Milianah

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

Translator’s Foreword: Among all the admirable gifts Alphonse Daudet possessed as a writer lurked at least one horrible flaw: he was anti-semitic. It is unclear if he acquired this prejudice from his childhood environment, from some slights he felt he suffered in his early days in journalism, or from the atmosphere of the lofty government ministries of the Second Empire where he became a favorite – perhaps all three. Even more unfortunately, it imprinted itself on his family, for his son Léon became a vicious hater of Jews who involved himself in the Dreyfus Affair on the wrong side, slandered the Jewish French prime minister Léon Blum, and sided with the pro-Nazi Vichy government during the Occupation. I have chosen not to bowdlerize or mitigate Daudet’s anti-Jewish attitude in the following piece for two reasons. Firstly, it is my impression from the Jewish intellectuals around me that they do not prefer to cover up the injustices done them under a doily of false delicacy, but rather to probe deeply into the reasons and motives for such wrongs in order to assure that they will not happen again. Secondly, I feel that Daudet’s thinking was not entirely an individual phenomenon, but part of a larger colonialist discourse that remains to be fully examined, as it may affect the course of history in our own times. Further, I feel this story is of special interest because, though it has been largely neglected by nineteenth-century and colonial period scholars, it offers observations – however stilted – on the phenomenon of clashes that occur when an occidental, constitutional system of law is superimposed on an indigenous system operating on religious and ethnic models, with the result that both systems tend to degrade each other and to provide disservice to the public.

***

     On this occasion, I invite you to come spend a day in a pretty Algerian town hundreds of miles from my mill in Provence. It will give us a change of scenery from the tambourines and the cicadas of that place.

Rain is on the way, the sky is overcast and the peak of Mount Zaccar is wrapped in mist. A dreary Sunday. In my cozy hotel room overlooking the old Arab fortifications, I try to distract myself by chain-smoking. I’ve gone over the entire library at my disposal in the hotel: a huge, detailed registry book and a few comic romances by Paul de Kock. Discovering a mismatched volume of Montaigne, I open and reread his magnificent letter on the death of his friend Étienne de la Boétie. It leaves me plunged deeper in somber reverie than before. A few drops of rain have begun to fall. Each one, falling on the window sill, creates a star in the dust that’s accumulated since last year’s rainy season. The book slips from my hands and I sink into a prolonged contemplation of those melancholy stars. Two o’clock sounds on the municipal clock mounted on the white wall of the tomb of a local Muslim saint. The poor old mausoleum! Who could have told him thirty years ago that today he would have a big clock stuck in his chest and that every Sunday it would send out the signal to the Christian churches in Milianah that they should ring vespers? Ding, dong, there they go, and it’s going to last a long while. This room is getting really depressing. Those fat morning spiders called Deep Thoughts have spun their webs in every corner. Let’s get out of here.

     I emerge into the central square. The regimental band of the Third Infantry, unafraid of a few drops of rain, is moving into place around its conductor. In a window in the Officers’ Quarters, the general appears with his daughters. In the square, the chief of police strolls back and forth with the chief judge. A gaggle of half-naked Arab urchins shriek out as they play marbles in a corner. Further on, an old Jew in rags comes out to search for the sunny spot he had left there the previous day and he is mystified that he cannot find it. “And a one, and a two, and a three!” The band launches into a tired mazurka by Talexy that hurdy-gurdies had played in the alleyways years before. That tune used to annoy me to no end, but on this occasion it moves me to tears.

     Oh, how happy they are, those musicians in the Third Infantry brass band. Their eyes glued to the notes in front of them on the music holders, intoxicated by the tempo, they think of nothing but counting their measures. Their entire soul is laid out on that square of paper hardly bigger than my hand, trembling on the instrument in its copper clip. “One, two three, hit it!” That amounts to everything for those boys. The patriotic tunes they play never make them homesick. Alas, not being a part of the band, I get disturbed by the melodies and I walk on…

     Where, oh, where could I while away this grey Sunday afternoon? Right! Sid’Omar’s place is open. Let’s go visit Sid’Omar.

     Although he has an open-air shop, Sid’Omar is no shop-keeper. He’s a prince of the blood royal, son of the former Dey of Algiers who was strangled by his Turkish guards. His father dead, Sid’Omar took refuge in Milianah with his beloved mother and lived there for a number of years like a lordly philosopher surrounded by his dogs, his falcons, his horses and his wives, in a comfortable shady mansion brimming with orange trees and fountains. Then came the French. At first our enemy and an ally of the insurgent chieftain Abd el-Kader, Sid’Omar eventually quarreled with the rebels and submitted to the colonial authorities. Out of revenge, the rebel leader burst into Milianah, pillaged his palace, tore out the orange trees, stole his horses and his wives, and all but decapitated his mother with the lid of a huge wooden trunk. Sid’Omar’s anger was terrible. That very instant, he became an active agent of the French, and we never had a more ferocious soldier at our service during the arduous struggle against the natives. Once the war was over, Sid’Omar settled again in Milianah. Yet even today, if one mentions Abd el-Kader, he grows pale and his eyes fill with fire.

     Sid’Omar is sixty. Despite old age and smallpox, his face remains handsome: thick lashes, a woman’s complexion, a charming smile and a princely air. Impoverished by the colonial wars, he lost all his former wealth except a farm in the plains of Chélif and a townhouse in Milianah, where he lives among the merchants and keeps track of his three grown sons. The native leaders from miles around hold him in great respect. Whenever a dispute arises, they appeal to him right away for arbitration, and his word is almost always law. He seldom leaves home. Each afternoon he sits in his store-front on a rug overlooking the busy street. The white-washed room is sparsely furnished with a circular wooden bench, some cushions, a few hookahs and two brasiers. There Sid’Omar holds audience and dispenses justice. Solomon in a store-front.

     This Sunday the space is packed. A dozen sheiks draped in their burnous robes crouch around the room, each with a hookah nearby and a small glass of dense coffee sitting in a finely-wrought metal holder. When I come in, none of them reacts. From his seat of judgment, Sid’Omar shows me his most gracious smile and beckons me with his hand to sit at his side on a cushion of golden silk. Then, with a finger to his lips, he bids me be silent and heedful.

     The case is this way: the leader of the Beni Zougzoug clan having a dispute with a Jew from Milianah over the property rights to a lot, the two parties resolve to submit the matter to Sid’Omar and to abide by his decision. The matter has been put on the docket that very day, witnesses already duly summoned, when the Jew up and changes his mind, walks into court all alone and without supporting testimony, declaring that he would rather involve the French colonial magistrate than Sid’Omar. That’s how it stands when I arrive.

The old, grimy-bearded Jew wears a maroon jacket, blue stockings and a velvet skullcap. He raises his nose up to the heavens, rolls his eyes in supplication, kisses Sid’Omar’s slippers, inclines his head, joins his hands, and kneels. My Arabic is a bit rusty but from the Jew’s pantomime and his constant refrain of “Frensh zhudge, Frensh zhudge,” I can guess the tenor of his eloquent statement.

     “I doubt not the word of Sid’Omar. Sid’Omar is wise. Sid’Omar is just. But the Frensh zhudge can handle this matter more suitably.”

     Though inwardly irate, the listener nevertheless remains impassive, true to his Arab nature. Slouching on his cushions, his eyes half-closed, the amber mouthpiece of the water pipe in his lips, Sid’Omar, god of irony, smiles as he pays attention. All at once in the middle of a most finely turned conclusion, the Jew is interrupted by an outburst of “Carramba!” that stops him in his tracks. At that instant a Spanish colonist who had come as witness for the sheik rises from his seat and advances on this Judas Iscariot. He splatters the Jew with a bucketful of insults in every language and style, including certain French phrases too filthy, sir, for me to repeat in this account. Sid’Omar’s son, who understands the idiom of Paris, blushes to hear such terms in the presence of his father and rushes out of the room. That tells you something about an Arab upbringing. The arbitrator is still impassive, smiling away. The Jew gets on his feet and sidles backwards towards the door, shaking with fear but still intoning his interminable “Frensh Zhudge… Frensh Zhudge.” As he exits, the furious Spaniard leaps after him , catches up with him in the street, and punches him twice in the face – biff! baff! Judas drops to his knees and hides his head in his arms. The Spaniard comes back into the store-front with a hang-dog look. As soon as he has gone away, the Jew hops back up and casts a suspicious gaze on the motley crowd that has gathered around him. There are people of every color there, Maltese, Balearic Islanders, blacks, Arabs, all united in their hatred of the Jews and overjoyed to see one of them roughed up. Judas hesitates a second and then grabs an Arab by the edge of his burnous.

