down hay to the goats. She stayed there all evening and, when she came down again, her eyes were somewhat red and she furtively gave her food to the hens under the table instead of eating happily with us as on other days.”

X “I said to my mother next morning, ‘Denise dislikes me: I must leave home and do my tour of France.’ My mother started to laugh and told me, ‘Claude, you are very simple for nineteen years old. The poor girl does not know herself what is happening, but I observe her from outside the

72

Chapter Seven

situation. She wishes you ill, in order to wish you well too much! When girls of her age laugh with the boys, it is a bad sign for marriage, you see, but when they run away it is a sign that they are looking for the best way to cope.’ “‘Oh, no!’ I replied to my mother, ‘Denise is not like that.’ “‘Well! She told me that you yourself seem to intend leaving tomorrow on your tour of France. Tell her and see if this pleases her or distresses her.’ “‘Well, I will not do any such thing, and in any case I will go’, I replied and went away sadly to sit at the edge of the well.”

XI “That evening, after supper, I announced to my mother, my brother and my little sister in front of Denise, ‘I want to be a good journeyman worker. Tomorrow, before daybreak, I leave for my tour of France’. My brother and sister were quite upset. My mother presented me, in front of them, with the stick encrusted with copper-headed nails in its leather sleeve, and my father’s very own apron and tools. I packed my bag in front of them. When Denise saw me oiling the leather of my shoes she went to her room upstairs and did not return. Everyone was sad apart from my mother, who truly doubted that I would go far.”

XII “Nevertheless, I left the following day as I had told them and, as I crossed the yard under Denise’s shutter, I shouted to her, ‘Goodbye, Denise’, but no reply came. I said to myself, “I must surely have offended her for her to let me leave in this way without even wishing me bon voyage. My footsteps kept me rooted to the ground under her window as if the nails of my shoes had penetrated the rock. At length I went down the path slowly, not looking back, my legs trembling under me as if under a drunken man. Alas! I had in fact drunk only tears throughout the night. My eyes were misty: I groped my way, not feeling the ground under me. It was like night. Yet the last little stars, fleeing from the daylight like maidens bathing, submerging themselves in the water for fear of being seen, were disappearing behind the firs on the mountains, and the sun, not yet visible, was watching us already from behind Mont Blanc.” “Yet, think for a moment what a man is, Sir. Shivering and sweating as I was, I began to whistle a dance tune, to keep my spirits up and to tell myself, ‘You are braver than your misery and you defy everything’. If I

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

73

had met anyone, they would have said, ‘There is a happy lad going to his wedding’. But the good Lord would have seen quite differently if He had opened my poor heart.”

XIII “But a noise I heard a few feet from my path in the dead leaves cut my whistling short, Sir. Look, over there, just at the place where you crossed this morning, where all the mountain paths meet like streams into a lake issuing from the domain of Les Huttes to cross the wide gorge opposite them. There, where the great trunk of a rotted chestnut tree lying across the gorge from one side to the other served as a bridge for us to go from home, there I saw something standing at the foot of a tree and barring my way over the bridge. ‘Look,’ I said to myself, ‘here is someone who gets up early to lead the goats into the dew, or maybe a beggar who found the barn doors closed and slept under the trees’. But what should I find as I approached? I saw that it was neither: it was Denise, who was herding her kids before daylight to help the creatures to tell the difference between a bramble and a wild vine, or between clover and hemlock. I was very happy to see her once again despite her hardness of heart towards me, as I thought. So, Sir, you may think what you will, but I would have given I don’t know what, not to find myself alone with her. My legs were shaking in such a way that I could neither go forwards nor backwards. If there had been another way to cross the gorge, to right or left, I would surely have turned aside so as not to touch her dress as I passed and not to have heard her voice once more, but there was no other way. I had to take courage and walk on as if I had heard nothing and seen nothing, to the foot of the plank.”

XIV “When I was quite near I lifted my eyes, which were lowered, towards the very tips of my shoes. I saw Denise standing right in front of me at the end of the wooden bridge, barring the way with her body. I stopped six paces from her without knowing what this meant, for it was not her custom to herd her animals so far or so early. My heart beat under my ribs, like a spring under a stone when the snows melt. “But I had no sooner lifted my eyes than I felt her breath against me and saw the shadow of her body cast by the sun at my feet. Then my feelings changed and my anger melted into compassion.”

74

Chapter Seven

XV “You would hardly have believed that she had spent from the evening to the morning of that night in the cold of the mountain and how it had affected her. Her feet were wet and shivering in the grass, which crackled with white frost. Her black woollen dress was crumpled by the dew and clung to her. Her hair was flattened to one side of her head, like someone who had slept with their head on their arm, and on the other side it had escaped from her headdress of black lace and was stuck with dead leaves and strands of yellow moss, like a lamb that had wandered through brambles. The surrounds of her eyes were black and blue as if she had been attacked by the horns of one of her goats. As she lowered her eyelids a drop hung from each lash. ‘Good Lord’, I said to myself, ‘is that Denise?’ My heart broke. I tried to open my lips to say hello and goodbye at least without bitterness, but I could not. My chest clamped shut. I stood there, unable to turn to go forwards or backwards and was wordless, like a ghost that had emerged from the wood.”

XVI “But Denise made a movement with both arms, up to her neck to take from it the black velvet ribbon she usually wore on Sundays. On it, at her throat, hung a little gilded brass crucifix that she had had from her mother when she died. She held the crucifix in both hands and held it out to me, without raising her head. “Since you are leaving Les Huttes, Claude”, she told me with a voice that faltered on her pale lips, “give me the pleasure of carrying this little present I give you, for love of me, and think of me sometimes when you find it again at the bottom of your sack as you pack to come and go. You don’t love me like the others at home. I have known this for a long time, Claude, but that is fine. I do not want it that way, but for all that I would wish you to go well with what I own that is most precious to me. I have still in my father’s leather purse a few small coins, with his silver cup for tasting wine at the presses. Take it”, she said as she slipped the leather purse with her hands into my jacket pocket with the neckband and the crucifix. “Please Claude, take that as well, for the love of God.’”

XVII “I was so thrown to hear that she was using tu to me for the first time in our lives and, since she had shown me so much aloofness for more than

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

75

three months, so amazed at her showing me such familiarity at the last moment that I did not know what to think or to do, Sir. I put my hand into my jacket pocket to refuse the purse and to return it to her. My fingers met hers. That made my whole body cold and my face warm, so that I could not look any more and trembled as she disentangled my fingers from hers, forcing me to put back in my jacket pocket the presents she was compelling me to take, so that the crucifix, the neckband and the leather purse fell into the tall grass between us. “Without thinking why, we both took the same action and knelt down, facing each other, to look for them and gather them up, and our heads met without meaning to do so. One of her tears fell on the back of my hand like a warm drop of summer rain in the grass. I knew for certain that it was not the dew. I said to myself, completely upset, ‘Do people cry so warmly for someone they are glad to see leave home?’ That made me lift my eyes to hers as we rose. Just then she was holding the purse and the crucifix by the tips of her fingers to pass them over to me, so she lifted her eyes to mine to implore me with all her heart to take them again. You would have thought them two large periwinkle flowers at the spring on which she had accidentally dropped water as she had lifted a full pitcher. She was looking at me so meekly through the rain of her tears, there was such a prayer in her look upwards to the skies or to me, that I began to weep as well, without knowing why, so that we stayed there a full moment facing each other, sobbing like fools, our hands clasped around the purse and the crucifix, saying nothing, as if we were two tree trunks.”

XVIII “Finally, I took courage and said to her, not daring to use the tu to her as I used to, ‘Denise, are you burdening me by giving me everything you own and weeping because I am going to take my journey round France?’ “‘Of course’, she exclaimed, ‘but I thought that it was you, Claude, who wanted this from me, as you have not been speaking as nicely to me as you used and finding me an intruder at home. If I have been avoiding you, it was because I thought my presence annoyed you.’ “‘As for me, I was going away because I thought you disliked me; but I now see clearly that it was a mistaken idea, since my first step out of here has made you get up so early and dampened your eyes. Let us say no more, Denise,’ I said to her, as I put the ribbon around her neck with shaking hands. ‘I will go back up and hang my sack on the nail by the chimney.’

76

Chapter Seven

“She leapt up on both feet and clapped her hands together, smiling with her lips while still weeping with her eyes. Lord! How happy we were to understand each other. We began to climb up to the hut, chatting about all sorts of things. My mother, who had suspected the whole outcome, emerged from behind the bush where she had hidden with her little girl. “Your tour of France is over then, Claude” she said to me. ‘My dear child. So much the better. What would you look for better at the ends of France? Since you love each other, would it not be best to say so at once? You could get engaged before haymaking.’ At these words, Denise and I blushed. Did we love each other then, since we said this without words, just by the amazed look on our faces?” “‘Oh, yes, my children,’ said mother, as if she had heard what we had not spoken, ‘you have loved each other since the apple tree came into blossom. I knew it well when I saw you keeping away from each other, she going to the side of the well and you going down by the sage, both of you like lost animals. When you are light hearted you don’t carry it in both hands like that. I knew that some time you would end up coming together without looking for each other, and that all byways lead to the main road. But I did not want to say anything for fear of causing the fruit to fall before it was ripe and speaking before the heart spoke. Now you must be engaged and I will happy about it, strange to say, since that will end all this bother with relatives and all the division of the cottages for which the children of the poulterer are asking. The two properties will be just one, just as you will form one household. Isn’t that so, Claude? Isn’t that so, Denise?’ “We said nothing and only dared raise our eyes to look at each other. But we went on walking, one after the other, to the cottage. Mother had spoken truly; we loved each other without knowing it.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I “‘Now’, my mother added, ‘you may speak for yourself’. ‘Speaking for yourself’, in our idiom, means to court openly before becoming engaged… I hung my sack on the nail. I took up my tools again and went down the mountain to work in the quarry, but I spoiled many stones that day. The hammer was going as my head was singing. I was seeing Denise’s face like a rainbow through the dust that my chisel sent flying. I was ever looking to see if the sun was setting to earn the right to go up and see her at Les Huttes. It seemed to me as if the good Lord had nailed it in the middle of the sky and it would never sink down on the side where the château lay.”

II “When I returned to the cottage in the evening, my mother had told my brother, Gratien, sitting with my little sister, Annette, that she would see Denise and I engaged in five weeks’ time, so that we could bring together the rest of the gorse field, the stone enclosure and the tall chestnuts, half the crop of which belonged to the poultry keeper and half to us since they overhung his land and ours, involving discussions between the two branches of the family. ‘But then, my dear child,’ mother went on, ‘it is also for your sake that I want this engagement for, once Denise has married into the household, she will not risk being asked for, as she has already by those boys down there, and leaving Les Huttes. For, when I am dead and Denise is gone for good, what would happen to you? Who would take your hand along the paths?’ “This news made my brother and sister very happy. My brother said, ‘What a blessing that Denise will not leave home anymore! I am now sure of having my sun in her eyes.’ We discussed the engagement happily all the evening as we ate our soup. All was contentment at Les Huttes. Denise had a care for everything; she came, she went, she had never been so attentive, cutting up bread for my poor brother and amusing Annette. She called to the hens in the yard and to the pigeons on the roof with such a voice that I had never heard before. It was proposed that we should

78

Chapter Eight

become engaged on the day after Pentecost. My mother went down to the valley to invite the relatives and to speak to the lawyer, and to arrange for the bell-ringer to ring a peal on that morning.”

III “From that time we began to ‘talk to each other’, as we say, Denise and I. That is to say, Sir, that when she was milking the beasts I would accompany her to the shed and hold the goat by the horns whilst she knelt in the dry leaves of litter, and she would raise her face to me and smile teasingly. I would carry the bundles of hay or bracken on my shoulders when she came back from the field or the verges in the evening or at midday. She would go empty-handed, or occupy herself eating the sloes left on the bushes by the winter birds, or gathering white clover or poppies. “On Sundays or holidays she more frequently put on her laced dress and shoes, and we went down by ourselves to the shop by the church where we would buy sometimes a plate, sometimes an iron, sometimes a knife, sometimes a packet of pins, sometimes a length of black lace, against the time when we would be married. On the way we would vie with each other as to who ran fastest down the slopes of smooth grass on the mountain side, who would leap best over the furrows made to irrigate the meadows, who would discover the shiniest pebble in the running water, the prettiest flower on the moss, the most charming nest in the bushes. Sometimes we held hands at our fingertips and walked along, saying nothing, like two children returning to school. That’s what is called ‘talking to each other’, as I said, in our way of speaking.”

IV “More frequently we sat, away from each other, on the rocks tinged golden by the warm moss, beside the deep gorge. There we listened to the water murmuring below over the stones, alas, as it still murmurs now, Sir. That set us dreaming, as Denise told my mother. The sun high in mid-sky, the night sombre below our feet in the gorge: the edge of the ravine over which the branches bent above us, as if they wanted to peer below—as if the leaves had eyes. The blackbirds left their nests with a noise that would startle children, the chaffinches were warbling in the cherry trees or the larks singing in the blue sky. The lizards were looking at us from the rocks. The sound of our breathing could be gently heard when the birds were silent and made us aware that we were a couple. That, Sir, is how we

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

79

spent most of our time, those lovely summer times, in the weeks of ‘talking to each other’. We would go back when the shadows lengthened, just about as slowly as the shadows on the surface of the mountain. We had not been walking, Sir; we had rested the whole evening, yet we seemed unable to get up from the rocks and we would drag our feet as slowly and in as tired a way as if we had been ploughing or hoeing all day long in the sun.”

