The Solitude of Compassion (19 page)

So, Augusta was a rich orphan. A little farther on, in the hills, there was a notary. A notary, a cistern, these are things to make use of. First they made Augusta sign a legal notice. Normal. I see Rodolphe. He must have pulled off his hat and scratched his head,
then squeezed his chin and pulled two or three times on the skin of his chin. At that point, he said:

“Let us see it.”

They passed the paper across the table to him.

He asked several times:

“What does that mean?”

The notary took back the paper, put on his glasses, and reread the act up until the word that Rodolphe kept his finger on.

“There.”

“There, that means…”

“Good. It is standard.”

Augusta signed, the notary signed. All that was left was to prepare his big hands and the rope.

I read that in Paris certain gun brokers sell revolvers to excited people and, distrusting them, give them blank cartridges. The evil is that in the middle of the land one cannot accomplish acts with blanks.

For Rodolphe, his son, and for the entire chestnut farm, we could perhaps avenge Augusta because they believed too much that the middle of the land was worth the middle of the sea. But I know other stories, another story that the newspapers do not talk about.

Last summer, in a little mountain village, I was going to smoke my pipe along the ravine with a dear old laughing man, slow, filled with wisdom, in bloom from the eye down to the lips. Towards noon his wife called him with a soft, loving voice and he went in to soup. Walking the flat of the fields at his leisure, one felt that he had a firm foot, long thoughts, a good weight.

I said to him often:

“Father Firmin, we are still going to have good pipes before the time…”

It did not bother him to speak about death. Everything was well-oiled in him. He saw himself at the end of his life with still a good bundle of years.

The wife died. Father Firmin stayed alone in the house. Then his nephew came to live in the house. They had spoken so much about company, they had spoken so much about children, little girls, of good society all cosy around the stove, they had waved good soups under his nose, good stews, fresh tobacco, the good young women fussed so much for the pains of the old man that Firmin went to the notary.

Twenty days later, after twenty mouthfuls of a very bitter truth, Firmin threw himself in the torrent.

The nephew is red-haired and a solid man. He has a lot of blood. He has to eat a lot. They are not plentiful, those little fields of dark grain up there in the high waves of the mountain.

Men lost on rafts, in the middle of the land.

For a very long time I have wanted to write a novel in which you could hear the world sing. In all of today's books they have given, in my opinion, too big a place to small-minded people and they have neglected to make us perceive the breathing of the beautiful inhabitants of the universe. The seeds that are sown in books, they all seem to have been purchased from the same granary. They sow a lot about love in all its forms, and it is a thoroughly bastardized plant, then one or two fistfuls of other seeds and that is all. Besides, all of that is sown into man. I know that we can hardly conceive of a novel without people, because they are part of the world. What is needed is to put man in his place, not to make him the center of everything, to be humble enough to perceive that a mountain exists not merely as height and width but as weight, emissions, gestures, overarching power, words, sympathy. A river is a character, with its rages and its loves, its power, its god of chance, its sicknesses, its thirst for adventures. Rivers, springs are characters: they love, they deceive, they lie, they betray, they are beautiful, they dress themselves in rushes and mosses. The forests breathe. The fields, the moors, the hills, the
beaches, the oceans, the valleys in the mountains, the lost summits struck by lightning and the proud walls of rock on which the wind of the heights comes to disembowel itself since the first ages of the world: all of this is not a simple spectacle for our eyes. It is a society of living beings. We only know the anatomy of these beautiful living things, as human as we are, and if the mysteries limit us on all sides it is because we have never taken into account the earthly, vegetable, fluvial, and marine psychologies.

This appeasement which comes to us in the friendship of a mountain, this appetite for the forests, this drunkenness which equalizes us, extinguishes our gaze and deadens thought, because we have smelled the odor of these humid burdocks, the mushrooms, the barks, this joy of entering in the grass up to our waist, they are not creations of our senses, it exists all around us and it directs our gestures more than what we believe.

I know that, at times, they have made use of a river to carry the weight of a novel; the silt of its terror, mystery, or strength. I know that they have made use of mountains and that every day they still make use of the land and the fields. They make the birds sing in the forests. No, what I want to do, is to put everything in its place. Despite everything, in the admirable, most recent novel of Jules Romains, Paris is too small. Paris by way of a character is much stronger than that. I know it poorly; the few times that I was there, it showed me the play of some of its muscles so well, the few strokes of its secret battles succeeded so well that ever since I have kept a distant respect for it. In this society of fat inhabitants of the universe, it is, along with all the big cities, the beautiful, cultivated, sportive, seductive, and rotten hoodlum.

If I say that it is small, in this book, it is because for the moment men are too important in relation to it. Besides, it is possible that
in the coming volumes, his portrait will be complete and at the end of things we will see Paris as it is: flat, gnawing, scolding, destroyer of the earth, embued with the stinking of human sweat like a great ant hive that exhales its acid.

Yes, they have made use of all that. One should not make use of it. One must see it. One must, I believe, see, love, comprehend, hate the association of men, the world around it, as one is forced to look, to love, to detest men profoundly in order to paint them. One should stop isolating the character-man, sow him with simple, habitual seeds, but show him as he is, that is to say pierced, drunk, weighty and luminous with humors, influences, the song of the world. For whoever has lived a while in a little mountain hamlet, for example, it is useless to say what place that mountain holds in the conversations of men. For a village of fishermen, it is the sea; for a village in the countryside, it is the fields, the wheat, and the prairies. We do not want to isolate man. He is no longer isolated. The face of the earth is in his heart.

To write this novel, all that is needed is new eyes, new ears, new skins, a man bruised enough, beaten enough, flayed enough by life to no longer desire anything but the lullaby sung by the world.

JEAN GIONO (1895-1970) was born in Manosque, Provence, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. A widely loved figure in his native France, he is the author of many books, the best known of which, perhaps, are
Song of the World
and
Horseman on the Roof.
In 1953, he was awarded the Prize of the Prince Rainier de Monaco for his body of work, became a member of the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and accepted a seat on the Literary Counsel of Monaco in 1963.

Except for a few journeys to Paris or abroad, Giono spent his entire life in Manosque, faithful to his native Provence.

 

HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) is the author of many books, including the classics
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn
, which chronicle his life as an American expatriate living in Paris.

 

EDWARD FORD, a lifelong admirer of Giono's, completed a Master's in French at the University of Virginia.
Solitude de la pitié
was the first book of Giono's he read, and it remains his favorite to this day. Ford lives in the Boston area.

Copyright © 2002 by Seven Stories Press
Foreword © 1969 by Henry Miller.

 

Originally published in France as
Solitude de la pitié
. © 1973 by Éditions Gallimard.

 

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Giono, Jean, 1895-1970.
[Solitude de la pitié. English]
The solitude of compassion / Jean Giono; translated by Edward Ford.

p. cm,

eISBN : 978-1-609-80031-4

1. Ford, Edward (Edward Bruce) II. Title.
PQ2613.I57 S613 2002
843′.912—dc21

2002010009

 

 

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