     “You saw him, Ahmed, you saw him. You were there. The Christian attacked me. You will be my witness. Yes, yes! You will serve as my witness.”

     The Arab pulls away from his grasp and shoves him off. He knows nothing. He sees nothing. At the crucial moment his head was pointing in another direction.

     “But you, Kadour, you saw it. You saw the Christian assault me,” cries the unfortunate Judas to a fat black fellow who had been peeling a prickly pear.

     The black man spits as a sign of scorn and hurries off. He saw nothing. Neither did the little Maltese whose eyes burn like hot coals underneath his headband. That Minorcan woman with skin red as a brick, she didn’t see anything either, and she runs off laughing, balancing a basket of grenadines on her head.

In vain, the Jew pleads, implores, gesticulates. No one has seen anything. No witnesses. By chance, two of his tribe appear at that moment, their eyes lowered, skittering along the walls. The Jew spots them.

     “Quick! Quick, my friends! To the agent! To the Frensh zhudge! You two saw it. You saw how he battered an old man.”

     And did they ever see it!

     Back at Sid’Omar’s place there is a flurry of activity. Hookahs are relit, coffee cups are refilled. Everyone chats and laughs out loud. It’s such a hoot to see a Jew get thrashed! I make my way discreetly though the smoke and the brouhaha. I feel like prowling over to the Jewish quarter to see how Judas’s tribe is reacting to the mistreatment of their brother.

     “Come dine with me, moussiou,” Sid’Omar calls after me.

     I accept with thanks. I’m back on the street.

     In the Jewish quarter, everyone is running this way and that. Word has already gotten around. Not a merchant is in his stall, not a tailor, not an embroiderer, not a leather worker. The whole tribe of Israel has taken to the streets, the men in their skullcaps and blue stockings in noisy, arm-waving clusters, the women with faces framed in black fabric, shifting from one group to another, pale, stiff, and red-eyed, calling out like cats. The second I arrive, the crowd stirs, piles together, and rushes forward. Supported by the shoulders of his witnesses, the Jew who is the hero of this adventure hobbles between a double hedge of skullcaps amid a shower of encouragement.

     “Avenge yourself, brother. Avenge us. Avenge the Jewish nation. Fear not. The law is on your side.”

     A hideous dwarf redolent of pitch and old hides approaches me sighing in a piteous manner. “You see,” he tells me, “We poor Jews. You see how they treat us. Look, he’s an elderly man. They nearly killed him.”

To speak the truth, poor old Judas seems more dead than alive. Eyes vacant, face distressed, dragging along rather than walking, he passes by. Only a hefty judgment against the wrongdoer will be capable of curing him. So they don’t take him to the doctor, but instead to the colonial agent.

     Algeria is full of colonial agents. They teem like locusts. Business seems very good for them. One of the greatest advantages is that you can step right into that job without tests, without degrees, without bond, without training. Just as in Paris you can magically become a Man of Letters, in Algeria you can magically become a colonial agent. All you need is a passing acquaintance with the French, Spanish, and Arabic languages, a fat volume that passes as a legal code, and above all the right professional attitude.

The functions of a colonial agent are diverse. Barrister, solicitor, salesman, consultant, interpreter, bookkeeper, sub-contractor, public scribe, all at once or one at a time, he’s the colonial equivalent of Moliere’s Maître Jacques from The Miser, doing anything and everything. Except Molière’s miser had only one Maître Jacques in his employ, while the colony has a lot more than it could ever conceivably need. In Milianah alone, you can find dozens of them. Usually, to keep a low overhead, these gentlemen meet with their clients in a cafe on the main square and give their advice between the coffee and the liqueur – but do they ever really give it?.

     Thus, it is towards the café on the main square that Judas and his witnesses proceed. Let us not accompany them further.

     Leaving the Jewish quarter, I pass by the entrance to the Bureau of Arab Affairs. From the outside, with its tricolor flag waving and its neat red tile roof, you could take it for a house along the Rhone. I know the interpreter, so let’s go have a smoke with him. Cigarette by cigarette, I’ll manage to finally finish off this sunless Sunday.

     The courtyard in front of the Bureau is jammed with ragged Arabs. At least fifty of them squat along walls in their robes. Though open to the weather, this Bedouin waiting area reeks of human hide. Hurry up. In the office I find the interpreter dealing with two braying idiots who seem naked but for a layer of greasy cloth. They are acting out some crazy story about a stolen string of prayer beads. I sit on a mat in the corner to watch. It’s a really classy uniform, that of the interpreter in the Bureau of Arab Affairs, and this interpreter wears it really well. They seem to be made for each other. The uniform is sky blue with black embroidery and shiny gold buttons. The interpreter has curly blond locks and a rosy complexion, a handsome cavalry man full of fun and imagination. A bit talkative, but then, he speaks so many languages. A bit skeptical, but then, he knew Ernest Renan back at the Oriental Institute. Quite a sports enthusiast, as much at ease in a native camp as at the Chief of Police’s receptions. Whirls a girl around the dance floor better than anyone and whips up a mean plate of couscous all by himself. In sum, a Parisian. That’s my man, and no wonder the ladies go wild about him. For a dandy, he has only one rival in these parts, the sergeant of the Bureau of Arab Affairs. That Beau Brummel, with his custom-tailored tunic and his spats with mother-of-pearl buttons, is the envy of the entire garrison. On special assignment in the service and absolved of all menial tasks, he parades daily through the streets with white gloves and a fresh haircut, carrying folders of important-looking documents under his arm. He is feared and respected. He is the embodiment of authority.

     This case of the stolen beads seems to be dragging out. Goodbye. I won’t wait for the end.

     On the way out I find the waiting area all stirred up. The crowd presses in around a tall native man, pale, proud, and robed in black. A week ago, near Mount Zaccar, this man fought with a leopard. He killed the leopard, but not before it chewed off half his arm. Morning and evening, he comes to have his wound dressed at the Bureau of Arab Affairs, and each time they stop him in the courtyard to make him recount his story. He speaks slowly with a fine, deep voice. Every so often he opens the folds of his burnous to expose the bloody bandages around his left arm in a sling against his chest.

     No sooner do I reach the street than I’m caught in a violent downpour. Rain, thunder, lightning, desert wind. Quick, find shelter. I slip into the first doorway I come to and find myself in a batch of homeless wretches heaped together under the arcades of a Moorish courtyard. Belonging to the central mosque of Milianah, this courtyard is the habitual refuge of the Muslim rabble and is called the Paupers’ Court.

Big, emaciated hounds covered with fleas and lice start to approach me with hostile looks. I lean against a pillar in the gallery and try to appear unaffected, as I watch the raindrops ricochet across the colored tiles of the courtyard. The homeless are lying in clumps on the ground. Nearby a young woman, nearly beautiful, with bare breasts and legs and thick iron rings on her wrists and ankles, sings a strange melody composed of three nasal notes. As she sings, she suckles a naked infant colored like dark bronze, while, with her free hand, she grinds barley in a stone mortar. Driven by nasty gusts of wind, the rain periodically drenches the infant’s body and the mother’s legs, but she pays no attention and continues the song, while giving her breast and crushing the grains.

     The storm peters out. Taking advantage of a clear moment, I hasten to leave this beggars’ court and head for Sid’Omar’s dinner. It’s high time. Crossing the main square, I again run into the same old Jew from earlier in the day. He’s leaning on the shoulder of his colonial agent. His witnesses file along joyfully behind him. A flock of nasty Jewish kids scramble around them. Their faces are all glowing. The colonial agent has taken the matter under advisement: he’s asking for a settlement of 2000 francs in damages.