V “To be honest, I was not the same workman in my stone yard as I had been before. I went down later, I returned sooner, and I did my work without enthusiasm. I was bored now with being alone; I, who previously had so much enjoyed seeing nothing move around me but my shadow. For her part, Denise was not quite the same in the fields, in the cowshed, in the house. She took longer to comb her hair at her window in front of the mirror I had bought for her. She washed her feet much more often, and her hands and face, in the bowl of the well when the dust from the hay or the barley in the barn had settled on her even a little bit. Her rough hempen shifts were more carefully folded down the front of her figure now I had given her the iron. Sometimes she even allowed herself to set white bramble flowers in her hair. ‘Oh, if you could only see how beautiful she is, with her wild flowers’, Annette exclaimed to her poor blind brother, and would tell him of her cousin’s beauty and how the bramble flowers shone like stars in Denise’s hair, and how the drooping leaves cast little shadows on her cheeks.”

VI “It seemed that Denise was finding the days long at home, just as I was finding them long at the quarry. Now, before she heard the stroke of the noontide bell in Saint Point, she would pick up her basket of woven laths of beech, lined with a hempen cloth, and bring me my bread, my milk, my butter and my salt by herself, alone, to the quarry. She was no longer shy to meet me or even to stay chatting with me at the quarry floor or below ground. But I did not want her to come down, for fear that she would cut her pretty feet on the shards from my workings. As I saw her coming I would climb up to the edge, take the basket and go and sit down and eat my food at the top of the quarry under the big pine tree whose roots stretched along the cliff face, like snakes attached by their heads to the branches, letting their tails wave out. She would lay out the coarse cloth on

80

Chapter Eight

the grass and remain standing, with her back against the tree, to watch me eating and drinking. I would have preferred to say to her, ‘Sit down, then, Denise and eat something with me’, but she would laugh and say, ‘No, it was right when we were not “talking to each other” and I was only your cousin. But now that I am your fiancée and you will soon be my lord, I must serve you, not sit down and eat in front of you.’ “It is the local custom, Sir. I would say nothing, but get my own back by dropping a piece of bread on the ground so as to touch with my lips, as if by accident, the ends of her feet. She pulled them back, blushing. That is how we spent our time, Sir.”

VII “Alas, Sir, we were so happy that we only thought of ourselves. Denise did not notice during these absences from the house and our long walks through the rocks or reveries beside the gorge that poor Gratien, who up to then had not left her apron-strings, stayed all alone with Annette or the little dog. He remained where he had been put, either on a rock in the sun in the yard, or on the grass under the service tree, not daring to come where we were, because he could well see without our telling him that we preferred to be two rather than three, and also because we spoke more softly when he was beside us. Of course, we always spoke friendly words to him when we went away and when we returned, and he would reply in a gentle and friendly manner. But, all the same, he could perceive that he was superfluous to Denise.”

VIII “He talked to Annette as much as he could and tried at least to keep her near him, and it was from her that we heard what he used to say. ‘Stay with me,’ he would say to her, ‘little Annette. You can see that Denise does not need you or me now. She is not as she used to be; you and I, we are no longer good enough for her. She must always be at the quarry, always by the hazel trees, always at the stream with Claude. That is as it should be, you see. They are betrothed; they are going to be married, they have many more concerns than thinking about us others.’” “And Gratien would turn his face away from the little girl lest she should see the great tears that rolled from his sightless eyes down his cheeks. The little girl herself became quite sad at her friend Gratien’s sadness. But she, too, had to leave him to lead the goats into the bracken, as Denise no longer had the time or inclination to go up there as usual.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

81

What would people say if they saw a grown-up, pretty girl like her, ready to be engaged, herding the flocks all day, seated on a rock spinning her distaff? That would be all right if she was a child or when she became old. The world, for her, was me. She would have been humiliated in my eyes. She did only farm work since she believed herself to be already her cousin’s wife. She was so fully attached that, without meaning to, she forgot her work. But also, Sir, I must admit my eyes saw only Denise, as did my heart, as did my dreams in the night, during my work in the day, either within or around me. It seemed to me that the whole world, heaven and earth, was in me with her, and that beyond her and me was no life. But it was not good, Sir, to relate in that way, everything else being as nothing, apart from us two, and to feel our good fortune so that we almost felt bad towards others; and how the good Lord punished me for it! “The nearer our engagement approached, the less we left each other.”

IX “Sometimes we stayed for a long time after nightfall, conversing softly under the service tree near the house or on the edge of the spring after I had drawn her bucket of water from the well. The fire lit by my mother in the hearth would be flickering through the window panes or the cracks around the door before we could at last decide to go back. Annette had to call us three or four times to come in to supper. I leave you to imagine how disturbed Gratien was, with his feet on the andirons, head in hands, hearing only the crackling of thorns in the fireplace and the clicking of his mother’s clogs across the house. Where was the soft voice and friendly laugh of his beloved Denise? All was dark for him since his accident, Sir; but since my good fortune all had become silent around the poor lad. He was heartbroken and we did not suspect it. Because we were so happy, should not the whole world be so? What a thought, wasn’t it? So it is, with happy hearts! “One Sunday evening we were later than usual, for it was the last Sunday before we were to become engaged and we were telling each other, ‘Eight days to go, Denise!’, ‘One more week, Claude!’ We felt so happy about this blessed event, so near and getting nearer, so that nothing could prevent it now, so that we were hardly able to walk back to the cottage. It was warm, as if the wind had been blowing from the door of a hot oven lit with sweet-smelling kindling. Over the stars were little clouds like flocks of sheep. We looked at each other without speaking. We had gone quite high up without noticing it, far above that rock to the place where the sheer-sided ravine carves out a bowl between the perpendicular

82

Chapter Eight

red sand walls, where we had set a hedge of dry thorns between the tree trunks to prevent the animals from falling in. Denise stood with her back against the white bole of a beech and I was six paces away from her with my arms clasped round the trunk of a young chestnut, my head resting on its bark. What we were thinking about, the wind may know, in our tranquility, facing our land and leaning against our trees, looking up at the stars, able to hear the beating of our full hearts against the wood. What we were talking about, a word every quarter of an hour, only the leaves can say. What I do know is that we were not thinking of going home. Can you tell the passing of time, Sir, when your heart has stopped beating and no longer keeps track of any incident or longing?”

X “So, we had no idea of the time. But it was evidently almost midnight and when they did not see us coming home and it was so late, my mother and Gratien were anxious. As for us, we were so at peace that we were only aware of the rustling of the leaves. Suddenly, from the opposite side we heard the tiny sound of stick striking the leaves, as if to put to flight the birds from their nests, then the sound of footsteps in the grass, then a loud cry and something or someone falling like a stone into the water, sixty feet away under the trees. Then silence, Sir!”

XI “Denise threw herself towards me, giving a little cry of fear. The thought came to her at once, “It was our poor blind boy”. I ran in front of her to find six feet away the entry to the ledge my father had made at some time, so my mother could safely climb down into the gorge to dip the lambs. Denise followed me, holding my jacket with one hand while gripping the moss and ivy on the slope with the other. We heard the noise of arms thrashing convulsively in shallow water and a stifled moaning, as if by someone unable to breathe. “‘Gratien, dear Gratien, is it you?’ Denise shouted to him. I had hold of him in my arms already, my poor half-dead brother. It was he. “We laid him down at the edge. He regained consciousness and speech, but can you believe that, instead of thanking God and us, he whispered, not thinking anybody could hear him, ‘What a nuisance!’ You could not tell whether he was speaking of his misfortune at falling in or having to be pulled out. Later, this gave me a suspicion that he had meant to destroy himself, not being able to endure his isolation, although perhaps he had

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

83

fallen while looking for us and mistook one tree for another. When I talked about it to my mother the day after next she put a finger to her lips and said to me, ‘Never think that, Claude. Don’t insult the good Lord by even thinking of it.’”

XII “He had not broken any of his limbs, Sir, had poor Gratien. But he was so stunned and bruised all over his body by his fall to the bottom of the ravine that he could not move at all to help himself up out of the water and climb up the steep sides of the ledge. I shouldered him, as I would a boulder from my quarry, while Denise held up his head behind me. In this way we climbed up to the trees at the edge. We brought him home unconscious and shivering, and laid him in the stable between two sheep to keep him warm with their bodies and their breath. My mother, Annette and Denise shouted out as if the wolf had taken the lambs. All was chaos and confusion in the hut. In the end, the warmth of the hut and the hugs of the women brought Gratien completely back to life. He said that when he saw that his mother was anxious at our prolonged absence, he had gone along the gorge to find us and, as he did so, had mistaken the path. He missed the edge and tumbled down the cliff. “Nevertheless, if he had done so he doubtless would have whistled or shouted so as to be heard by Denise and me from far off in the night. But we had heard no shout before the noise of his fall. So he had not shouted. That always increased the suspicion that the poor lad had thrown himself over the cliff on purpose, since he could not endure the loneliness to which my marriage to Denise was going to condemn him.”

XIII “For her part, Denise seemed to have the same suspicion, so next morning at daybreak, when we visited the blind boy lying feverish in the shed, she reddened then went pale when she heard my voice. She did not look at me and my presence seemed like a stab in the chest to her. When I tried to get closer to her as we crossed the yard, she said very softly, ‘Ah, Claude, what a disaster! To think that I am the cause, by having too much happiness by being with you always and having left your brother to his unhappiness and misery. Your mother has reproached me for it all night, while Gratien was burning with fever and delirious in the shed and we were giving him water. “Denise!” he was shouting, “it is she who is killing me. Why has she lighted up my path with her own hand all my life and

84

Chapter Eight

then abandoned me to my night on the mountains? What will become of me when my mother is dead and Denise will be tied up all day with her housework and with her children? Oh! Why did they bring me up out of the gorge? Let them leave me, let them leave me, mother. What is the use of carrying me to the sunlight, since I must never see daylight again, either through the sun or through these eyes?” And when your mother heard that she kept saying, “Wretch, you have done all this. Did you have to be glued to your fiancé’s coattails or in his shadow all day, and not think of the blind boy, as though he did not exist? Did God and I entrust him to you for that?” She is right, Claude, we are indeed guilty of thinking, you of me and I of you, so we thought of nobody else. We must be punished, or God will punish us.’”

XIV “When she said that, a shiver of fear gripped my heart and I made a sign for Denise to stop, as if the fear of it made me guess what she wanted to tell me. I suddenly saw my dilemma, though I dared not admit it. I shivered as I saw it and shut my eyes and my heart as if I had come to the brink of an abyss and, looking down to the bottom, was drawing back in fear. “We looked at each other, Denise and I, wringing our hands and weeping. Then we returned to the shed. “Gratien was still weak and feverish, but daylight and the fresh morning air had revived him a little. He was not crying anymore and seemed to be looking at us with his blind eyes, which were so tender and full of tears as to excite pity. Denise went up to him, took his hand and spoke so gently to him that poor Gratien began to smile and grow calmer. Then I, a little reassured by his feeling better, left him to go to my work. “I went down to the quarry and began to work hard to dispel my sadness, but would stop in the midst of my work, troubled by the sad thoughts that I was turning over within me. To renounce Denise sent me into despair. I would say to myself, ‘That is impossible. Gratien will get better: it is the fever talking in him; that will cease when it leaves him. Then, when he is better, we will not leave him anymore, Denise and I. She will be with him when I am at work and on Sundays we will keep him company.’ So I tried, Sir, to bring a little consolation to my spirit. He was in my thoughts day and night. Sometimes discouragement was uppermost, sometimes hope, and, in spite of everything, I went back up to Les Huttes a little comforted.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

85

“But Gratien’s state dispelled my hopes. He had visibly shrunk and the whole of his slight body was wasting away and Denise’s care was doing nothing for him. I saw clearly that, despite my longings, it was not his body that was ill but that his sickness was particularly in his heart. “The fever became worse. It returned and gripped him more strongly every night and threw him into delirium. Gratien then began to call to Denise, always Denise. As for me, I would weep before the poor blind boy with the whole family and would tell myself so sadly, ‘We must make a sacrifice for him’. “I remained for two months in conflict between my disappointment and my duty, resigned to it one day, depressed the next, unable to decide to break off with Denise. My mother tried to implore me every day. I assented for a time, softened by her tears and Gratien’s illness, then I resisted. I prayed to the good Lord in vain: nothing happened. I was no longer working although in the quarry, my hands limp and my eyes sadly fixed on Les Huttes. “I had spent several days in this way when, one evening as I went up, I heard the bell of Saint Point ringing, which awoke my heart to thoughts of the good Lord. I was so depressed by my thoughts of the day that I was seized with devotion as I listened to it. I prayed with hot tears, thinking of my sick brother Gratien, thinking that my resistance was making his sickness and trouble longer and causing unhappiness at home. I told myself that it was wrong to delay his cure, and that I should definitely renounce Denise and this was God’s will. “I reached Les Huttes thus, prepared to do my duty, and met Denise in the yard, evidently waiting for me. ‘Now, Claude,’ she said to me, ‘Gratien is still suffering. I fear that God will curse us if we let him waste away in this way. We must save our blind brother. You are the clearsighted one. You can earn your living with your two hands; there is no shortage of marriageable girls in the district; everyone regards you as a first-rate workman and a plucky lad. Come, try to think of me no longer. I must stay here to do my duty and be a servant to your mother and sister and be a... for Gratien.’ She would never utter the word ‘wife’. “She dissolved in tears at that point and escaped into the hayloft to weep all day. She could be heard sobbing from the house through the wattles of the ceiling. “Then my mother came in her turn and said to me, ‘Claude, I indeed told you that you and Denise should be engaged. I thought that was God’s will and for the good of the family. But now I see that would be wrong and that God would punish us and bring trouble for the one who is already most unfortunate of all, my poor Gratien. He loves Denise as much as you

86

Chapter Eight

do, you see? Perhaps even more, since she is a joy to you while for him she is his light. What do you want to do? Do you want your brother to have a living staff to direct his steps no longer, so at every step to fall into a hole in the road or have a gap in his heart? Do you want to feel that in the hearth of this home there is always an unhappy person whose every breath is a reproach and condemnation of your hardness towards him? Once again, what do you want to do?’ “‘I want to do what you ask, Mother, whatever it costs. I love Denise more than the light of heaven in my eyes, it is true. But I love the peace in this home, obedience to your will and the grace of God better than my own good. So ask, Mother, and I will do what you tell me to do, without protest.’ “‘Right, go away’, she said, putting her arms round my neck and sobbing over my head. ‘Go away, my poor Claude’, and she kept me pressed to her chest. When I looked up to the window of the hayloft I saw Denise, who had watched it all and heard it all, wiping her eyes with the edge of her apron. I heard her words, ‘Goodbye, Claude’, through the cloth, and her sobbing. It was decided, Sir. I took my sack from the nail and went down the mountain without turning back, for fear of not being able to pull my steps away, or of seeing the smoke of Les Huttes once more. “Three months later Denise was married, in obedience, to the blind son. She no longer thought of me and was a good wife to Gratien.”