     At Sid’Omar’s house, a sumptuous dinner. The dining room opens onto a Moorish courtyard where several fountains are babbling. An excellent Turkish meal right out of Baron Brisse’s cookbook. Among other things, there are chicken with almonds, vanilla-flavored couscous, meat pies (a bit heavy but with exquisite taste), and honey pastries. For wine, nothing but champagne. Despite Muslim law, Sid’Omar partakes a bit – when the servants’ backs are turned . After dinner, we proceed to our host’s sitting room, where hookahs, coffee, and more sweets are brought in. The furnishings in this room are as simple as can be, a divan, some woven mats, and in the background, a big, high bed with two small red cushions embroidered in gold thread. On the wall hangs an antique Turkish painting depicting the exploits of a certain Admiral Hamadi. It seems in Turkey the artists only paint with one color per canvas, so this one’s painted green. Sea, sky, ships, and even Admiral Hamadi himself are green as can be.

     Arab custom dictates that one should retire early. The coffee drunk, the pipes smoked, I bid farewell to my host and leave him to his wives.

     Where should I finish the evening? Too early to go to bed. The bugles of the spahi troops have not yet sounded taps. Anyway, the golden arabesques of Sid’Omar’s abode are still dancing around in my head and would keep me awake. Here I am in front of the theater, so let’s go in.

     The theater in Milianah is a former storage barn more or less disguised as a house of entertainment. Crude oil lamps that are replenished at intermission do the job of chandeliers. The low price seats are not seats at all, but standing room, and the better seats are on a bench. The highest price seats are very exclusive because they have actual chairs stuffed with straw. All around the theater runs a long, dark corridor without flooring. You might as well be outside, it’s all the same. The night’s performance has already begun when I arrive. To my great surprise, the actors are not half bad, at least the men; they have enthusiasm and sincerity. Almost all are acting amateurs, soldiers from the Third Infantry. The regiment is proud of them and applauds them whole-heartedly every evening.

     As for the ladies, alas, it is always the same question of the eternal distaff side of provincial theaters, pretentious, exaggerated, and phony. Nevertheless, there are two among them that interest me , two Jewish girls from Milianah, still quite fresh to the profession. Their families are in the audience and can’t get enough of them. They have convinced themselves their little girls will bring in millions of sheckels in this racket. The legend of the great Jewish millionaire actress Rachel has already begun to spread among the children of Israel all over the Mediterranean.

     Nothing could be more tender and comical than those little Jewish girls on the boards. They shrink timidly back at one corner of the stage, powdered, rouged, low-cut and rigid. They are cold and a bit ashamed. Once in a while they spit out a line without understanding it and while they are speaking their big Hebraic eyes scan the house in a stupor.

     I leave the theater. Amidst the surrounding shadows, I notice cries from a corner of the square. It must be a couple of Maltese settling scores with knives.

     I slowly head back towards the hotel along the ramparts. A heady fragrance of orange blossoms and juniper berries rises from the plains. The air is soft, the sky nearly cloudless. There at the end of the path looms a ghostly old wall, the remnant of some nearly forgotten temple. The spot is still sacred; Arab women come there every day to hang little charms and effigies, fragments of old robes or scarves, plaited tresses of reddish hair bound with silver thread, strips of unknown cloth. They all flutter in a thin moonbeam, blown by the warm night air.

The Three Low Masses

A Christmas Story

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

          “Two stuffed turkeys, Garrigou?”

          “Yes, reverend father, two magnificent turkeys stuffed with truffles.  I know all about it, since it was I who helped stuff them.  You would have thought their skin was going to crack in the roasting, it was so tight…”

          “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and I love truffles so much!  Quick, hand me my surplice, Garrigou.  And besides the turkeys, what else did you see in the kitchen?”

          “Oh, all kinds of wonderful things.  Since noon we’ve been doing nothing but plucking pheasants, grouse, game hens.  There were feathers everywhere.  Then from the pond they brought trout, golden carp, eels…”

          “How big were the trout, Garrigou?”

          “Big as this, reverend father, enormous!” he declared, spreading his arms wide.

          “Oh, my God, I can just see them.  Have you put the wine in the cruets?”

          “Yes, reverend father, I’ve put wine in the cruets.  But by golly, it’s not as good as the wine you’ll be drinking as soon as the midnight mass is over.  If you could see the castle banquet hall and all the pitchers filled with wine gleaming in so many colors!  And the silverware, and the lace, and the flowers and candlesticks!  There’ll never be the like of this Christmas feast.  Milord the marquis has invited all the nobility of the countryside.  You’ll be at least forty at table, not counting the bailiff and the notary.  Ah, you’re so fortunate to be invited, reverend father!  Why, just from having sniffed those turkeys once, the aroma of the truffles follows me everywhere.  Yum!”

          Come now, come now, my boy.  Let us not succumb to the sin of gluttony, especially on the night of Christ’s birth!  Rush out now and light the candles on the altar and sound the first bells for mass, for midnight is approaching fast and we must not be late.”

          This conversation took place one Christmas night in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred something between the reverend father Balaguère, formerly prior of the Barnabite abbey and presently appointed chaplain to the house of Trinquelage, and his altar boy Garrigou, or at any rate the one he took for his altar boy Garrigou, for you’ll see that the Devil that night had taken on the round face and plain looks of the little sacristan the better to lead the priest into temptation and to make him commit the heinous sin of gluttony.  Therefore, while the so-called Garrigou (ha hah!) rang the bells of the castle chapel with all his might, the reverend father finished putting on his chasuble in the tiny sacristy.  His mind already troubled by the descriptions of all those gastronomic wonders, he repeated to himself while dressing: “Roast turkey with stuffing, golden carps, trout as big as this!”

          Outside the howling wind swept over the music of the bells and gradually folks appeared around the base of Mount Ventoux, beneath the ancient towers of the castle of Trinquelage.  It was the peasant families of the neighborhood coming to hear midnight mass.  They scaled the steep slopes in groups of five or six, with the father in front holding a lantern, the women wrapped in their great gray mantles where the children huddled to shelter from the wind.  Despite the hour and the cold, all those good souls marched happily, sustained by the thought that when the mass was over there would be, as every year, a table set for them downstairs in the kitchens.  From time to time a nobleman’s carriage rumbled up the rocky road, preceded by footmen with torches, its glass windows flashing in the moonlight.  Or else a mule trotted up, tinkling with bells, and in the brightness of the firebrands surrounded by smoke the peasants would recognize their bailiff and hail him as he passed, “Good evening, Mister Arnoton!”  And he would answer, “Good evening to you, friends.”

          The night was crystal clear, the stars twinkling in the cold.  The breeze was penetrating and sparse flurries landed on the clothes without dampening them, faithfully preserving the tradition of a white Christmas.  High up on the mountainside the castle loomed as their goal, with its enormous mass of turrets, spires, and gables, and the bell tower rising in the inky sky.  A myriad of little lights came and went and flashed in the windows against the dark background of the buildings like sparkles from the ashes of burning papers.  Over the drawbridge and inside past the postern gate, the visitors on their way to the chapel crossed the outer courtyard full of carriages, sedan chairs, porters, and footmen, all lit up by the torches and the lights from the kitchen.  They could hear the clanking of  roasting forks, the rattle of pots and pans, the clink of crystal goblets and silverware as the feast was prepared.  A rising warm fragrance, carrying the hints of roasting meats and elaborate sauces met the peasants, as it did the chaplain, and the bailiff, and everyone else, making them say, “What a fine supper we will have this night after mass!”

         

          “Ding-a-ling!  Ding-a-ling!” The midnight mass was about to begin.  In the castle chapel, a veritable miniature cathedral with vaulted arches and old chestnut paneling the height of the walls, the tapestries had been hung all around and the candles lighted.  What a crowd!  And what splendid clothes!  First of all, here in the sculpted stalls around the choir were the the Lord of Trinquelage dressed in pink taffeta and all his invited friends of the nobility.  Facing them, at prayer stands upholstered in velvet, were the old dowager marquise in robe of scarlet brocade and the young Lady of Trinquelage, her hair dressed in a tower of fine lace in the latest fashion of the royal court.  Further down sat the bailiff Thomas Arnoton and the notary Mister Ambroy, dressed in black with vast wigs over their clean-shaven faces, two solemn notes in the symphony of colorful silks and damask.  Then came the grave butlers, the pages, the gamekeepers, the overseers, and Mistress Barbara, chief maid of the establishment, with all the castle keys hung on a chain of fine silver.  Lower still, on benches, sat the rank and file of servants, the cleaning and cooking staffs, and the peasant farmers with their families, and finally, way down by the door that they opened and closed very discreetly, the kitchen boys who came up between two sauces to breath in a little air of the mass and brought a whiff of the feast into the festive church, warmed by innumerable candles. 

          Was it the sight of their little white caps that so distracted the priest?  Or perhaps it was Garrigou’s hand bells, those crazy little hand bells going ting-a-ling at the foot of the altar with such infernal haste, always seeming to say, “Let’s go, hurry up; the sooner we’re finished, the quicker we sit down to table!”

          The fact was that every time those bells rang – those diabolical bells – the priest forgot all about his mass and could think of nothing but dinner.  He imagined the cooks running about mumbling to each other, the great chimneys lit up like a forge, the steam rising from the covered pots, and in the midst of that divine mist two magnificent turkeys stuffed and stretched to the bursting point, chock full of truffles.

          Or else he saw in his mind’s eye a procession of pages carrying in the dishes enveloped in tempting aromas, and he followed them into the banqueting hall prepared for the meal.  Oh, wonders!  There was the immense, illuminated table groaning with fare.  Roast peacocks dressed in their plumes, pheasants served up with their wings stretched out as if to fly away, pitchers of wine glittering like rubies, pyramids of fruits popping out between green leaves, and those fantastic fish Garrigou had mentioned (ah, yes, little Garrigou!), resting on a bed of fennel greens, their scales pearly as though they had just emerged from the water, with little herb bouquets stuffed in their sea-monster nostrils.  The vision of all these marvels seemed so utterly real to Father Balaguère that they might have been served to him right there on the lace napkins of the altar.  Two or three times, he caught himself saying, instead of “Dominus vobiscum,”  “Bless us now for what we are about to receive…”  Apart from these little lapses, however, the good father recited his mass very conscientiously, without omitting a single line or genuflection, and thus, all went well for the first service, for as you know, on Christmas day the officiating priest must saw not one, not two, but three consecutive low masses.

          “One down!” muttered the chaplain with a sigh of relief.  Then, without taking a second to rest, he signaled to his altar boy – or the one he took for his altar boy – and “Ding-a-ling! Ding-a-ling!” the second mass began.  And with it began the sin of Father Balaguère.

          “Hurry up! Faster!” cried out the sharp little bells in Garrigou’s hand and each time the wretched priest, abandoning himself to the demon of gluttony, tore into the missal and devoured pages at a time in the grip of his over-excited appetite.  Frantically he knelt and rose, swished off signs of the cross and genuflected like a bobber, shortening each gesture to get through more quickly.  He barely reached out his hands for the Gospel, tapped his chest for the Confiteor.  Between him and the altar boy it was a race to see who could mumble the lines faster.  Verses and responses went neck and neck, bumping into each other down the stretch.  Words half pronounced without even opening the mouth (too much delay!) ended in incomprehensible syllables.

          “Oremus ps ps ps ps.”

          “Mea culpa pa pa pa.”

          Like harvesters hurrying to stomp the grapes in the vat, the officiants splashed through the Latin of the mass, sending spattered bits flying in all directions.

          “Dum..scum!” said Balaguère.

          “’Stutto!” answered Garrigou.

          And through it all there was that damned little bell tinkling in his ears, like the bells they put on the feet of post horses to make them gallop all the faster.  You can imagine that at that rate the second low mass was over in no time.

          “Two down!” puffed the breathless chaplain, and without taking a breath, red in the face, sweating like a laborer, he ran down the steps of the altar and “Ding-a-ling! Ding-a-ling!” the third low mass began. 

          The banqueting hall was only a few steps away, but, alas! As the time for dinner grew near, the  bedeviled priest found himself carried away by a folly of impatience and gluttony.  His vision pierced the walls.  The golden carp, the roasted turkeys, they were there, right there! He could touch them.  He could even… Oh, God! The dishes reeked with aroma, the wines made him giddy, and the little bell shaking in a frenzy cried out to him, “Quicker still! Oh, hurry, now.” 

          But how could he go faster yet?  His lips were barely moving as it was.  He wasn’t even pronouncing words.  Unless he could cheat the Good Lord completely and steal his mass.  And that’s just what he did, the wretch!  From one temptation to another, he started by skipping just one verse, then two.  The Epistle being too long, he simply cut it off.  He passed by the Credo without even looking, skipped “Our Father,” gave a distant wave to the preface, and launched himself full speed into eternal damnation.  The whole time he was aided by that dirty Garrigou (Get back, Satan!), who assisted with malicious intent, brushing his chasuble, turning pages two by two or three by three, bumping into the lectern, spilling from the cruets, and ceaselessly shaking those little bells ever stronger and more and more rapidly. 

          You should have seen the faces of the stunned parishioners!  Forced to mimic their way through a mass where they could not understand a single word, half rose when the other half knelt or sat down while the others rose.  All the parts of this unusual ceremony landed in a jumble of conflicting gestures among the crowd in the pews.  The Christmas star en route through the heavens toward a little stable must have blushed in horror over this confusion.

          “The priest is going too fast.  It’s impossible to follow him,” murmured the old dowager marquise as she shook her locks in distraction.

          Mister Arnoton, his big steel-framed glasses on his nose, searched through his prayer book to find out where the dickens they could be.  But in the end, all those good people, who were also thinking of feasting, were not so unhappy that the mass was charging along like cavalry.  So when Father Balaguère turned with a beaming countenance and announced to the faithful with all his remaining strength, “Ite, missa est,” they answered with one voice, “Thanks be to God,” in a chorus so joyfully and thunderously filling the chapel that one would think they were already answering the first toast of the dinner.

          Five minutes later, the assembly of nobles sat in the great hall, the chaplain in the midst of them.  The castle, illuminated from moat to turret, echoed with songs, shouts, laughter, and conversation.  The venerable Father Balaguère planted his fork into a drumstick of grouse, drowning his remorse in a torrent of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and succulent meat juices.  The saintly man ate and drank so much that he died in the middle of the night in one awful attack, without so much time as to mutter a repentance.  Thus, the next morning he arrived before the pearly gates with his head still buzzing from the frivolity of the evening, and I’ll just let you imagine how he was received. 

          “Get thee from my sight, you fallen Christian!” said the sovereign Lord, master of us all.  “Your sin is great enough to wipe out a whole life of virtue.  Why you stole a mass from me!  Very well, you’ll pay with three thousand in its place.  You won’t enter the gates of paradise until you’ve celebrated in your little chapel each one of those three thousand masses in the presence of all those renegades who fell into sin because of you and share your disgrace.”

          Voilà! That’s the true legend of Father Balaguère as they tell it down among the olive groves of Provence.  Today the castle of Trinquelage no longer exists, but its chapel still remains on the slopes of Mount Ventoux in a stand of live oaks.  The wind slams its crooked door and grass grows in the entrance.  Birds nest in the stone arches whose stained glass windows have long disappeared.  Nevertheless, it seems that each Christmas Eve, a supernatural light wanders through the ruins, as today’s farmers on their way to church or to family gatherings notice this ghostly chapel lit up by invisible candles glowing in the open air, unaffected even by the snow or the raging wind.  You can laugh if you like, but a wine-grower of the region by the name of Garrigue, probably a descendant of the aforesaid Garrigou, swore to me that one Christmas Eve, finding himself three sheets to the wind, he got lost in the brush on the mountainside near Trinquelage.  And this is what he saw.  Until eleven o’clock, not a sound.  Everything was quiet, deserted, almost lifeless.  Suddenly around midnight the belfry up in the chapel began to ring – an ancient sound of bells that seemed to come from fifty miles away.  Soon, on the path leading up the mountain, Garrigue saw the swinging of lanterns in the midst of vague, shadowy shapes.  In the entry of the chapel there was movement and a voice whispered, “Good evening, Mister Arnoton!”  Another answered, “Good evening, my friends.”

          When all the shapes had entered the chapel, my brave wine-grower friend crept softly up and looked in through the broken door at an incredible spectacle.  All the people he had seen go in were grouped around the choir in the ruined sanctuary, as though the old benches were still there.  Pretty ladies in brocade with lace hairdos, gentlemen done up in silk from top to bottom, and peasants in embroidered jackets like great-great-grandfather wore.  All of them seemed old, faded, dusty, and tired.  From time to time the night-owls that now live in the chapel, disturbed by the lights, swooped around the candle flames that burned straight but curiously dimmed, as though filtered through a curtain of gauze.  What most amused Garrigue is that a certain poor fool with steel-framed glasses was continually shaking his big black wig to dislodge one of the owls which had gotten its talons stuck in the hair and flapped its big wings in an effort to get away. 