CHAPTER NINE

I MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF CLAUDE

And you, Claude, what happened to you after both your hearts were broken? As for me, I began my tour around France that day. Tell me about it, if it is not too much trouble and if the setting sun allows us time. That is soon told. I was no longer on my own. I was no longer where I was. I was completely in a different world. My body came and went in those districts, but my heart and spirit stayed in the mountain. Denise, Gratien and Annette were there. The rest of the world was all one to me. However, it was then that I began to think further, and as it were all the time, of the good Lord. This sacrifice that I had been forced to make of all my happiness in this world had softened my soul and, as it were, turned my heart to higher things. The Lord rewarded me by causing me, the ignorant one, to understand that His love could still fill an empty heart. Then I told myself, “Since my mother has asked you to make the greatest of sacrifices for your blind brother, all the other sacrifices you will be able to make for others will be truly easy and light. So make them as you find opportunity on your way. God will reward you also, not in this world, because He no longer has anything to give you here now that He has taken Denise from you, but in the other life.

II “That said, Sir, I went on for seven years, from town to town, from stone yard to stone yard, with my bush hammer and my granite hammer, looking for work where it was to be found, improving my lot as much as a poor lad can who is too old to learn to read and write and draw diagrams with a pencil on paper. But I worked things out for myself in stone, not paper.

88

Chapter Nine

Employers liked me, as did my fellows, since I was honest with the former and as helpful as possible to the latter.”

III “From this time, Sir, I decided to earn only what was necessary for my food and clothing, for replacing worn out tools and for a lodging under the tiles in the villages, yards or houses where I was working. Only I did not say so, for fear of being taken for a man who wanted to be odd. I accepted the day’s wages from employers like anyone else, but when I saw an old friend, broken down and caring for a family, or when one of the young workmen had father, mother or sisters to feed by his hammer or, finally, when one of them had an accident, an illness, an enforced absence from work, then I would work for them in the yard, do their work, and they would collect their pay in the usual way. In the stone yards I was given the nickname of ‘the Substitute’, and if anyone wanted a day off he would come to me and say, ‘Come Claude, I need a good man to fill in for me’ and I would do it, Sir.”

IV “You will ask me, ‘Why did you deny yourself in this way and wear out your tools, your time and your youth without a thought for the future?’ This is why, Sir. It is that when I lost hope of marrying Denise, I firmly decided never to marry, because for any other match than Denise I would have to have travelled round France ten times and have gone even further without ever finding her. How would you have it? Of course, there would have been others as good-hearted and more beautiful, but they were never her. We were two ears from the same stalk. All the other ears could well have been just as good, but it we were the only ears that actually met and fitted to each other and knew each other on the awn. Apart from Denise, there was no wife for me in the world. When I saw the others passing on Sundays on their way to a dance or church, I used to say, ‘That’s not Denise’. She remained like a speck in your eye that makes you see a thousand stars, but also makes you weep. ‘Since you have made that sacrifice for a poor blind boy and for the peace of the family,’ I would tell myself, ‘you can surely make others throughout your life!’ And truly, what little I have done for the world of the poor costs me nothing. When I have been given the heart that beats beneath my ribs, what is it, then, to give an arm or hand?

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

89

“Furthermore, I had the friendship of the world, in the workplace, to recompense me. “It was in this way that I took seven years over my tour through France, always taking a route further away whenever I was tempted by the meanness of the countryside to see again the mountains and the valley of Saint Point.”

V “But who consoled you while you were far from home, in your isolation and distress?” I said to Claude, “Did you at that time have news from your mother or from Denise? Or did you write to them? Did you have a friend with whom you would talk of Les Huttes, of your childhood, of your love, of your unhappiness? “No, Sir, nobody wrote to me and I wrote to no one, because in our family we could neither read nor write. I never spoke either of her or myself. It was not even known which mountain I came from. I was on good terms with all my companions, without being particularly close to any of them unless they fell off a ladder or broke a limb at work. Yet I did have a friend who consoled me and upheld me through everything,” he said, imperceptibly raising his eyes away from me to the setting sun. “You must tell me that on Sunday”, I said, as I rose in order to climb down home again, “won’t you, Claude? You have told me already enough to depress me all week.” “Oh, Sir, you must never be depressed”, he replied with a contented smile that contrasted with his story, with his solitude and with the few green mounds under our feet around him. “Never be sad, because depression takes strength from the arms and, further, life is of so little account that it is not worth your stopping to cry over it. All ends well, Sir, be assured of that. It is only a matter of waiting for the moment in the now or in another time.” “What do you call ‘another time’?” I asked him. “That which does not end,” he replied. As our glance said as we parted, we parted as two friends who will meet again.

CHAPTER TEN

I I loved this poor man and this poor man loved me, though I was so inferior to him in philosophy, in perception of natural things, in detachment, in acceptance. Even though I was caught up in the currents of human thought, he shone above it like a bare peak above the mist. Yet there was something common to us both, the sense of divinity in nature. That was the magnet that drew me to Les Huttes and was the basis of my long visits to Claude. I went back to his retreat eight days afterwards. I found him occupied in bringing a swarm back to his hives. The swarm was making off, whirling in the clear air above his head, seeking both to escape and to remain in the enclosure. It seemed to be a tension between two opposite instincts, the one of freedom, the other of reluctance. Claude took the swarm in both hands when it settled on a plum tree, placing it in the hollow trunk of a pine tree that he had prepared for his bees. “Here is a new family that has come to me this week, Sir”, he told me. “It did not arrive uninvited and without making an appointment. See”, he went on, and showed me a score of sainfoin plants in flower. “The table is set for all those invited to the marriage feast of the good Lord, isn’t it?” he added. “And the home, too”, I said, indicating the tree trunk, hollowed out and set up by him on two boulders. “But how, Claude, did you keep a calm face and your hands safe from that cloud of flying needles that would pierce me with thousands and thousands of stings? “Well, it is because they know me, mother and daughter, hives and swarms, even bees before they emerge into the sunlight for the first time. It seems that their mother or the good Lord told them beforehand, ‘Don’t harm him who wishes you well’. We think that these creatures are not intelligent. We have it wrong, you know. Why is it that flights of rooks let themselves be approached by the man who carries a glittering ploughshare on his shoulder, yet fly away from a man who has a gun on his arm? Do you think that their mother and father did not teach them that it was powder? And the little fish, Sir; I was often entertained on Sundays when I

92

Chapter Ten

was small, catching them at the side of the brook with my hand, putting them in my hat and spilling them out far from there on the grass. Well, in spite of being so far from the bed of the stream and although the height of the grass hid the water from sight, they would get back there all by themselves without losing their way, Sir. How would they do that if they had not been taught when they came out of the egg?” We conversed in this way for a long time about these signs of intelligence in animals, then I gave the conversation an imperceptible turn to more serious matters. He allowed it because he sensed that it was not so much human curiosity as a sense of the divine that drew me to him, and it was the opportunity to speak of God.

II This was the attraction between this man and me. I did not readily put it from my thoughts. When at the bottom of my garden or at the heights of my woods on the other side of the valley from where we are, I would hear in the silence of midday the regular blow of the stonemason’s hammer. My ear would hear that sound like the buzzing of more than a poor insect, a man digging out the rocks, probing the ground and piercing the skies to search for Him who ceaselessly calls him and ceaselessly flies from him, his God. I considered that each blow that the man made with his chisel was also a blow of thought in his brain, to expand it in proportion to the great idea that dominated him. I would ask myself seriously, as one who has worn out his tongue in his palate and his eyes under their lids by speaking and reading and writing of this God, at all times and in all languages, what ideas could this untutored soul have conceived of the sovereign Being? When I found myself with him again, naturally I was drawn to renew our discussion on this subject. Moreover, I knew instinctively that his soul overflowed with a devotion that would turn that way at the slightest prompting. So I sat down at the same spot where I had talked with him about Denise and, when he had finished putting his hive straight on its supports, he came back and sat down at a certain distance opposite me for, although Claude was trustful and straightforward in his language, he was in no way familiar. He had those natural good manners that command respect, when experienced. He kept his distance like a good infantryman who must neither let himself be entangled with the next man behind him nor tread on the heels of the man in front of him. He sensed and knew his place in creation, just as he sensed and knew the place of others. A prevailing and untaught decency clothed him with a natural dignity. You

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

93

could tell that he placed himself as lowly among men, but had respect with God. This is something like how our conversation went that day: MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE MYSELF

CLAUDE

Claude, you told me eight days ago, when recounting your troubles, that you had a friend into whose ears you used to pour everything and who softened it all during your long absence from Les Huttes. So who was that friend who, for you, took the place of your mother, of Denise, of your mountain, even of your heart that you had left behind there? Perhaps I am surely bold to have dared to use that name. This friend will forgive me, Sir. This friend, Sir, was the good Lord. And who told you about Him? Hardly anyone, Sir, but it was Himself who all my life spoke in my heart. And what did He tell you? And what did you yourself say to Him, in this interior closeness that kept you so patient within yourself and so useful to others? As to what He said to me, Sir, It would be impossible to repeat it to you. God does not speak the language of intellectuals like you nor the dialect of simple people like me. I don’t know how He made Himself known to my feeble mind, but I would hear Him within me when I retired from the noise of my fellows to listen to Him, just as we hear the general murmur that comes up from the valley, without knowing if it is made by people, voices, footsteps, the leaves, the streams, the growing plants, the birds singing, men breathing. But we know that it is something alive, don’t we, since it makes a sound? So, this mute sound of the Lord’s presence in the creatures and in me I have fortunately always heard, as I tell you, and I say fortunately for me, Sir, for otherwise I would that I was dead, I would have reckoned that my chest was a coffin where a soul was buried that was living entirely alone with earthworms for company. I would have thrown myself into the first quarry I came upon to crush my thoughts with my head against the jagged rocks. But, thanks to the awareness of God’s

94

MYSELF

CLAUDE

Chapter Ten

presence and His mute but clear sound that I heard especially when I had no work to do, I would return to the lodgings where I slept, at the workshop under the penthouse roof and, thanks to His goodness that He always showed in speaking gentle words to my heart, I was always comforted. Man is like a child who is cradled by lullabies with words he does not understand, but he smiles after he has cried. Isn’t that so, Sir? I was like that. I never knew what the good Lord said to me; but though I heard it from afar, it comforted me, it upheld me, it gave me patience and hope. I think, Sir, that the least word works in us the echo in our breast for the good of the day, for the better understanding of our faith, for peace in our stupidity, our confusion and our problems. That’s as it is meant to be, I think. For that Word, which created the whole world by calling into being separately one after the other all the creatures and by making them appear simply at his will, condescends to communicate with poor earthworms like us. Think what a comfort that is in our nothingness. Yes, Claude, I have no doubt that you heard in your being the echo of the eternal Word, maybe more clearly than someone else, unaware that you were like any man of noise. Between that Word and you was only the sound of your hammer. We have the noise of the world. But how did you know that God was speaking to your poor soul, and what told you that He was conversing with you? In this way, Sir. Thoughts came to me that I had not conceived myself and of which nobody had spoken to me. They arose from the warmth of my heart that no hand had touched. They sprouted in my life like a sort of drunkenness, though I had not tasted wine. Then I heard all sorts of insensible things that could not be expressed in the few words my mother had taught me when she brought me into the world. I don’t know what words were used, but they said to me, I am, I live, I last, I create, I see, I listen, I love, I console, I come and everything comes to me and everything that had originated in me finishes in me. When everything that has originated in me will be refashioned with me, then

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

95

all will be powerful, happy and everlasting through me and with me And I will neither be great nor small, and I will be all for everything and for every creature. And I despise nothing and I set no price on anything. With me there is no small or great, for great and small do not exist for me, I who have no limits. I am your father, just as I am the father of the sun over your head. I am your mother just as I am the mother of the stars in the depth of your sky. And I am your judge, just as I am judge of all that fulfils or breaks my laws intentionally. I am your friend, just as I am friend to all that has come from my own life in order to have life. I am your consoler, since it is by my word and will that you suffer. And you can speak to me in confidence, since I understand you without speech. I am above and I am below, and I am in front and behind. I am the ocean where you can cast all your desires, your troubles, your hopes with no fear of losing any one of your breaths, or one of your drops of sweat, one of your tears, because I restore everything, I am the height of everything, the depth of everything, the limits of everything. I am all and nothing can escape me except into nothingness, and nothingness is a Word belonging to limited humanity. There is no nothing. I fill it. My true name is Life. And a thousand thoughts like that, which I heard and believed I understood a little, though they were so much beyond my comprehension. And after that Word had sounded in me, like the striking of a bell moves the air by giving it a hammer blow before it sounds forth the music of the angelus, its sound making the leaves tremble as it passes through. Should I say, Sir, that when the Word had stirred in me, it imparted to me a harmony, a peace, a radiance, so that you could have said that I felt as good as if a star had come down from the sky to enlighten my spirit within me, or as if a hand had drawn together all the strings of my heart, my head and my body, as an organist tunes his brass wires and pipes, so that in such a way I myself became an instrument that sings true and on which the hands of God could as it were play on me.