          In the background a little old man with a child-like body, inside the communion rail, was desperately shaking a mute hand bell without a clapper.  Meanwhile a priest, dressed in faded gold, came and went before the altar, reciting prayers whose words were impossible to decipher.  It must certainly have been Father Balaguère hurrying through his third low mass.

‘The Lighthouse on Bloody Shoals’ by Guest Author Alphonse Daudet

Jim Gaines

The Lighthouse on Bloody Shoals

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

            Last night I couldn’t sleep.  The north wind was angry and the bellows of its great voice kept me awake until dawn.  Roughly swinging its worn-out vanes that whistled in the breeze like the rigging of a ship, my old mill creaked all over.  Tiles from the roof crazily flew off.  In the distance, the clustered pines that covered the hillside waved around and rustled in the dark.  You would have thought you were on the high seas…

It reminded me perfectly of the persistent insomnia I had experienced three years earlier, when I lived at the lighthouse on Bloody Shoals, down on the Corsican coast, at the mouth of the Gulf of Ajaccio.

    Another pretty spot that I had found to dream in and to be alone.

      Imagine a reddish island with a savage appearance, the lighthouse on one end and at the other an old Genoese defensive tower where, in my time, a sea eagle nested.  Lower down at the water’s edge, a ruined quarantine station completely invaded by weeds.  And then, ravines, scrubland, outcrops of rock, a few feral goats, Corsican ponies prancing with their manes in the wind.  Finally, up at the top, amid a gyre of seabirds, the lighthouse keepers’ house with its terrace  of white-washed stonework, where the keepers walked back and forth, a green door shaped like the entrance to a monastery, a squat iron tower, and above it all the huge facetted lantern that gleamed even in the daytime with the rays of the sun.  That is the scene of the Bloody Shoals as I recalled them that night while listening to the moaning of the pines.  That was the magic island where I sometimes shut myself up before I moved to the mill, when I needed fresh air and solitude.

     What did I do there?

     Just as little as I do here in Provence, but a lot less.  When the northers or nor’easters weren’t blowing too badly, I went down to sit between two boulders at the water’s edge, surrounded by seagulls, blackbirds, and swallows, and I remained almost all day in a kind of listless stupor provided by the view of the sea.  Don’t you also know that wonderful drunkenness of the soul?  You don’t think, you don’t even dream.   Everything breaks free from you, flies off, and scatters.  You become the diving tern, the spume floating between a couple of breakers, the whitish trail of a boat heading out, the red-sailed skiff of the coral fishermen, a drop of seawater, a patch of fog, anything but yourself.   How many glorious hours of somnolence and self-abandon I spent on that little island!

     On the days when the wind was up and the water’s edge was unapproachable, I stayed in the courtyard of the quarantine compound, a little melancholy enclosure utterly saturated by the scent of rosemary and wormwood.  There, leaning against an old wall, I left myself open to the soft sense of oblivion that floated with the dappled sun among the stone cells that opened on the courtyard like a circle of ancient monuments.  From time to time there would be a sound of cracking wood and a wild nanny-goat would spring into view on its way to graze in the lee of the gale.  As soon as she noticed me, she froze and stayed quiet and alert, horns to the sky, watching me with childlike eyes…

      Around five o’clock, the lighthouse keepers would shout to me through a megaphone to come up for supper.  Then I would take a narrow path through the brush that clung to the cliff side above the sea, as I slowly returned to the lighthouse, pausing at every step to gaze over that immense, glowing blue horizon that seemed to get bigger and bigger as I ascended.

      It was homey up there.  I can still see that pretty oak-paneled dining room with its great flagstones and a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse in the middle of the table.  The door was opened wide onto the white terrace and the setting sun streamed in.  The keepers were waiting for me to sit down to eat.  There were three of them, one fellow from Marseille and two Corsicans, all short, bearded, with the same tanned, wrinkled face and the same village-made sheepskin jacket, but so unlike in temperament and pace.  You could sense right away the difference in country lifestyles from the way those characters lived.  The man from Marseille was lively and industrious, always up to some scheme, perpetually in movement as he rushed around the island from morning to night, gardening, fishing, collecting birds’ eggs, lurking in the underbrush to catch and milk some passing goat, and always putting some bouillabaisse or aioli on the burner.  When the Corsicans, on the other hand, were not on duty, they took care to do nothing at all.  They considered themselves Civil Servants and spent the daytime in the kitchen playing innumerable games of scopa, and only putting down their cards to light their pipes solemnly or to use the scissors to cut up tobacco leaves into their cupped hands.  To sum it up, whether from Marseille or Corsica, all three were good old fellows, plain and straight-forward, and full of consideration for their boarder, whom they must have judged to be a very odd duck.

     Just think of shutting yourself up in a lighthouse for fun!  They found their own days quite long and were happy when it came their turn to go ashore.  In the fine weather, this great privilege was accorded them once a month: ten days ashore for every thirty on the island, that was the rule.  But when the change of seasons brought heavy weather, all rules were off.  The gales blew, the waves battered the cliffs, and the Bloody Shoals were soaked with spray.  The lighthouse keepers were entrapped for two or three months on end, sometimes in quite insufferable circumstances.

     “Here’s what happened, to me, sir,” Old Bartoldi recounted one evening at supper time, “Here’s what happened to me five years ago at this very table where we now find ourselves.  One winter evening, just like tonight, there were two of us here at the light, me and a buddy called Chico.  The others were ashore, sick or on leave, I don’t remember.  We were just finishing a nice, quiet supper when all at once, my friend stops eating, looks at me for an instant with strange eyes, and poof!, he falls face down on the table.  I came around and shook him and called out, ‘Chico! Chico!’  No good, he was dead.  You can just imagine my feelings.  For more than an hour I trembled stupidly there, staring at the corpse.  Then, suddenly, an idea popped into my head, “What about the light!”  I barely had time to scramble upstairs to light the lantern.  It was already dark.  Well, sir, what a night!  The sea and the wind did not have their natural voices at all.  It seemed to me that someone was continually calling to me from the stairwell.  I became feverish and damned thirsty, but wild horses could not have dragged me down those steps.  I was too afraid of that corpse.  However, as dawn broke, I got up a little courage.  I carried my friend to his bed, pulled up his sheets, dashed off a quick prayer, and then raced to the semaphore flags.”

      “Unfortunately, the sea was too rough.  I signaled and signaled, to no avail.  Nobody came.  There I was for three days in the lighthouse with the earthly remains of my friend Chico and God only knew how long it would last.  I hoped to keep him near me until a boat arrived, but after three days it became unbearable.  What to do?  Take him outside?  Bury him?  The ground was nothing but bedrock and there are so many crows on the island.   It would be a shame to abandon a Christian soul to their greedy beaks.  Then I thought about bringing him down to the quarantine station.  That sad chore took a whole afternoon, and I can tell you it took a ton of courage.  Look, sir, even today, when I go along that side of the island on a windy afternoon, I can feel the weight of that dead man on my shoulders,”

     Poor Old Bartoldi.  Beads of sweat ran down his forehead at the mere thought of it.

     Thus we spent our meals in long conversation: the lighthouse, the sea, tales of shipwrecks, stories of Corsican bandits.  Then, as the sun went down, the keeper on first shift lit his hand lantern, took up his pipe, his canteen, and a fat volume of Plutarch with a red ribbon marker that constituted the entire library of the Bloody Shoals, and disappeared into the shadows.  After a few seconds everyone in the building could hear a fracas of chains, pulleys, and ponderous counterweights being hauled up into position.

      As for myself, I went out onto the terrace and took a seat.  The sun, already very low, dropped more and more quickly toward the sea, pulling the whole horizon along with it.  The breeze grew colder and the whole island turned purple.  In the nearby sky a massive bird glided slowly by, the sea eagle on its way home to the nest in the Genoese tower.  Little by little the twilight thickened and soon one could only see the curls of white foam around the edge of the island.  Suddenly, above my head, a ray of light shot out.  The lantern of the lighthouse had been lit.  Leaving the rest of the island itself in shadow, the beam projected its soft light far off onto the sea.  I was lost in the dark beneath those great swaths of light that scarcely trickled down as they swept overhead.  But the wind was freshening and it was time to go inside.  Feeling my way, I closed the heavy door and bolted it, then located the little iron stairway that shook and squeaked under my weight, and came finally to the cabin at the top of the lighthouse.  Here, there was certainly a great deal of light!

      Think of a gigantic Carcel lamp with six rows of wicks, around which revolved the panes of the lantern, half filled with huge crystal lenses and the other half opening onto fixed sheets of glass that kept the lamp sheltered from any wind.  I was stunned as I entered.  Glittering reflections of copper, zinc, and tin, and those curved crystal panels that spun in great bluish circles, all those mirrors and the clanking of polished clockwork made me dizzy for a minute.  Yet, my eyes gradually got used to it and I came and sat down at the foot of the lamp next to the keeper who was reading his Plutarch out loud so as not to fall asleep.

      Outside, a great pit of darkness.  On the little balcony that wound around the lantern, the wind tore by, howling like a madman.  The lighthouse creaked and the sea groaned.  On the point of the island, on the rugged boulders, the breakers exploded like cannon fire.  Every so often an invisible finger would tap on the glass.  Some night bird attracted by the light had bashed itself into the glass panels.  Inside the hot, glittering lantern, the only perceptible noises were the guttering of the flames, the dripping of oil, the chains inching along, and a monotonous voice chanting out the life of Demetrius of Phaleria.

      At midnight, the keeper stood up, cast a last glance over his wicks, and we went downstairs.  On the way down, we met our companion who held the second watch.  He was rubbing his eyes on his way up.  We handed him the canteen and the Plutarch.  Then, before getting into our beds, we crossed the lower room cluttered with chains, barrels of lamp oil, ropes, and there, in the circle cast by the little portable lantern, the keeper completed his shift by writing in the heavy log book that always sat open: Midnight.  Heavy seas.  Storm approaching.  Ship coming in.

‘The Ordeal of the Semillante’ contributed by Guest Author Jim Gaines

Guest Author Jim Gaines

The Ordeal of the Sémillante[1] -By Alphonse Daudet

-Translated by guest author James F. Gaines

          Since that northerly wind the other night blew us up onto the coast of Corsica, permit me to tell you the tale of a terrible maritime tragedy the fishermen down there mention often during the evenings and on which chance has furnished me with very interesting information. It was two or three years ago.

     I was sailing the seas around Sardinia with a team of seven or eight customs officers.  Tough trip for a novice!  All through the month of March we didn’t have a single good day.  The easterly gale bore down on us and the waves would show us no mercy.

     One night we were racing before the storm when our boat came to find shelter at the entrance to the Gulf of Bonifacio in the midst of a cluster of little islands.  Their appearance offered nothing encouraging; huge windswept boulders covered with seabirds, a few tufts of wormwood, stunted locust trees, and here and there in the mud, scraps of wood moldering away.  But by heaven, for a spot to spend the night, these hideous rocks were better than the broken keel of wrecked ship where the waves swept in and out as though they owned it, so we made the best of it. As soon as we had gone ashore, while the mates were putting together a fire to boil some chowder, the skipper called me over and showed me a little enclosure of white stones hiding in the broom at the end of the island. 

     “You coming along to the cemetery, Mister Daudet?” he asked.

      “A graveyard, Captain Lionnetti, sir?  Where can we be, then?”

     “The Lavezzi  Rocks, my friend.  This is the last resting place of the six hundred men of the Sémillante, exactly where their frigate broke up ten years these ten years past.  Poor fellows, they don’t get many visitors; the least we can do is to go pay our respects while we’re here.”

    “Yes, sir, with all my heart.”

     What sadness in that little cemetery of the Sémillante!  I can see it again now, with its low surrounding wall, its rusty iron gate so hard to open, its silent chapel amid hundreds of darkened crosses hidden in the weeds.  Not even a single bouquet of everlastings to brighten the place, not a single memorial, nothing.  Oh, the poor deserted dead, how cold they must feel in their makeshift tombs.

      We knelt there a moment.  The skipper prayed out loud.  Great herring gulls, the only watchmen for these graves, pivoted around our heads and mixed their raucous cries with the moaning of the sea.

      When our prayer was finished, we returned with heavy hearts to the corner of the island where our boat was anchored.  During our absence, our shipmates had not wasted their time.  We found a big campfire blazing in the lee of a cliff and the pot boiling away.  We sat in a circle around it with our feet to the fire and soon each of us had in his lap a big earthenware trencher of chowder with two large hunks of dark bread to sop up the sauce.  It was a silent meal, since we were soaked, hungry, and so close to a cemetery.  Yet when all the dishes had been cleared, we lit our pipes and started to chat a bit.  We spoke, naturally, about the wreck of the Sémillante.

      “How did the events unfold?”  said the skipper with a deep sigh.  “Well, mates, no one in the world can say precisely.  All that we know is that the Sémillante, loaded with troops bound for the Crimea, set sail from Toulon the previous evening in the midst of bad weather.   As night wore on, it got worse and worse.  Wind, rain, and combers higher than anyone could remember.  Toward morning the wind fell off a little, but the sea was as stirred up as ever, and along with that, a damned, devilish fog set in, so thick you couldn’t see a lantern two fathoms ahead.  That kind of fog, my boy, is undoubtedly the most treacherous danger in the seven seas.  But as if that were not enough, I’ve a mind that the Sémillante had her rudder carried away during the morning.  No fog bank lasts forever, and without some further bad luck, her skipper never would have been fooling around in these shoal waters.  He was a real old salt whom we all knew well.  He had commanded the coast guard in Corsica for three years  and knew the charts as well as I do, who knows little else. “

     “And how many bells, you think, when the Sémillante went down?”

     “It must have been around midday, yes sir, just about noon.  But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in all that mist it must have been no brighter than the pelt of midnight wolf.  A customs man ashore told me that he had gone outside just about half past eleven to refasten a shutter that had blown loose.  Suddenly his uniform cap blew off and at the risk of being blown into the drink himself, he chased it along the beach, running on four legs like a dog!  You’ve got to understand, you don’t get rich in the customs corps and those uniform caps cost a pretty penny.  It so happened that at a certain point this fellow raised his eyes and saw, looming out of the fog, a ship of the line with its rigging all blown away being driven by the wind toward the Lavezzi Rocks.  That ship was racing so quickly that it swept by like a vision in a dream.  Everything leads me to believe that was the Sémillante, because scarcely thirty minutes later the shepherd who keeps a flock on these rocks… But, look, here comes the very man I was talking about.  He can tell us all about it himself.  Good evening, Palumbo!  Come warm yourself up a bit, don’t be shy.”

     A hooded man that I had been watching wandering near the fire for a short time and that I had mistaken for a member of our crew, since I had no idea there could be a shepherd on this reef, cautiously came closer.   He was a mangy old timer, like a village idiot, afflicted with some kind of odd scurvy that had swollen his lips to horrible proportions.  It took quite a while to explain to him what we wanted to know.  Then, holding up his bloviated lip with a dirty finger, the old man told us that, in fact, he heard from his hovel around midday an awful crashing on the rocks.  Since the island was nearly awash, he could not go outside.  It wasn’t until the morrow that he opened his door and saw the beach covered with debris and bodies washed up by the sea.   Horrified, he ran off to his rowboat to go to Bonifacio and ask for help.

     Worn out by so much story-telling, the shepherd sat down and the skipper took up where he left off.

    “Yes, sirree, this is the very man who came to tell us the news.  He was almost crazed with terror.  The affair left his wits a bit scrambled.  Well, of course, it was enough to… Just imagine, six hundred cadavers all over the strand, scattered among the flotsam and scraps of sail.  The poor Sémillante!  The sea had dashed her to bits and ground her up into pieces so small that Palumbo could barely find enough solid driftwood to repair his ruined sheepfold.   As for the men, they were almost all terribly mutilated and disfigured.  It was awful to see them stuck together in little bunches like clusters of grapes.  We found the captain in his full dress uniform, the chaplain with his stole on his shoulders, as though giving last rites, and in a small hollow in the rocks a little wisp of a cabin boy with his eyes wide open.  You’d think he was still alive, but no, it was fated that not a single person would escape.

     Here the skipper paused.  “Watch out, Nardi!  The fire’s going to go out!”  Nardi threw an armful of tarry planks on the coals that flared up immediately.  The skipper went on.