96

MYSELF

CLAUDE

Chapter Ten

They were precious moments in my troubles, Sir. They caused me to weep with my bodily eyes, but they dried the eyes of my soul when the memory of Denise would weep in my heart. Then I became accustomed to praying without ceasing in this way. So, do you think that the Lord is like the man who does not know what he wants and who allows himself to waver from one side to another in prayer, moved by the tears of whoever has spoken last? Oh no, Sir. But I think that the good Lord, when He created us to do His will, foresaw that we would need this and that during our journey through life, and He himself gave these humble creatures like us the instinct to ask for what we needed in order to keep us in adoration, in longing and in recollection, perpetually before Him. He does what He wills, but we others do what He inspires us to do as we pray to Him. Asking and receiving, is not that the whole nature of man, Sir? So why do we who ask for everything from those who have so little to give? Should we not ask ceaselessly from the One who has everything? I well know that it is said, “Yet the whole will of the good Lord is as eternal and unchangeable as He is, so it is pointless to try and change it by prayer”. But, as for me, I think that He has foreseen from all eternity that we would ask from Him such and such a grace, and that He has also granted in advance from all eternity the prayer we would make to Him. So that the so-called change in His will is in fact eternal fulfillment. I sometimes said to myself, “The Lord is like an architect of an iron dome that I have seen, who allows interplay between the materials that form his framework so that the iron stretches or shrinks at will, according to the season, without breaking the structure”. This design of the architect above, Sir, which carries out His immutable will, allows the prayers of human beings to carry it out. That, I consider, is prayer. That’s stupid, isn’t it? But how else? We are all stupid when we speak about the good Lord. Moreover (he went on), even though it would be pointless, never mind, it always helps to speak of lofty things.

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

MYSELF CLAUDE

97

What prayer did you say most frequently, Claude? Oh, I would rather remember, Sir, all the breaths that I have breathed since I first began to breathe, than the words and sounds of all the prayers I have made to Him, because it came in truth from my heart just as it came from my breathing. You see, my heart swelled with longing under my ribs. At first I used the prayer my mother had taught me when I was little, the prayer of Jesus Christ, which He gave to men as a language understood up there, “Our Father, who art in heaven”. You see? In it is everything you need to ask for. It is like a large coin in your pocket with which you can get a bit of bread anywhere. But each person must make his own prayer, Claude, for one person’s needs are not another’s. What prayers do you make most frequently for yourself? Oh, that is different as day from night. It goes according to the time of day, the wind, the sun, the rain, according to what I was feeling about everything. It was more of a conversation than a prayer. I was breathing out loud, that’s it. And what did you ask for most frequently in your prayers? Ah, Sir, you know well enough without my telling you. I first asked for food and peace of mind for my mother, my brother, my sister and for Denise, and that the good Lord would be with them at Les Huttes day and night, winter and summer, spring and autumn and that He would shed a blessing on each of their days, above all that they would not be sad on my behalf. And what did you ask for yourself? Ah, for me not so much. I need so little: I only asked to live by serving those less fortunate than I, to spend my time honestly in the state God has put me in on earth, and afterwards to be reunited on the breast of Denise, to love her and to love each other for ever. As for the rest, that was as it came, a God, a love, an eternity, that was enough for a simple peasant like me. I never had ambition for wealth, for science or to command others. I never felt anything but the need to love and to make happy, as was in my power, those around me.

98

MYSELF

CLAUDE

MYSELF

CLAUDE

Chapter Ten

You say you never had ambition for science. Yet, that Being about whom you have thought ever since you were born is supreme science. Have you never sought to hear more learned people than yourself speak about Him? Or to know the different names given to Him at different periods on earth, in different languages and in different peoples’ religions? In a word, you who were all love and prayer before our Sovereign Master of all, did you not make an act of faith in Him, a credo, as it is called in Latin, in church? And what was this credo that you were doubtless making for yourself through your perpetual adoration? Oh, Sir, my credo was not long! It consisted of few words, “You are before all, You are everywhere and You will be after all. I come from You, I will be called to You, I can know nothing apart from You. It is up to You to design here your image for me to adore. My wit is so small, I would wish to enlarge it. You will increase it daily. Make me believe of You what You will.” That creature, good Lord, that you see over there spreading its wings on that moss, it cannot make its credo to the sun. It cannot say to him, “Your rays are this or that”, but it does say to him, “I feel your warmth and blessing on me”. I was as ignorant as that creature of the good Lord, Sir, and my credo was, I think, in comparison of a man and an insect, like the latter. But did no one speak to you about this God you loved so, and did not they teach you to worship Him and serve Him in some sort of faith? No, Sir! There were no churches open and priests were paid by the Republic, in those days. Each believed as he wished, you worshipped the good Lord of your fancy. There were even some who did not worship Him at all, because they said that the clergy had conspired with the kings or those in power to enlist Him on their side and to claim the land in His name. “And if that should happen,” I said to them, “is that a reason to deny your Father because He has been given a different name than his own or because His name has been caricatured?” These men, called atheists, make me sorry for them, believe me. I think they were more blinded in their soul than my

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

MYSELF

CLAUDE

99

brother Gratien. I avoided them as much as I could and prayed especially for them as creatures more unfortunate then the rest. In contrast, I felt attracted to those who had a religion, no matter what it was, who fell on their knees before anything, whatever it was, provided that it was heartfelt and in good faith, because I said to myself, “Those people have an inner perception like me: they see the good Lord in one guise or another. They at least seek to see Him, to know Him and worship Him. That does them credit and makes them good; for you can indeed be frail, but you cannot be wicked when you believe yourself to be in the presence of supreme Goodness”. I was glad, without knowing why, when the places of worship were reopened and when the nation recognised one God and all the ways of worship that could freely be offered to Him. Then I said, “Here is a people, where previously we were a herd”. So, were you making a religion for yourself with all and sundry, in a church, in a temple or in a brotherhood, agreeing among themselves to give worship and obedience to the Sovereign Master? No, Sir, that is not what I was doing, neither by myself nor in company with others. I prayed and served all alone, according to my purpose because, you see, I was continually going from workshop to workshop, from town to town, from one district to another. I was visiting every sort of society at my level and they had every sort of religion, some philosophical, some Catholic, some Protestant, some nothing at all. Each one advanced his reasons and cursed the others, looking for an opportunity to be able to persecute or kill them. I was not capable of judging between them. Only, I privately said to myself, “What a misfortune and shame that those people insult each other in this way in the name of their Father, of all people! What a crime and blasphemy it is that they appeal to the officers, the executioners, the scaffolds, to imprison, torture and kill those who do not see their cloud in the sky in the same shape and the same colour as their own! If anyone really holds to the good Lord among them, then He is certainly the most merciful; for a religion that imprisons, that burns and that curses

100

Chapter Ten

cannot come from the same source—or rather it has undergone change on its way and, in place of water from heaven, it gives people the blood of executions to drink”. So I have no other catechism, Sir, than what enlightens me through all these religions I encountered from region to region: “Worship and pray with the whole world, but only believe with yourself”. It is always good to worship and pray with people, but it is sometimes bad to believe as they do when they believe against nature, against the greatness and goodness of God. “In a word,” as I said to myself, “let them say this or that, without arguing with them about what you do not know and what they do not know either, believe with everyone what is good and do not believe with anyone what is bad”. There is a simple man’s catechism that I made, Sir. And if you say, “But who taught you to distinguish what is good from what is bad?” well, Sir, I would hardly know how to reply. It would be the voice within me that I did not cause to speak, but which of its own accord, without doubt, said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ within my breast. It is this voice that educated people call conscience and we others, the simple people call common sense. It does not argue, but nevertheless is unmistakable. It does not express itself but judges everything, you see. A person needs a final word as basic when he debates with himself and does not know whom to listen to. Well, this conscience is that final word. The last word of all is God, who has written it into us just like a route is written on signposts along the roads so that you do not mistake your way. For example, there was an old stonemason, a Hungarian by nationality, who had worked at I do not know how many churches, temples, minarets, mosques, pagodas, pyramids all over the world, from a country he called India to Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, Germany, Rome and Strasbourg. There was no deity for whom he had not cut a stone so that, as he sometimes laughingly put it, he was certainly sure to have a friend everywhere in Paradise. He befriended me because of my youth, my ignorance and my good behaviour, which led me to go for the older rather than the younger among my fellows,

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

101

because there is always more sweetness in ripe fruit than unripe. He could read: I could not. He kindly read his prayer books to me on Sundays and old stories from the early days that I would listen to with pleasure and an ever fresh sense of thrill. These were stories that made you worship the goodness of God and made you weep with sympathy over the adventures of poor families like ours, grazing their beasts and ploughing their furrow like us in the wilderness. There were other stories that made you shrug your shoulders because they told of many gods, of gods marrying earthly women, of deceits, of the mischief of such or such a god, scheming, devising dirty tricks and wickedness for men. These books, which came from India, from Arabia, from Greece, from I don’t know where, made me think over and over again about these heaps of lies mixed with heaps of truths that the good Lord allowed the ancients to pass over to us in this way, so that we would never cease seeking for nuggets of gold in these heaps of sand by the sweat of our brows. I said to myself, “So it is the divine will that the soul labours as the body does to find its food, since He has not Himself winnowed the grain but has thrown it to us mixed with the chaff and since in the best tended fields He has grown as many weeds as ears of corn?” That used to surprise me, Sir, but it did not upset me; the good Lord is the Master, He knows why He has made it like that. Perhaps it is so we should continually think, and always about Him, progressing towards perfect understanding one step at a time. For, in the end, if we had achieved perfect knowledge at the first step, we would search no more. So to live is to seek, isn’t it? Yet you sometimes find, over periods of time, at rare intervals, truths and holinesses that give sustenance throughout times of starvation, of the truth and holiness that God has laid upon men. Then the old man would read to me at random the thoughts, as he called them, of the great ancient wise men inspired by wisdom as from on high, more than others. I have kept the memory of some of them, like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Cicero. Those men, Sir, had ideas about God that enlighten the whole night of my soul, so to say, like

102

Chapter Ten

snow fallen from the sky perhaps many, many years ago over Mont Blanc that, as you see from here, has not yet melted and lightens up at evening and morning the yet dark levels of the countryside. But above all there was a little book with pages that were all dog-eared and tattered as a result of having been read again and again by the old man, and from which he would always read to me to conclude his gentle sessions, so it seemed that an elder brother was speaking to his younger brothers in simple parables, so close to daily life that that it was as if a mother pulling down a branch so that her child might pluck off the nuts. It was the New Testament, Sir, which I came to know better and put into use, even, much better since I have heard pages read from it and teachings in the parishes about good conduct taken from it. Ah, how I loved that holy man, Sir, who came whence I know not to mingle in a small way with the poor world, rejecting no one, talking with fishermen and gardeners as with the learned, pardoning in God’s name despised women who were repentant, playing with little children, tirelessly teaching his people, sacrificing himself to the vengeance of the Jewish priests who were persecuting him because they were the darkness and he was the light, then finally allowing himself to be crucified by the local judges. Why? For not lying about his Father who spoke through him and for buying at the price of his own blood a purer worship for the Creator. Ah! What beautiful ideas he brought from God on the mountain! How you felt that there was a Word, a Logos as you say, a sunrise in the soul of a world where all the images of a long night had changed into false gods! How He whom he proclaimed was indeed the true God, the only God, without father or mother, without country or nation, without friends and without enemies, without anger and without lightning, the father, mother and brother of all, of pagans as of Hebrews, of the learned and the ignorant, of the great and the small. And how His prophet was truly from Him! How He was, in truth, animated with all His love for His creation. For He would have finally wanted to recreate the corrupted

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

103

world, full of lies and false gods, by giving it life again from His life. Can anyone love the Creator and humankind more than that? To die so that mankind may worship God more holily! To die in order that He may shine more clearly on the world! What more than that? By heat you recognise fire. Surely that man must have had a clear vision of God in his soul, so that the light that had blazed within him would have inspired such a sacrifice to his Father for his brothers and at the hand of his brothers! There is the Word of God! There is a son of the Father! There is the brother of all those born or yet to be born of a woman”. I used to say these things to myself when the old man stopped reading. “Also, see how a drop of blood, falling alone from the head of the cross to the earth, has penetrated thence to the core of the earth, that it still resonates after two thousand years, and that his word has not stopped reverberating and will forever be mingled with all the other words that are to come, we don’t know when, to be added to His until the name of God be accomplished in this globe of earth and in the fiery globes.” The old man would smile as he listened to me, in my ignorance, speaking like the language of the New Testament. He was well content to see this good seed germinating in my simple spirit. That was how we spoke as we read, and I felt myself echoing in myself like the nave in an empty church where the stones echoing the voice of the priest seem to repeat through their thousand echoes of the holy words that they nevertheless do not understand. Later on I understood better what the old man said. On reflection, his words calmed me and amazed me. Knowing nothing of other people’s religions, I made a rule for myself to judge for good or ill. I told myself, “There is truth and error in all that: there is God, there are men. How do we separate truth from lies to know that the Lord is in that and man in this? Good Lord! It is simple, even for a simple man. It only involves seeing through your conscience where is the good, where is the bad. Where the good is, there is God, where the bad is, there is man. Truth cannot produce what is bad any more