     “The saddest thing of all in this business is this.  Three weeks before the disaster, a little corvette headed for the Crimea like the Sémillante had broken up in the same way and almost in the same spot.   Except that time we had been able to save the whole crew and twenty or so soldiers who were aboard in transport to the front lines.  Those poor soldier boys were not exactly in the catbird seat, as you can well imagine.  We brought them back to Bonifacio and looked after them for a couple of days at the base.  Once they were dried off and on their feet again, so long, good luck, and they were on their way back to Toulon.  A little while later they were off to the Crimea again, but guess in which ship?  The Sémillante, by damn!  We found them all, all twenty of them right here where we sit tonight.  I picked up the body of a fine young brigadier with a fancy moustache, a fair-haired Parisian, who had lodged at my own house and regaled us with constantly with his tales of city life.  Seeing him there like that nearly broke my heart.  Oh, Mother of Mercy!”

     With that good old Lionetti, with tears in his eyes, shook out the ash from his pipe and bade me goodnight.  For a few more minutes some of the shipmates went on chatting with muted voices.  Then, one after another, they put out their pipes, no one spoke further, and the old shepherd drifted away.  I alone remained awake musing while the crew around me fell asleep.

Still under the gloomy influence of the tale I had just heard, I tried to picture in my mind the poor, doomed ship and the ordeal whose only witnesses had been the seagulls.  A few ideas that had stuck with me, such as the captain in his full dress uniform, the chaplain with his stole, and the twenty trans-shipped soldiers, helped me to reconstruct the events of the disaster.  I imagined the frigate leaving Toulon in the pitch dark, setting out from port.  The sea was angry and the winds terrible.  But the captain was a brave and seasoned sailor, so no one aboard was worried.

     In the morning the fog bank crept in.  Alarm spread.  The crew members were all turned out on deck and the captain didn’t leave the wheel.  Below decks the soldiers were cramped in complete darkness.  The atmosphere was clammy and stifling.  A few of the passengers  groaned from seasickness in their berths.  Suddenly the hull lurched over and it was no longer possible to stand upright.  Hunkered down on the decks and benches , they started to mutter, but they found they had to yell to be heard.  Some of them started to get scared.  Think about it!  Shipwrecks are not rare in these waters, as the soldiers themselves can testify, and what they recalled was not reassuring.  The officer especially, a wise guy from Paris, made their skin crawl with his bad jokes.  “A shipwreck, that’s a laugh!  If we crack up, we’ll all get nothing but a good cold bath and they’ll bring us back to Bonifacio again to swill down pheasant at old man Leonetti’s place. “

     At that, the soldier boys began to snicker.   Suddenly there was a crash.  What was that?  What was going on?

     “We’ve just lost the rudder!” shouted a water-logged seaman running down to the other end of the hull.

     “No fear!” responded that comedian of an officer, but no one was laughing any more.

     There was an uproar up on deck, but the fog prevented anyone from making out what was happening.  The sailors were feeling their way around in a panic.  No rudder!  That meant they were dead in the water, at the mercy of the waves.  Blown before the gale, the Sémillante raced through the water.  That must have been when the customs man saw her pass by.  It was eleven thirty.  Up in the forecastle, there was noise like a cannon.  The breakers!  The breakers!  That’s it, there was no more hope and they smashed onto the rocks.  The captain made his way into his cabin and emerged again in a minute next to the useless wheel, in full dress.  He wanted to look proper for his death.

     Between decks, the agony-stricken soldiers looked silently at each other.  Those who were sick pulled themselves to their feet.  The brigadier had stopped making jokes.  At that instant the door burst open and the chaplain appeared in his stole, saying “Kneel down, boys.”  They all obeyed.  With a ringing voice, the chaplain began a prayer to Saint Jude.  Suddenly there was an unbelievable crash and amid outstretched arms and clasped hands, a single huge wail went out, crying “Mercy on us!”  The vision of death passed like lightning before their eyes.

     That’s how I spent the night, pondering the destiny of the ill-fated ship from ten years distance with its debris scattered all around me on the beach.   Out in the straits, the storm raged on, and gusts occasionally rushed into our camp to whip at the flames of our dying fire.  Out in the cove, I could hear the groaning of our own cutter as it strained at the anchor chain.

---

[1] The frigate Sémillante was named after a symbol of the French Revolution, a peasant woman sowing grain who represented fertility and hope for the future, so ironically in this case.

- See more at: http://www.eeriedigest.com/wordpress/2013/07/the-ordeal-of-the-semillante-contributed-by-guest-author-jim-gaines/#more-9205

‘Locusts’ by Guest Author James F. Gaines

Locusts

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

          Before returning to my mill, here’s another memory of Algeria…

      The night I arrived in that farm on the outskirts of the Sahara, I couldn’t sleep.  The new landscape, the disruption of the trip, the barking of the jackals, and then that sapping, oppressive heat – complete suffocation –  as if the mesh in my mosquito netting could not allow the passage of a single breath of air.  When I opened the window at dawn, a heavy summer fog floated in the air, scarcely drifting along and fringed at the edges with pink and black.  It hovered like a cloud of gunpowder over a battlefield.  Not a leaf fluttered, and in the beautiful gardens that spread out below me, everything had the same sullen mood, the same immobility of foliage waiting for a thunderstorm: the grapevines aligned on the exposed slopes that made for sweet wines, the European orchard tucked into a shady corner, the orange and mandarin trees in long, calibrated rows.  Even the banana trees with their shoots of tender green, always waving in the slightest breeze that tousled the fine, light fronds, stood at attention silent and straight as the plumes of a cavalry regiment. 

     I paused a moment to look over that marvelous plantation where all the trees of the world congregated, each providing in season its gifts of exotic fruits and flowers.  Between the wheat fields and the masses of cork oaks shown a stream that was refreshing to behold on such a stuffy morning.  Just as I was admiring the orderliness and plenty of all these things, the handsome farmhouse with its Moorish arcades, the terraces sparkling with dew, the stables and barns clustered around, it struck me that twenty years ago, when the intrepid settlers came to homestead in this valley of the Sahel, they had found nothing but the wretched hut of a highway worker surrounded by a wilderness of dwarf palms and sumacs.  Everything had to be done from scratch, built up from nothing.  At the drop of a hat an Arab revolt would spring up and they had to drop the plow to take up the rifle.  And then the diseases, the eye infections, the bad harvests, the groping around with inexperienced hands, not to mention the ongoing struggle with a short-sighted, wishy-washy administration.  What exertions!  What drudgery!  What unbroken watchfulness!

   Even today, despite the bad times they had weathered and the fortune they had scrimped to win, the farmer and his wife were the first in the village to rise.  I could hear them at this ungodly hour, bustling about down in the kitchen on the ground floor as they organized breakfast for the farm hands.  Soon a bell rang and the workers filed out onto the paths.  There were vineyard specialists from Burgundy, Kabyles from the Berber hills dressed in homespun  with red fezzes on their heads, Spanish gardeners from Minorca without any leggings, Maltese, Italian laborers from Lucca, a whole motley world of a workforce that was challenging to control.  To each of them the farmer in the doorway assigned a daily task in a clipped, gruff voice.  When he had finished, this tough fellow raised his head and scoured the sky with worried eyes.  When he spotted me at the window he yelled up, “Bad weather for the crops.   The scirocco wind will be blowing in.”

    Just so, as the sun rose higher, gusts of incandescent, suffocating air hit us like the fires of a blast furnace.  We couldn’t decide what to do or where to hide.  The whole morning went on like that.  We took our coffee on mats out in the gallery, without the force to stir or to make conversation.  The miserable dogs, seeking coolness from the floor tiles, stretched themselves into ridiculous contortions.  Lunch raised our spirits a bit, for it was a real farmer’s spread with odd ingredients including carp, trout, slices of roast boar, hedgehog stew, high-class butter from the resort at Staoueli, local wine from Crescia, guavas and bananas.  Nothing less than an international conference of dishes that so resembled the complex environment that surrounded us.  We were about to get up reluctantly from the table when suddenly we heard cries that came right through the shuttered French doors that tried to keep out the incinerating midday heat: “Locusts!  Locusts!”