104

Chapter Ten

than light can produce night or the dove can hatch the viper. If from a religion there comes hatred, persecution, contempt, genocide, nothing of that is of God. If there comes out love of neighbour, mutual support, compassion, self-sacrifice, worship of one God in spirit and in truth, all that is from Him. And I will take issue with the former religion, without wishing them ill, and believe and worship with the latter.” In this way, in my simplicity, I tried to work out my religion for myself and to serve my Creator with my small abilities according to His will. Then I said to myself, “But it is not enough to think of Him and to pray to Him as you do when you get up, when you go to bed and when you rest at noon after eating your bread in the shade. You must further show Him that you are a faithful workman of his earthly household, that you want to serve without wages, only for bread, and that you will give your wages to those who are weaker or more sickly or indigent than you are.” You will not believe, Sir, how much the Lord rewarded my day in my heart more than the townsfolk or the businessmen in my purse. It seemed to me that all the money I took was not for myself or that I earned it in order to take it in the evening to the wounded, the sick, the women, the children, the disabled father and mother of my fellows—that would take shape in my ears all the night through as it were a purse full of money, silver and gold, which the good Lord Himself had poured into my hand. That always gave me a new heart for work. And when my workmates said to me, “But if you take nothing for yourself, what will you do in your old age, Claude?” I would reply, “I have a brother and sister at Les Huttes who will accept me back and feed me in my old age. That is why I do not need to think of myself. My father has thought of that. I have a small advantage. I do not want to marry. If that were not so, I would surely have to provide for my wife and children in my turn”. When my workmates and the girls, their sisters, would say, “Why do you not want to marry, Claude? There are many in the district who would take you for your kind heart, and for your two arms as well!” At that,

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

105

Sir, I made no reply. I blushed all over or paled as I thought of Denise, and went to watch the river flowing or the clouds drifting over the high mountains.” I went back to the village deep in thought, not having dared to sound out further the heart of the simple stonemason that day.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I I climbed up again the following Sunday. I found him at the foot of the gorge, roughly at the place where his blind brother had fallen or had thrown himself on the night of his despair. He was sitting not far from his goats, which were browsing on the ends of the new shoots on the cliffs on both sides of the gorge. The noise they were making as they shook the young branches and dislodged the gravel with their horny hoofs, and the soft murmuring of the brook over the pebbles in its bed, prevented Claude from hearing me. He was at the foot of a rowan whose light and indented leaves allowed the gentle sunbeams to light upon him in the shade and upon the grass around him, like live fireflies chasing each other along the edge of a wide ditch. Crowds of birds were singing, whistling, murmuring, fluttering around in the branches of the oaks, ashes, beeches and geans above his head. Flowers were picked out here and there on the torn carpet of turf, and hung in clumps and bunches on the very floor of the ravine as if they breathed in the water and scented it in return. The midday air, falling from a calm and burnished sky, penetrated through the canopy of bushes and warmed the usual freshness of the gorge. You could only see through the branches small patches of blue sky that showed up the green of the most mature and dark leaves in contrast to the sky. Midges rose in clouds from the water each time a bird alighted to drink. They floated like tiny living clouds over the spray of the ravine and the sunbeams shining through them lit up all the colours of their wings, like rainbows over the cascades of overflowing life.

II The centre of this spot was much more evocative for Claude than for me since it was the scene of his childhood, of his whole life, and which he reclothed, so to say, with all his impressions, his memories. Claude seemed absorbed in the contemplation of what surrounded him. You could say that he formed a living part, growing or petrified, in the soil and that he had taken root there like the trunk of the rowan against which he was leaning. I took care not to interrupt him by any sudden or premature

108

Chapter Eleven

sound. I was curious to see that man living and hear him breathing alone in God’s presence. He was there as usual, in fact in thought and worship, and he was unaware that there was a look and an ear between him and God.

III He was absently tracing lines in the sand with a hazel twig that he held in his hand, its end already in bud. He was rolling grains of sand or small gravel into the water with his feet, seeming to hear with a certain pleasure the plangent sounds they made in dropping into the pool. He was calling by name first one goat, then another; he whistled his dog. He followed with his eyes the shimmering of the sunbeams on the water. He leaned first on one elbow, then on another. He closed and opened in turn his heavy eyelids as if to release his thoughts. He passed long intervals in which you could tell only from his breathing that he were alive, then a long, deep sigh as if he were putting all his life into one exhalation. At the same time, calm and movement could be seen in that soul; it was like the ocean breaking its majestic silences with majestic waves. Vitality within was weighing on him like God, invisible Father on His ocean. He was praying.

IV What would I not have given to translate into words that mute prayer, that silent invocation that was being made privately between his lips and his heart? The heartbeats of a simple soul have never been recorded, though doubtless a thousand times more beautiful than the hymns of the poets and the learned and studied prayers of those who make enthusiastic contemplation their profession. I was not given anything to seize upon but the corresponding expression on his face, in his attitude, in his gesture and sometimes the name of God that he spoke while bowing his forehead and raising his eyes to the tops of the trees. Yet, in the way he spoke this name, there was a revelation of the presence and the holiness of his Creator. I also heard distinctly the name of Denise and these words, repeated eight or ten times. “Are you there? Do you see me? Is it you who responds to my soul? Tell me then when it shall please God to reunite us? I am somewhat impatient, am I not? It is indeed bad of me not to know how to wait for the will from above, which you know, you do. But the mountain is so lonely without you. Ask from the good Lord that He has mercy on Claude. Denise! Denise! How interminable is life for me!” And several other

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

109

confused and interspersed words like these. Then, as if ashamed of his impatience and as if he had blushed at being so sorry for himself, he got up, wiped his eyes smiled sadly and glanced at the sun above him at the end of the gorge and climbed slowly up the slope on my side. I then made a sound in the leaves and took several steps as if I had only just arrived at Les Huttes, as if I was looking for Claude in the enclosure among the rocks. At this sound he saw me, came up to me, greeted me cap in hand and head bared. I shook his hand with a feeling of true friendship that I recognised in the strong and confident grip of his own hand. We walked on, talking of the beauty of the season and the serenity of the day. We sat under the large chestnut where the fires of the shepherd days of his infancy had scored into the bole and charred roots.

V After instinctively taking up by slow stages the conversation about himself and his past life, “Well, Claude”, I said to him, “were you sufficiently contented with that life devoted to your brothers during your journey round France, and did you only think of consoling your fellows, of God and of the books that the old man used to read to you about His perfection and about your destiny after this life?” “Oh! Sir,” he replied, “I thought all too often about other matters, about the district, about my mother, my brothers, my little sister and Denise. The more I tried to banish those thoughts that made my hammer so heavy in my hand and the taste of my food so bitter, the more they always returned, despite myself. My companions made fun of me and called me ‘the dreamer’. ‘Say, Claude’, they asked me, ‘Have you forgotten someone on the stars or lost something in the mountains, and that’s why you always look upwards as you sigh?’ I would blush, Sir, and not know what to reply. Alas! It was only too true that I had left everything and lost everything up there in the hills. Every time I left town on a Sunday walk or crossed the plains of a district and saw mountain peaks like this one, and the smoke from a cottage or a woodcutter rising up behind a fir tree, I could not take my eyes away from it. When I raised my hand to my eyes to see better, it came down with moistened fingers. I said to myself, ‘That’s like home. There might be ravines, rocks, goats browsing, water flowing as it gurgles down its banks, a hearth where fresh firewood has been thrown down to make soup for the family, an old mother, a pretty fiancée, a Denise’. And then my legs felt so weary that I could walk no further and must sit down on the edge of the ditch facing those lofty mountains from which those heartfelt thoughts came upon me.

110

Chapter Eleven

In a word, Sir, I had what we common folk call homesickness, almost the only sickness we might have; the sickness of the simple which, since there is not much around to love, begins to love the corner of the earth that bore them. I think it is like a chestnut tree: if you transplant it, it misses the patch of earth that fed its roots.”

VI “At that time, Sir, at every moment, day or night, I would give myself a moment of sadness and of pleasure, saying to myself, ‘Think freely about them. What are they saying? What are they doing up there just at the time when I am thinking of them. It is night time and they are returning to the cottage, they are lighting the fire for supper. It is morning and they will be coming out with their rakes and their hoes over their shoulders to clean up the meadow or the trough. It is noon and they will be eating together in the shade of a sapling in the corner of the field. It is evening and they will be resting at the door or maybe saying their prayers and thinking of me. It is springtime, they are dipping the lambs at the spring. It is summer and they will be bringing down to the floor in front of the house the sheaves hung with cut down poppies, which will make a sound like copper wire when they are dry and the flail comes down on them. Denise, my mother and my sister are treading them barefoot, whilst my poor brother is shelling peas alone in a corner of the yard, for fear of injuring someone with his flail. It is autumn and they are beating the chestnuts. It is winter and they are warming themselves in the glow of the cooking pot, in the warmth of the sheep in the stable, while they scotch the hemp or crack the hazel nuts to make oil. But how many are present there? Is my mother still there? Is she bent double? Do her hands, which were beginning to get thinner, shake? Are there new children clinging to the women’s aprons or in the cradles at the foot of the beds?’ Ah! Sir, I could no longer stop myself once I pictured all these things in my mind’s eye and asked all these questions of myself and would reply to them without realising, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. They were waking dreams, were they not?

VII “The more time passed, the more did these thoughts cling to my spirit, the way ivy clings to walls that are growing old. At last I could stand it no more. I said to myself, ‘Come on, let’s return tomorrow. It is seven years now. Haven’t there been enough falls of snow and aren’t there enough dead leaves on the path where we said goodbye, Denise and I? Does she

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

111

now think of me other than only as a sister thinks of an absent brother? Hasn’t she been happily married for such a long time? Aren’t there several little ones clinging to her dress or whom she carries in her arms as she goes to the rocks? That feeling we used to have for each other, has it not gone away a thousand times from her heart like the water from the melted snow in springtime runs away a thousand times into the ravine, so that it can never again be drawn up and reformed as it had been? Maybe they will be glad to see me, or the opposite? Maybe my mother is asking for me on her deathbed? Maybe they have more mouths to feed at home than arms to hoe, to sow and to harvest? Maybe they need a labourer and cannot afford wages for a man or woman servant and are saying to each other, ‘Ah! If only Claude were here!’ I fancied that I heard them, Sir, as if they were speaking beside me, into my ear.”

VIII “Finally, without really taking a conscious decision, I worked my way instinctively nearer to my country, like a fly round a lamp regardless of how we chase it away to prevent it burning itself. I went to work from Toulon to Barcelonette in the Basses Alpes, then to Grenoble, then to the quarries of Vienne in the Dauphiné, then to the Couson quarries on the Saöne, where stone is cut out for the city of Lyon, then to Belleville, then to Villefranche in Beaujolais, then to Mâcon, from where you see the other side of the mountains from where Les Huttes is, darkening in the evening like a partly demolished wall against the sky. Ah! Once I got there I tried to restrain my feet but I could not restrain my eyes. As soon as I raised them from the stone I was cutting they travelled by themselves to these mountains. It was so hard, Sir, to tell myself, ‘In seven hours walking you will be content, you would be where you want to be, you would see what you long to see! But, no, you shall not go, you will limit yourself to seeing your country from afar. They will not yet know that you are in it and have passed by so near to them.’”

IX “You will say to me, ‘But you did not send any news of yourself and you received no news from them.’ First, Sir, neither I nor anyone at home could read or write and, furthermore, I had never met a boy from the mountains in the places where I worked who could tell me this or that about my country. So, need I say more? Much as I longed to know what had happened at home since my journey through France, I was fearful of

112

Chapter Eleven

learning about it. I know well that this is contradictory, but that is how it was. Have you ever thought that on occasion a man is divided, so to say, and, whilst the one part wants something, the other fears it in himself? So, no word from Les Huttes came my way for this long period and no word from me went to Les Huttes. For me it was like another world, which I had lived in before I died and which I would not see again until after my resurrection.”

X “But, since I had let myself be drawn by myself, as if in spite of myself, to return so near and since I was calculating with my eyes all day the number of steps I had still to take in order to reach these mountains and to see the family again, I was no longer in control of my legs or my will. I was sometimes mad with longing, Sir, my heart was beating as if it wanted to escape from my shirt and go over there without me. “I could sleep no longer, or I slept half-awake, imagining in dreams all sorts of things at home that I could no longer erase from my eyes when I was in fact awake. I became more silent than usual. I even had no desire to help this person or that by my labour and, to top all that, I was hardly praying to the good Lord any longer, or at least I was not listening to myself as I mumbled my prayers. Oh! That was an awful time in my life. I regretted having come so near and indeed I often planned to go back to Toulon or to Bayonne and to stay forever far away, so far away that I did not have the temptation now dominating my spirit. But, when day came and I saw the mountains again, that was over. It was as if I had leaden soles on both my feet. I could no longer keep away.”

XI “That is precisely how I was living during those fifteen unhappy days and, would to God that I had listened to the voice that kept me back instead of that which called me to Les Huttes. But Lord, it was for the best, it was stronger than I. One night, when I absolutely could not go to sleep and when my head throbbed on my pillow as if a bird was beating its wings trying to burst out of its cage, I started up and dressed without giving myself time to think of this or that. I slung my sack over my back and started walking through the dark night across the countryside without feeling the ground under my feet, as they say ghosts walk. I was in a heavy sweat, but my sweat was cold as if I had thrown a bucket of water over my head. Before day broke over there on Mont Blanc I was already in the

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

113

foothills. I climbed up the paths and through the pine forests without stopping for breath or sitting down on any stone. It seemed as if I was climbing, climbing, without ever getting there. However, when the full sun came to warm me and the light of day brought me a little reason, I said to myself, ‘Where are you going? And what are you going to do? Do you even know if your mother is alive? If your brother, happy with Denise, will wish not to see you at home because of jealousy, knowing that she gave her heart to you before your mother gave her hand to him? Are you sure that you will not upset Denise’s heart at the sight of you? Are you sure that the whole good atmosphere of the home will not vanish when you arrive, like the shadows of the trees being dispersed by the sun? And if that is so, what will have been the use of having been courageous and good at one point and absent for so many years of your youth if you lose in one hour the benefit of your self-denial? Would it not be better if they believed you to be dead, as they must believe after having heard no news of you?’ So, a thousand things like that, Sir, made me take one step forward and then two steps back, recover my impetus then stand still there, looking at the ground and my toecaps, not breathing. Ah, Sir, what a painful journey, as if I had climbed up Calvary, you see!”

XII “Not being able either to resolve to retrace my steps or to decide to go on further and seeing the midday sun so bright that shepherds would be able to recognise me at a distance and take news of my return to the district and Les Huttes, I sank down a little to one side of the path against a boulder and put my head in my hands to think. ‘No, let me say, I cannot turn back, I have gone too far, there are cords which draw my heart so that it would remain there if I tried to pull away. Tomorrow I will see my mother’s house. I will find out who is alive or dead under my father’s roof. I will not go away without Denise’s voice once more enlivening my ear, at least if she is still alive. But I will not attempt to see her, I will wait here until nightfall. I will walk barefoot, I will control my breathing so as not to wake the dog. I will go up like a thief, alas, to steal one glimpse of those I have loved and missed so much.’”

XIII “As I was debating with myself in this way, with my face towards the ground, seeing and hearing nothing outside me, lo and behold, I heard a cracked voice that seemed to know me and shouted from the path, ‘Is it

114

Chapter Eleven

you, Claude? We were told that you were dead and we would never see you again in these parts. It can’t be true! You seem to be well off now, with a good shirt, a decent hat and strong nailed boots. Give me a sou for charity. I am old, sans aime.’ The years had not changed him, yet the hairs that straggled from his tattered woollen cap were white instead of being the grey they had been when I was small. “Time passes over these innocents, you see, Sir, like rain over the rocks, because they are not aware of its passing. They are never old because they are ever children. ‘Ah, good morning, my poor innocent’, I said to him. ‘So you certainly recognise me, anyway. What are they doing nowadays at Les Huttes?’” “I trembled for his reply. “‘At Les Huttes’? he replied. ‘Ah, I don’t know. I haven’t been up there by Les Huttes for six years, you see, because they have a new dog that barks like a wolf. I steer clear when I have to go up in the mountains and I see their smoke from a distance, in case the children set the dog on me. I don’t know what became of the blind one, or the mother, or Denise or the little girl; I only saw the rubbish on the rocks from far off: that’s all. But what nice clothes and shoes you have now.’”

XIV “The persistent admiration of the innocent one for my clothing and for my shoes gave me an idea, Sir. I thought, ‘If I exchange with him his bag, his linen shirt, his cap and his clogs to go up to Les Huttes without anyone suspecting, from a distance, that it was anyone but the innocent, I could see and hear without being recognised. This way I will see if they don’t need me at home. Well then, I will return without having upset anyone’s feelings.’ I had no difficulty in persuading the simpleton to exchange his clogs for my shoes, his linen shirt for mine, his coat with holes in it and his empty bag for mine. That done, I gave him five sous to go and do a supposed errand for me at a village eight leagues from the mountain, so as to keep him away from Les Huttes for two or three days. He left happily with no hesitation, the poor soul, and I hid myself again in the firs, for fear of being seen by a shepherd. I ate the crusts that the simpleton had left in his bag and drank using my cupped hand from a spring I had found when I used to herd the goats. Thus I waited, praying to God and thinking of home until night brought darkness over the fir trees. I put the simpleton’s clogs on the path so that he could find them again when he came back, and I approached Les Huttes barefoot and noiselessly.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

115

XV “Chance would have it that when I approached the house, from where a little light shone, I was met by our dog coming back alone from hunting a hare or a rabbit in the rocks. He barked two or three times and threw himself on the simpleton’s rags to bite them, but I shoved the bag in his teeth and called him softly by name. He let go the rags and came gradually nearer, growling less and less, like someone who does not know whether he should be annoyed or amused. Then, when he had sniffed me at close quarters, he finally knew who I was and covered me with caresses and stuck to me, not wanting to leave me again. That ensured that nobody in the house was warned of my approach.

XVI “It could have been about two hours before midnight, there were neither moon nor stars in the sky. Black clouds covered everything. You could see nothing but a little star shining though the pane of the low dormer window that opened from the rear wall of the house, on the side that overlooked the gorge. You could hear nothing but a few quiet rustles of the wind in the bracken, the cautious working of the moles under the bushes and the bubbling of the running water at the foot of the great ‘abyss’, where I was just then, Sir. I walked softly, softly, taking care not to dislodge a pebble or make any noise in the grass under my bare feet. The nearer I approached, the more I wanted to go back without going further, for fear of finding out what would make me too sad for finding it. ‘God,’ I said to myself, ‘Suppose I see neither my mother nor my brother, nor Denise around the hearth but the faces of some strange woman and a man and children who have come in like the ants you see in an empty snail shell. What would happen to me? For sure, it would be better to go away, having again seen the wall, the smoke and the glow of the lamp and to imagine that everything was still as it had been in my time.’”

XVII “Two or three times I stopped and took a step to retreat to where I would descend. You will never believe it, Sir, that the dog kept me there and compelled me not to go down. He growled, he licked my feet, he bit the fringe of my rags as if to force me to go back with him. I was afraid of the noise he was going to make and I continued to follow him. But to speak

116

Chapter Eleven

the truth, I no longer knew what I was doing or what I was not doing. I was like those people who walk or think, as it were, in their sleep. Regardless of the dog, I did not dare to make for the side of the stable yard and the door of the house. I climbed down towards the ravine then went up the other side, grasping the roots with my toes and the grass with my hands. When I reached the top I scaled the rock that you see serves as the floor of the hut and found myself right up against the wall, just beside the little lighted dormer window which was then, as it were, barred with the tendrils of leaves and clusters of our ivy.”

XVIII “I listened a little but heard nothing but the dull beating of my heart in my chest like the bolter of a mill that is out of order. I gradually moved the clusters and leaves of the ivy aside and managed, without being heard, to make a narrow opening for my head through which I could see what was happening in the house through the pane. At first when I would have liked to watch I could only see a fog of fire, so much had the agitation and impatience of my spirit clouded over the scene. Gradually, however, this dispersed and I began to perceive a fire in the hearth and figures coming and going across the flame, their clogs making sounds on the stone tiles of the floor. But I could not yet be certain whether they were men or women, old men or children. ‘Heavens!’ I said to myself. ‘If only I could have one glimpse of the form of Denise, that would satisfy me and I could see the others more clearly’. Then I felt a chill in my limbs and said to myself, ‘But if she were no longer there!’ What a moment that was, Sir, what a moment! An eternity does not last as long as a minute like that.”

XIX “Finally, either my eyes or the glass cleared, a huge bundle of broom blazed up in the hearth and lit up the whole room. ‘Denise! Denise!’ I uttered under my breath very softly. It was she, Sir. I had seen her in the firelight. She was carrying something like a cup in her hand that she had taken from the fire and was carrying it to a bed in the shadow at the back of the room. For a moment I fell over backwards over a pile of logs that were on the rock and it took me a struggle and time to stand up on my feet again, back to my place at the dormer window. Then I not only saw but heard distinctly a kind and broken voice from the bed, “Thank you, my dear Denise, I give you much trouble and make you go to bed quite late

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

117

and rise early. But, praise God, you will not have these troubles much longer. The good Lord will not take long to give me rest.’ Ah! Sir, I understood that my mother was very ill, but at least I would be able to say goodbye to her and receive her blessing before she died. I was heartbroken and began to weep.”

XX “I passed my hand over the glass to wipe away the haze of my breath that hindered me from seeing the whole room again and this is what I saw. “First, my mother’s stool at the fireside was empty. The salt box and the bag of brown flour had been placed on it. I understood that my mother no longer left her bed for long and that her place in the inglenook was always vacant. “Then I saw the little walnut tripod on which my brother used to sit every evening to scutch the hemp, upside down, its feet in the air in a corner of the room. His blind man’s stick that he always had beside his leg, even in the house, to touch from a distance this or that object, was stood up against the wall along the stone of the chimney, together with the pick and rake handles, covered in dust and spider webs. I suspected that my poor brother was dead, if he no longer needed his stick. Lord, two empty places already in so short a time. I dissolved in tears and drew back from the window in case my sobbing should be heard from within the house. What shall I say, Sir. Try to go away for eight years from your château, said to be so full of company, of kindness, of abundance, and then return and then you will understand. No, Sir. I do not wish such a quarter of an hour on you.”

XXI “I returned to the window after weeping. Denise came back to her seat by the fire to undress the children, for there were two little children of about four and six years old running to and fro in the house, hanging onto her apron. I forgot to mention them to you. “Now I could see Denise as I wanted to, for she had the back of her chair turned towards the door and her face, lit by the fire, towards the garret window. Sir, that was not the same Denise I had left behind. She was quite changed, although she was recognisably the same person in her appearance; the beautiful young sixteen-year-old girl under the young twenty-six-year-old widow. It would seem that you only had to wave your

118

Chapter Eleven

hand over the shadow of her face to find her once more as she had been before my journey through France. She was wearing her woollen dress braided with black, her cheeks were paler, the corners of her mouth a little more turned down to her chin, the rings round her eyes touched with blue, like someone with a slight bruise under her eyelids, her bust a little lower, the skin on her arms whiter, and a shade thinner. “A person who had not aged, but had suffered—there you had Denise. I could not keep my eyes off her and I said to myself, ‘Poor Denise! Poor Denise! Could not I have been there to spare you the distress and the labour! I love you even more than I did when you had no tear in the corner of your eye and not a finger’s mark of sadness on the skin of your cheeks. Lord, how I admire you, even more than when you were younger and more attractive. I can no longer be your fiancé but how I would want to be your helper and servant, with no other reward than to see you and hold your little fatherless children on my knees!’”

XXII “When she had half undressed the two little ones, that is, the six or sevenyear-old boy and the four or five-year-old little girl, and you could see their pretty little pink shoulders coming out of their clean linen shirts, she made them kneel down at her apron and I heard them half lisping the Our Father, the words of which she made them say after her, their hands together, half asleep as they were. Lord, what a pretty sight, Sir, that young mother with those little ones from whom the good Lord had taken their father, alone and deserted on the mountain at night, next to an old dying mother, leading these two lovely children to speak of the Father in heaven, just as if they had seen Him, and kissing them afterwards on the forehead or on the lips to reward them for having faithfully repeated His name after her! “When that was over, she told them, ‘Now that you have said your prayers well for us, to the good Lord, my little ones, we must finish by saying it for others’, and to fix their attention on a visible object she stretched out an arm to the wall and took down something hanging on a nail by the chimney. It was my stonemason’s sack, Sir, that I had left at home, forgetting it when I had run away without saying goodbye to my brother, which had remained as a memento of me just where I had put it. So she took it down and laid it on her knees in front of the joined hands of the children. I saw something shiny on the sack, Sir. It was the bronze cross from her old ribbon that she had wanted to give me when we parted and that I had not wanted to take. It seemed that since that day she had not

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

119

wanted to put that pendant and that cross back on her neck and had left them attached by a pin to my little leather sack. “‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘say a prayer before this crucifix that He receives the soul of your father in His paradise.’ And the littler ones lowered their heads as she did. “‘Say a prayer that the good Lord may sustain and heal your grandmother who is sick and that He cares for us at least until you are grown up.’ They lowered their heads as she did. “‘Say a prayer for your uncle Claude, about whom we speak every day, whose sack you see under this crucifix, so that if he is dead, the good Lord may grant him grace and mercy and, if he is alive, the good Lord may take care of him in those faraway parts where he is travelling, that he causes him to find a good wife and children like you and watches over him in his work.’ “They lowered their heads like her, but she held hers down much longer than they and, as she put the crucifix on the sack, she touched it with her lips before hanging it back on the nail. “So I knew that Denise still loved me. I did not want to see anything further, Sir.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I “Soon the fire in the hearth went out and the silence of sleep took over the house. Only I was left groping my way around in the feeble light of the crescent moon that had risen behind the chestnut trees. I could not decide what to do, but I could not go away; strings seemed to be pulling at my heart. I took a few steps here and there. I recognised all the places around where I was born, as a child with my mother and father, as a shepherd boy with Denise. The well, the spring, the plum trees, the orchard, the meadow, the haystacks, everything seemed to be saying to me, ‘Good morning, Claude! We have not seen you for a long time, but we always know you, as the chestnut recognises the shell it was formed in when it is put back in it for the winter.’ The soft light of the moon filtering through the leaves like a hidden light from the mountain sprites lit a silent celebration of the return of a child of the mountain. I was calm, yet I could not go to sleep.”