    Our host became as white as a sheet, like a man who had heard news of a disaster, and we sped outside.  For ten minutes throughout the house that had moments ago been so calm there arose a stampede of running feet and chaotic voices blending into the mobilization of an alarm.  Hopping up from the shady nooks where they had been enjoying their siestas, the servants stormed outdoors banging away with sticks, pitchforks, flails, and any metal objects they could lay hands on, such as copper kettles, wash basins, or pots and pans.  The shepherds blew frantically on their sheep horns.  Others sounded off with conch shells from the ocean or hunting horns.  This created a frightful, disorganized cacophony that accompanied the harsh ululation made by Arab women running up from the adjoining village.  Sometimes, they think, you can frighten off the locusts by making a colossal racket that causes the atmosphere itself start to shake and impedes the locusts from descending to earth.

     But where in the world were those horrible insects?  I could see nothing in the vibrant blue and burning sky but a bronze-colored cloud on the horizon, compact as a cloud full of hail, advancing with the sound like a million trees rustled by a downburst.  That was the locusts.  Flying wingtip to parched wingtip as if to hold each other aloft, they formed a solid mass that spread a dense, expanding shadow over the valley below.  Despite all our cries and exertions, they came on.  Soon the cloud arrived right over us.  For a second we noticed a slight tear on the edges and a sort of unraveling.  Like the first drops to fall from a shower, a few of them, distinct and brownish, broke off from the flight and dove, then the entire cloud broke open and a hail of insects hit the ground hard and noisily.  As far as the eye could see, the fields were covered with enormous grasshoppers as fat as your thumb.

     The massacre began.  A hideous crunching like hay being chewed up.  With plows, harrows, and picks, the people attacked the seething earth.  The more we killed, the more they came on.  They writhed, layer upon layer, with their long legs interlocked.  The ones on top leaped wildly in panic, right onto the noses of the horses that had been harnessed for this bizarre plowing.  Dogs from the farmyard and the native village launched themselves into a cross-country mayhem, snapping at the locusts and rolling on them, At that instant, two companies of the Native Algerian Rifles, trumpets blaring at the lead, raced to the rescue of the beleaguered colonists, and the battle changed its appearance.

    Instead of squashing the bugs, the soldiers methodically roasted them by igniting long trails of gunpowder stretched through the furrows.

     Tired of killing, sickened by the stench, I returned to the farmhouse.  Inside the building there were almost as many of the locusts as outside.  They had pressed in through the shutters, through cracks around doors and windows, even down the chimneys.  Along the woodwork and the half-eaten draperies, they dragged, dropped and flew.   They scaled the whitewashed walls casting huge shadows that doubled their ugliness.  And always that gut-wrenching smell.  At dinner time, we had to do without water because they had fouled all the cisterns, the water basins, the wells, and even the horse troughs.   That night in my room, despite the hordes of them we had killed and removed, I still heard some stragglers crawling beneath the furniture.  The scraping of their carcasses reminded me of the sound of pods splitting open in the sun.  I didn’t sleep that night, either.  Anyway, the entire farm was still awake.  Gunpowder trails sizzled across the valley from one end to the other.  The Native Algerian Rifles were still at it.

     The next day, when I opened my window again, the locusts had all gone.  But what devastation they had left behind them!  Not a flower remained, not a blade of grass.  Everything was blackened, eaten away, incinerated.  I could recognize the orchards of bananas, apricots, peaches, and mandarins only by the skeletons of their lifeless branches.  Nothing remained of the charm, the shimmering leaves that are the life and soul of a tree.  Women were dredging out the cisterns and the pools.  The farm hands were plowing up every inch of earth to kill the eggs that the swarm had laid.  Each clod had to be turned and laboriously broken up.  My heart nearly broke at the sight of all the pale roots, previously full of life, that withered as the land was turned inside out.

‘Moving In’ – By Alphonse Daudet -Translated by James F. Gaines

The rabbits were the ones who were surprised.  Since they had seen the door of the mill closed for so long, the walls and the front yard invaded by weeds, they had come to think that the species of millers was extinct.  Finding the place empty, they had established it as a sort of headquarters, a center of strategic operations – the Jemmapes Rabbit Mill.  The night I arrived, there were (honestly) twenty of them sitting around the front yard warming their paws in the moonbeams.  The second I opened a window, frrt! they broke camp in a rout and all their little white butts sprinted off, tail in the air, into the bush.  I hope they come back.

     Another inhabitant who was astonished to see me was the second-floor renter, a sinister old owl with the face of The Thinker, who had lived in the mill for at least twenty years.  I spotted him in the upper room, sitting still and straight on the cross-timber in the midst of fallen plaster and tiles.  He watched me a minute with his round eyes, then, surprised not to recognize me, started to call out “Hoo! Hoo!” and ponderously to shake his big wings, grey with dust.  Those damned Thinkers, they never brush themselves off!  No matter.  Such as he is, with his blinking eyes and frowning face, this silent renter pleases me more than any other could.  I instantly renewed his lease.  As in the past, he takes the whole second story of the mill, with an entry through a hole in the roof.  I reserve for my own use the first floor, a whitewashed room underneath, its ceiling low and vaulted like the refectory of a monastery.

     That’s where I write to you from, my front door wide open to the wonderful sun. A beautiful stand of pines shimmering with light goes down to the bottom of the hill.  On the horizon, the Alpilles Mountains raise their pointed peaks.  Not a sound.  You can barely hear, far away, as though through a filter, a curlew in the lavender fields or the bells of a mule train on the highway.  This whole Provencal landscape lives entirely on light.

      So why should I regret your dirty, noisy Paris?  I have it so well in my mill.  It’s just the spot I was looking for, a fragrant, warm getaway a thousand miles from newspapers, cabs, and fog.  And there are so many great things around me.  I’ve been moved in for scarcely a week and already my head is crammed with impressions and memories.  Why, just last night, I was present when the flocks came back to the mas (farmstead) down the hill.  I swear that I wouldn’t trade that spectacle for all the premières you have gone to in Paris this week.  You be the ju   dge.

     I should explain that in Provence it’s customary that as soon as the hot weather arrives they send the livestock up into the mountains.   Man and beast spend six months up there sleeping under the stars with green grass up to their chests.  Then, at the first bite of autumn, they come back down to the mas to graze comfortably on the little grey-green hills perfumed with wild rosemary.  Since the break of day, the farmyard gate has stood wide open in welcome, the barns full of fresh straw.  From hour to hour, the farm folk would say, “Now they’re as far as Eyguières, now they’re at Paradou.”  Then, all of a sudden, towards twilight, a great cry goes up, “There they are!  Down over there!”  In the distance, we see the flock approaching in an aura of dust.  The road itself seems to be marching along with them.  Out in front come the old rams, brandishing their horns defiantly.  Behind them the mass of sheep, the ewes somewhat tired, with their lambs nosing around under foot.  The mules decorated with red pompoms on their bridles carry the newborn lambs in baskets, rocking them as they walk along.  Then come the dogs, panting away, their tongues practically down to the ground, and two big rascally shepherds in red wool mantles that hang down to their ankles like a priest’s robes.

     This whole parade passes joyously in front of us and disappears into the barnyard, their tramping feet making a noise like a downpour of rain.  You should see the uproar in the compound.  From up on their perch, the big green and gold peacocks with iridescent heads recognize the arrivals and greet them with a terrific trumpet burst.  The chicken coop, which had been on the point of falling asleep, reawakens with a jolt.  All the birds are running around: ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys, pigeons.  The hen house has gone crazy; the chickens are talking about staying up all night! It seems as though each sheep has brought back in its wool a wild Alpine fragrance, a bit of that giddy mountain air that makes one dance.

     Amidst all this hubbub the flock disperses to find their bedding spots.  Nothing could be more charming than this homecoming.  The old rams fondly settle in to their favorite corners.  The younger lambs who were born during the high season and have never before seen the farm gaze around with astonished eyes.

     But the most touching thing of all is the dogs, those good old sheepdogs completely absorbed with their flock and seeing nothing else in the mas.  In vain, the guard dog barks at them from his house.  The bucket from the well, filled with fresh, cool water, beckons to them with no effect.  They refuse to see or hear anything until the flock is bedded down, the big steel latch bolted on the Dutch door, and the shepherds at table in their quarters.  Only then do they consent to go to the kennel where, lapping at their bowls of stew, they tell their farm friends what it was like up in the mountains, a dark land with wolves and giant purple foxgloves filled to the brim with dew.