II “After visiting and recognising everything and even—and I have to confess all my folly—after having given a good hug to the plum trees, the cherries and the elders as if they had a heart under their bark to hug me back, I again went up to the hut and circled it. Then, tired of wandering about to right and left in this way, I sat down on a heap of straw that had been left in the evening as litter between the goat door and the steps to the house, just over where you saw my dog lying when you came to my hollow just now. As I was stretched out there, I would not attempt to tell you, Sir, how many thoughts came to my head whilst the crescent moon passed from one hill to another before my eyes. In the bed of the gorge I heard the murmuring of a few trickles of water under the leaves that night. It was at the same time so sad and so sweet. “When I thought that my poor blind brother was no longer there and that my mother was probably on her deathbed, quite unconsoled and not seeing at least one of her children at her bedside, I was heartbroken. But then, when I thought that Denise was still there, still so charming and

122

Chapter Twelve

tender, watching over my mother or asleep by the cradles of the two little ones and who still had such love for me that she had taught the name of Claude to her children to have them pray to the good Lord for me over my crucifix and something of mine, then I was the happiest of man on earth. In this struggle that was so long drawn out and indecisive, between anxiety and contentment, my thoughts became confused and my eyes closed. I pulled the simpleton’s cloak over my head as we common folk do with our jackets when we want to sleep. I turned my face to the side of the wall and went to sleep, saying to myself, ‘You will wake up before daybreak and climb up there to hide among the chestnut trees, so as not to go into the house until the sun is high and your mother is properly awake, poor woman’.”

III “I expected to rest for a few hours only and to sleep so as not to miss the cockcrow. “But, Sir, my physical exhaustion, and, even more, my heart’s exhaustion with all the ideas that had battered my head for two long days, cheated my expectation and I slept so soundly and so well that neither the song of the lark, nor the crowing of the cock, nor the lowing of a hundred oxen calling the cowherd to the stable would have succeeded in waking me. It was the good Lord’s will, wasn’t it? I was dead and deaf as the stones of the steps I had cut out. Alas, that was most unfortunate. It would have been better for all concerned if I had been under the chestnuts and revised my longing to return to the hut, even to receive the last blessing from my mother.”

IV “I do not know for how long I slept, Sir, but suddenly I heard the light sound of clogs coming down the steps of the house, right over my head, followed by the lighter, smaller clogs coming down. Then, as I opened my eyes, I saw full daylight through the chinks in my cloak and two frightened children’s voices saying, ‘Mummy, there’s the simpleton lying by the wall. We’re afraid to go past.’ ‘Go on, go on’, a gentle voice replied. It was Denise. ‘Come, come. The simpleton won’t harm anyone. He is sleeping there, poor chap, because he found the barn not open last night. Don’t disturb his sleep. You will take him a bowl of milk and some bread when I have milked the goats.’ And she went into the shed next door to

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

123

milk the herd, passing so close to me that I felt the draught from her apron over my face.”

V “I leave you to think, Sir, how I felt at that moment. I would have longed to be a hundred feet under the ground and to escape far away. Far away, from fear of being seen by Denise in the clothes of a beggar. What would she think of me? But the two little children had remained by me there, outside, making no noise in obedience to their mother and, putting their little fingers on their lips as they watched me sleeping, for fear of me and of disobeying Denise. I did not dare move. I thought, ‘When she comes back with the pinewood bucket in her hand and goes into the house to look for the bowl and the bread and the children follow her up, I will get away and no one will know what has happened to me when they come down again to wake me up.”

VI “But unfortunately there was a bowl in the stable and a crust of bread on the floor over my head, next to the door. So, as she left off milking the goats, Denise, still just as caring for the poor as she ever had been, picked up a crust of bread from the floor and dipped it in the bowl. She came up close to me and in her softest voice spoke to me, ‘Wake up, dear Benoît,’ she said, ‘it is full sunlight. You have slept a long time. You must have something to eat. There is a bowl of milk and some bread. Take it and pray to the good Lord for the whole household… and for Claude’, she added, in the tenderest of voices. “Ah! Sir, my name was on her lips and I did not dare to kiss the tips of her clogs. You understand? “I felt thunderstruck in my head, my heart and over my whole being. Had the good Lord not told me to get up I would not have budged. I did nothing. I was hoping that she would go away without waking me up.”

VII “But Denise was concerned that I made no reply, as I held my breath so as not to move, thinking no doubt that I had fallen down there sick or exhausted from lack of food. She called to me louder and, still getting no reply, put her pail on the ground, picked up the bowl in her left hand and

124

Chapter Twelve

with her right hand pulled my cloak off my face so that the sunlight could shine in my eyes and waken me. “Imagine what I thought, Sir, and what she herself thought when her hand lifted my mantle and revealed to her in full sunlight, instead of the face of the idiot she expected to find there—what? The face and person of her fiancé, Claude, dressed in beggar’s rags!”

VIII “She gave a cry that sent the children and the chickens scattering all over the yard. Her fingers dropped the bowl and the milk on the grass and she fell over backwards, with her right hand barely grasping her poor body to the first step of the stairway. I stood up and ran to help her. The children came back to see, and began crying and shrieking. My old mother came out, half dressed, at the noise on the verandah to see what misfortune had befallen Denise. She recognised me, gave a cry and stretched out her arms. I ran up, embraced her and carried her back to her deathbed. Then I went back to pick up Denise and comfort her as she had half-fainted for fear. I supported her in my arms and brought her, trembling, back into the house and sat her down on the wooden bench next to the tablecloth.”

IX “‘Is it really you, Claude, in these poor clothes?’ she said, ‘Is it you, my poor child, reduced to begging? Is this home so distressed that a child of Les Huttes, such a good worker and so helpful to others, is begging his bread from door to door? Good Lord!’ “I quickly reassured her by explaining that I had exchanged clothes with the simpleton over at Milly so as not to be recognized by shepherds and to have news of home without going back. I did not dare to finish all my thoughts for fear of bringing the past back to Denise. But I pulled out of my waistcoat pocket a handful of thirty sou coins that I had earned and kept aside for home that time at Lyon and Mâcon, in case they had need of money, and I showed my mother and Denise my shirtsleeves of good quality striped cotton of which the proudest girls in the region should have been glad to own to make scarves or aprons. “The two women were convinced when they saw these that I had not fallen on bad times and returned as a beggar to disgrace the family.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

125

X “They gave me food and drink with the children, who had become used to me and laughed as they dressed themselves up with the mantle and bag of the beggar. I described in a few words my journeyings in France. ‘Good Lord. How big the world is’, they said as they listened. Denise turned quite pale when my mother asked me if I had not met up with a girl I liked and if I was not engaged to anyone. Then Denise blushed and went outside, on the pretext of going to give grass to the goats, when I replied that I had not and had never thought of being married. “Then, when I was alone with my mother, she took advantage of there just being the two of us and told me what had happened during my absence from home, speaking hurriedly and softly so as not to cause Denise to cry.”

XI “‘Ah! My dear Claude,’ she began to say to me, ‘How wrong I was and how I need forgiveness from you! You see, we should never will anything other than what the good Lord wills, my boy, as sooner or later our will is crushed by His. You loved Denise: Denise loved you. I willed it otherwise than you. I loved poor Gratien too much. It was natural, since he was the least able of my children. I thought that only Denise could console him in his sad life. She obeyed me out of sacrifice, the poor girl. She said, “Aunt, I will marry whom you tell me to marry since I owe you everything and you are as my mother.” I made you go away, thinking that you were a strong young man who with your arms and eyes would find other girls, whereas there was only one for this blind boy. So what has happened? This, my boy.’”

XII “‘Ill came through the door of this house before you had shut it, you see. First Denise was ill for six months and it took away the use of her arms, her strength and her complexion. She became as pale as the violets in the shade of the hazels. ‘The blind boy could not suspect anything. Nobody told him anything and he continued to live from day to day. Her patience and gentleness were the same as ever and her voice took on more tenderness than before. It was like the sound of a bell cracked by a hammer. He thought it was a sign of her love for him, in his innocence. He was waiting for the moment

126

Chapter Twelve

when I would tell him, “You can speak to Denise”. Finally I told him, Denise agreed to whatever I asked her. She had nothing against Gratien. On the contrary, she loved him as an unfortunate brother. ‘She gave herself completely to him all his life, like the dog we gave him when he was a child that stayed close to his legs and never left him I had them engaged a year after you left, and they only waited until St John’s day to be married. That happened with no fuss, no celebration, no change of home, any more than if a new servant had arrived. Gratien was very happy and Denise did not show her feelings. Only if your sack happened to fall from the nail to the floor, or a relative came by Les Huttes and asked for news of you and mentioned your name, then would she would go off and call her hens or sweep the top sty. But never a word more between us three.’”

XIII “‘Three years went by like that, and Denise had first her girl and then her boy. That seemed to bring more happiness to the home. But, no, it wasn’t as I thought. ‘One evening as you were being talked about in the district, a boy from Saint Point who was in the army passed by Les Huttes and met my blind son at the doorstep and told him, “I am returning from Toulon-sur-Mer and your brother Claude is working on the Fort, but he will not be working for long, poor man, his comrades say that he is heart sore and doesn’t want to relax or drink or laugh with them. He is harder than his hammer and closer than his saw, and won’t live through the winter. He is about to leave for another workplace. I haven’t been able to ask around and find work for him in these parts.” ‘That poor soldier was not aware of the damage he was doing. It was a death blow for our blind one. Denise, who was at the back of the house breastfeeding her little girl, heard everything. She did not let on in any way, but it turned her milk so we had to feed the baby with milk from one of the she-goats. ‘As for Gratien, he cried out and beat his forehead with both hands as if he had seen a lightning flash from the good Lord for the first time. “I have killed my brother,” he said to me softly when he came in, “My good fortune is at his cost. I can’t go on living”.’

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

127

XIV “‘From that day he had not a moment of peace. Denise herself could get no word of comfort from him. Even her voice, previously so necessary to his ears, seemed to upset him. He wasn’t sleeping, he had no appetite, he did not want the children or Denise to stay by him in the yard or in the house. He went to bed by himself with the sheep in the stable. He did not want anything to do with me to console him. He would say to me, “Is it you who sacrificed them for my happiness? You were wrong. I was a Cain! May God forgive us all and may He take me soon! I want to go above and ask my brother’s forgiveness.” I had the doctor in. He told me, “There is nothing wrong with him, it is his mind; we must leave it to time and humour him in every way, dear lady”. ‘At the end of six months he died, without being ill, asking your forgiveness as if you had been there at his bedside, saying, “Denise, Denise, don’t reproach me forever for having loved you in place of someone else. I have stolen the happiness of another from your heart. I am content to die as punishment for my wrongdoing and so many other things as these, my dear Claude.” ‘Denise, the children and I, we wept for him so: he was so good. His goodness had killed him.’”

XV “‘That was about two years ago, my dear child. From that moment, times have been hard for us, you see. I was again depressed with remorse for your misfortune and Denise’s, and distressed at the death of your brother. My arms lost strength, as did my heart. My feet did not support me any more to go to the fields. Hardly had my task begun than I had to lean on the handle of my rake. I was no longer good for anything but to work my spindle, to sit by the bushes and watch the animals. ‘Denise, who had quite enough to do for her two little ones, had to get up before dawn and go to bed after midnight to get everything done, the barley, the hay, the chestnuts, digging, weeding, harvesting, bringing in the sheaves, separating the grain, beating the chestnuts, everything. She could not do it all poor child, and bread became scarce on the tablecloth. I had to take to my sick bed three weeks ago. The animals had to look after themselves, on their own with the dog. Denise spent her days at my bedside caring for me. Poverty was at the door, as well as sadness and death, when the good Lord sent you. May He bless you as I bless you, my dear Claude. Perhaps there will be a solution to all this, if you can remain

128

Chapter Twelve

with us now and work for your mother, be a father to the little ones, and maybe,’ she added, weeping, ‘once again be engaged to Denise’. ‘So be it,’ I answered, ‘Mother, if Denise does not despise me now that she has seen me in these beggar’s clothes, I will remain and not leave again. I will love these little ones as my brother’s children and as mine; I will love Denise as I have always loved her.’”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I “That said, I left to go and look for a suitable jacket and linen in Mâcon in place of the simpleton’s rags. “When I returned the following day, my mother had told Denise everything. She made me welcome and poured out soup for me at the end of the table where she used to serve it for me when she was a girl and I was her fiancé. I took the little boy and girl on my knees, hugged them so that she understood that I loved them for her sake. In fact, it was the little girl who looked like her, Sir, and as I hugged her I thought that I was hugging them both. “But we did not speak to each other about it, because my mother said that it was necessary to get permission from the mayor and a dispensation from the parish priest for a brother-in-law to marry a sister-in-law. “It was then that I went down to the château and your mother, so helpful and beloved throughout the hill country, received me graciously and obtained the documents for me. Indeed, I met you then when you were quite young, in the garden with your sister. I did not know that you would one day come so often to these rocks to talk with a humble man like me.”

II “When I had the documents, Sir, then we talked to each other as we used to talk in former days under the hazels and beside the bushes, only that the children gathered poppies or pulled out the nightingales’ nests around us, every so often coming back to show them to their mother and me. Denise smiled and wept, and wept and smiled like an April shower. She was prettier than at eighteen since she now slept through the night and there was bread and milk aplenty on the table, thanks to my provision, and she sensed me there beside her without anybody attempting to gainsay or separate us. I had bought her blue woollen dresses embroidered with red, with aprons of striped cotton and shoes with brass buckles as shiny as her crucifix. Her cheeks had become rosy like haws. She ran up the sloping fields after her little girl as lightly as if she had been her sister. How young we were! How delirious we were! How happy we were, Sir, The day drew

130

Chapter Thirteen

near when we must go down to the village to be married. My mother herself looked younger and began to take the sun again in the yard. Those nine years were nothing but a bad dream that seemed to have lasted but a night.”

III “In the waiting period I took up work again, to bring back a little ease of living to the household and to buy the trousseau and linen that make up newlyweds’ things in the district. “As I had been absent for so long from the valley of Saint Point and the other stonemasons did not work so reasonably for the poorer inhabitants of the mountain, there were plenty of orders for work for me. That man had married off his daughter and wanted to build another room for his son-in-law; this man’s barn had fallen down, or his sink or his dovecote. The women asked me to make mortars for salt, the men for millstones, the herdsmen troughs for their cattle, the ploughmen wheel stubs for their doors. I earned, even in small sums, more than was needed to support our small family. I had cleared my old quarry between Les Huttes and the valley of all the rubble that the landslips and downpours had accumulated over nine years and all the brambles that had grown over it. I had made, under the pleasant firs where Denise used to bring me my ‘nosebag’, a hollow that was over-arched like a cave from which I extracted thick blocks, squared, yellow and handsome as butter, good enough to make a pillar for a cathedral. I regained the strength of an eighteen year old in my arms. At each blow of the pick I said to myself, as I watched my sweat falling like raindrops on the stones, ‘This is for her’, and I felt more vigorous in the evening than in the morning. What a sweet repose does love bring to the heart! “And at home everyone was happy, including the children.”

IV “My mother had made fritters and waffles of buckwheat for the wedding day, which was the Tuesday of St John’s summer feast. She had invited the relatives, the boys and girls who lived in the village or were spread out here and there in the hamlets. There were a dozen, young and old, as many boys and girls of the poulterer as of the others. The dressmakers had come to make a bridal gown and headdress for Denise and they were trying this and that on her all day. You should have heard the chatter and the laughter in the house from dawn to dusk.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

131

V “As for me, Sir, I would laugh for a moment with them then go down again to work, but not consistently during these latter days. My heart was too taken up with Denise. Also, for a surprise I had prepared what we called St John’s Day fireworks, as was customary in these hills on the eve of that feast, to celebrate the wedding with a more striking spectacle than usual. I worked for eight days digging a cache of explosives such as I had seen dug in the rocks at Toulon, capable of lifting the roof off my quarry under the pines and giving me enough material for masonry for more than six months without further effort.” “I had said nothing to anyone, even to Denise, so that it would go off at the end of the wedding feast and everyone a league away on the mountains would say when they heard it, ‘There goes the stonemason’s wedding salvo’. I had packed it with half a quintal of gunpowder, well wadded with stone dust on top. In case of mishap, I had attached a slow burning fuse and covered it with gravel, dust and dry grass so that the animals would not disturb it with their hooves. I alone knew the clump of nettles where the fuse end was curled as it emerged from the ground near the quarry, beside the road.”

VI “On the morning of the day before the wedding, I went to the quarry again so as not to be idle (‘to break my arm’, as it is said). I gave a few blows of pick and crowbar to my stones, I inspected the fuse, I prepared my trail of tinder up the road and I said to myself as I climbed up again, ‘You will strike the flint, the powder will catch, the tinder will light and take the flame slowly to the fuse. You will have time, without haste, to go up to Les Huttes, you can drink a glass to the health of the relatives as you kiss Denise, then the blast will go off’. That was my plan, Sir.”

VII “When I had done this, I went running down to the village of Saint Point to buy six bottles of white wine to provide drink for the wedding the next day. I relaxed a little with one or another, with the landlord, with the bell ringer, with the curé and his servant. Everyone stopped me and congratulated me on my good fortune in marrying such a courageous and beautiful widow; for she was well known and liked, even though she was seen only by chance at church and the main feasts, never at dances. She

132

Chapter Thirteen

was known, as I told you, as ‘the shy woman of Les Huttes’, but not thought of any the less for it. I was offered a glass of wine everywhere and could not refuse without being churlish. I drank several times too much. The proof of that is that I, who did no more than whistle at work, went up to Les Huttes almost at nightfall singing so loudly that my voice put the birds to flight that had already gone to roost in the bushes and on the trees.”

VIII “I thought only of my good fortune in becoming Denise’s partner next day and coming down from there with her, when she would wear one bunch of red carnations on her breast and another in her headdress. I could see her beforehand on my arm, with her pretty shoes on her feet, or in her hand for fear of scratching them on the stones. I had quite forgotten that it was the Eve of St John, the evening when torches of burning straw are carried around and pine poles lit on the hills.” “As I came to my workplace in the shadows I heard a noise in the leaves and something like whispers of women’s and children’s voices from the other side of the quarry, high up under the tall fir tree. I stopped and said to myself, ‘That will be Denise, the seamstresses and the children, who have come to meet me as a surprise and a joke as they had not seen me going back up, since it is so late’. And that was only too true for, just as I was thinking that, Denise’s clear and trilling voice hallooed at me with full strength, laughing, echoing from one side of the clearing to the other. The children hallooed with their pretty little voices as she did, shouting happily, ‘Claude! Claude!’ through the woods. “I replied, hallooing likewise so that my voice rose more loudly than theirs, which sounded above me as mine down below, ‘Denise! Denise! It’s you! It’s me!’ as I ran a few steps round the hollowed edges of my quarry to go and hug them. “But at that moment, Sir, a great light flashed suddenly in my eyes and a dozen voices of children and infants began to shout from the opposite side to the rise where I had heard Denise. It was the boys, girls and infants of the morrow’s wedding who had come to greet and surprise me, to spend the night at Les Huttes and to walk with lighted torches of straw surrounding Denise and me, a sign of rejoicing. They had come to light them as they heard me reply to Denise. They came forward with shouts of joy, shaking their flames and sparks above their heads in the darkness.”

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

133

IX “In the glow from their burning torches I saw Denise clearly at the top of the quarry, right on the cliff top opposite me. Her little boy was holding her hand and her little girl was hanging from her neck, sitting on her arm like a statue of the Holy Virgin carrying the child Jesus. She was gazing at me with an expression of gladness and love, lit up in the red glow. I held out my arms to her, then suddenly gave a great shout and gestured to her to get away from where she was standing. “The thought struck me like a hammer blow to the head. The boys and girls were fast approaching where I had planted the primer over my tinder in the morning. A spark carried by the wind would be enough to light the fuse and blow up the rock above the cave over which Denise was standing. “Alas, Sir, I thought of it too late. I had no time to loosen my tongue in my mouth or stretch out my hand towards Denise before a mighty blast of an underground explosion burst under her feet and I saw her propelled with her children clinging to her neck as high as the top of the fir tree, falling down as a cloud of smoke, as one coming down from heaven, swallowed them in a chasm that had just opened up then closed again with the noise of the world falling to pieces. Heavens alive! Would that it had closed up again over me!...” I could not keep back a cry of horror and tears of pity….

X I saw that the poor man could not go on. I was so sorry for his anguish. I hastened to draw him away towards another spot and to distract his mind from that horrendous end of his love, putting off to another day the details of that event that was still being talked about in the hills. He understood me, he got up shakily weeping and praying, “It was God’s will, Sir”. He stopped as if by the divine hand, as if felt on his head. The two of us started off in silence down the road to the valley. As we passed the edge of the deserted quarry he turned his head away. I noticed a stone cross against an old trunk of a fir tree that I had not noticed before, above a wide landslip. That was doubtless the place where, after the explosion, he had seen Denise raised up in the sky like a saint above the cloud. He went with me this time as far as the edge of the fields. I seemed to have become closer to him since I had wept with him for Denise.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I When I saw him again on the following Sunday, he said, “Alas, Sir, what have you come to seek? I have no more to tell you. Denise was discovered dead with her two children by the diggers in the rubble of the cave. The doctor said that they were already dead, suffocated and struck down by the smoke and fire of the explosion before they had fallen back into the grave I had dug for them. They were carried there to the spot where you stand, beside my mother, who had not been able to remain alive for a single day after our ill fortune. If you roll back that layer of turf over this earth bed, you will see all my family again. They keep the place for me, as you see, Sir. There is my marriage bed, beside Denise”. I saw a space between two graves. “And you are living there,” I said with compassion, “always looking at your vanished love?” “I could not live otherwise any more” he said to me. “My heart has taken root there, like this box tree that draws its sap from death.” “And do you never complain in yourself, Claude, against that Providence that has twice given you a glimpse of happiness so close by, only to snatch it away from you when you thought you held it in your arms?” “Me complain against the good Lord, Sir?” he exclaimed, “Oh no! He knows what He is doing and, as for us, we only know what we suffer. But I have always thought that suffering was the desire of the heart, subdued in the heart until acceptance emerges from it. That is to say, perfected prayer—human will, bending under the hand from above.” “But will desire, bent under the hand from above, not emerge again, Claude, like a spring rebounds when the weight upon it is lifted?” “Yes, Sir, but if it rebounds in this world, then that is a revolt: if above, then that is Paradise.” “And what is Paradise according to you, Claude?” “It is the will of God in heaven, as on earth, Sir.” “But if that will were found to be contrary to yours still above and you were once again separated from your beloved?”

136

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, I would wait again. Yes, Sir, I would wait for an eternity without complaining until the Good Lord said to me, ‘There is what you seek’.” “Do you firmly believe that you will find Denise again?” “Yes, Sir.” “When?” “When it pleases God.” “And while you wait are you suffering?” “I suffer no more, Sir. I love and I hope.” “And yet you believe as well, don’t you?” No, Sir, I have no difficulty in believing. I live with two loves. Is not faith love? I have it twice over.” “So, in all this you are not too miserable?” “Not at all, Sir, God has given me grace to see Him everywhere, even in my sufferings. Can you be unfortunate when in the presence of the good Lord?”

II I often came back during that summer to visit Claude and to discuss one thing and another with him, but above all higher things. I always had the same appreciation of his simplicity and the salve of his words. He was for me like one of those tree trunks where honey bees have left a smear on the coarse bark, which you taste with delight when you find it after a long walk in the sun at a wood’s edge. I spent some time away without returning to Saint Point. I returned in 18.., walked up to Les Huttes and there found only a wild goat browsing the grass and the threshold of the empty and deserted shack. Another mound lay in the enclosure beside that where Denise slept. As I went down I met one of the poulterer’s sons who was going to pick up the windfall plums in the orchard of Les Huttes to fill the panniers of his donkey. “Is Claude dead, then?” I said to him. “Yes, Sir, two years ago, on St Martin’s Day”, the poor, lame fellow replied. “What did he die of?” “Oh, he died of God’s love, as the priest said.” “What do you mean—‘of God’s love’, Benoît? You live in it, but you don’t die of it,” I said to him. “Isn’t it rather for love of Denise?” “Ah, Sir, that is it! That man loved God so much that he no longer thought of Him, no more than a swallow that has just hatched and does not

The Stonemason of Saint-Point by Alphonse de Lamartine

137

know how to eat unless its mother brings him a midge to its nest. He had saved nothing against years of illness. He was working for the love of God in all the villages. He only said to those he worked for, ‘If I get disabled or sick, you will feed me, won’t you?’ In fact, Sir, he broke his leg and dislocated his shoulder as he was raising widow Baptistine’s roof after it collapsed on her and her children one night. By saving their lives, he lost his own.” “But everyone took good care of him, didn’t they, in his last illness? For they are caring people in the neighbourhood, especially if they don’t have to spend a farthing.” “Oh, yes, Sir, they carried him on a litter to his hut and one person on one day, another on the next, went up to take him his bread and turn him over on his straw mattress. He would have lacked for nothing, had he wanted it. But he was anxious not to be a burden to people or to take anything that was not his due. So he accepted absolutely nothing but a piece of bread for himself and his dog. When pressed to accept anything else, like some meat or a little beef tea to sustain him, he would say, ‘No, I have not earned that from you. I do not want it. I would deprive your children’. No reasoning or pleading would persuade him, so in the end they had to take it away. “One day, when he seemed weaker than usual, my wife and I went there and took him a bowl of broth from a chicken we had killed for him and I said, ‘Take it, Claude, we have killed our surplus and have made broth’. But no. When he saw the bowl he said, ‘That is not soup from a surplus fowl. You have killed a hen to feed me. I will not take your goods, because I cannot repay you.’ “We spoke in vain, Sir, to no effect. He refused to drink the broth that would have strengthened him. He only took the bread. My wife left the full bowl on the floor of his room and we went away. Next day, when I came back to keep him company on Sunday, the full bowl was still where we had left it and he, Sir, had died of weakness with the black dog at his feet. That man was a saint of God, for sure.”

III Nowadays, when autumn brings me back to Saint Point, I climb up once more to Les Huttes as the chestnut leaves are falling. Poor Claude’s grave inspires me to prayer, acceptance and peace. I like to sit there at sundown and think of him and Denise, reunited under the sun’s rays that never slumber.

138

Chapter Fourteen

IV And I miss that man in the valley. The little lamp I used to see from my window, shining through the mountain mists, was like a star that should be set in the firmament of the sky—or like a glow-worm glimmering in the grass under the bushes that suddenly goes out at your feet. Just a glowworm, but it contained a fragment of the fire of suns. So was poor Claude. Sometimes, in the midst of the fields in the burning heat of noon on a summer’s day, when everything was silent in the valley, I listened involuntarily with my ear inclined towards the mountains and thought I heard a regular hammer beat, resounding on the echoing stone like a rustic pendulum on the eternal dial.

FINIS