But what made the blood of the girls run cold as they sat round in the pale candlelight, and sent them running off to peer wildly into the darkness, was the story of the famous band of criminals from Orgères called the Roasters, whose exploits still made the district shudder with horror sixty years later. There were hundreds of them, beggars, tramps, deserters and pretended hawkers, men, women and children living from theft, murder and vice. They were descended from the old bands of organized armed bandits, who took advantage of the troubles arising out of the Revolution by systematically attacking isolated houses which they burst into by breaking down the doors with battering rams. At nightfall they would come like wolves out of the forest of Dourdan, the scrubland of La Conie, from the dens where they lurked in the woods; and as dusk fell, terror descended on the farms of Beauce, from Etampes to Châteaudun and from Chartres to Orléans. Amongst their legendary atrocities the one most frequently spoken of in Rognes was the sacking of the Millouard farm, only a score of miles away, in the canton of Orgères. On that night, their celebrated leader, Beau François, who had succeeded May Blossom, had with him his lieutenant, Red Auneau, the Big Dragoon, Breton-dry-arse, Longjumeau, One-thumb Jean and fifty more, all with blackened faces. First, they forced all the workers on the farm, the maids, the carters and the shepherd, down the cellar at bayonet-point; then they ‘roasted’ old Fousset the farmer, whom they had kept separate from the rest. Having stretched his feet out over the glowing embers of the fire, they set light to his beard and all the hair on his body with lighted wisps of straw; then they went back to his feet which they slashed with the point of a knife so that they would cook better. When the old man had been persuaded to reveal the whereabouts of his money, they eventually let him go and made off with an immense amount of loot; Fousset had the strength to crawl to a neighbouring house and did not die until some time later. And the tale invariably ended with the trial and execution in Chartres of the band of the Roasters who had been betrayed by One-eyed Jacques: a mass trial for which it took eighteen months to collect the evidence and in the course of which sixty-four of the accused died in prison from a plague caused by their own filth; a trial which brought one hundred and fifteen prisoners before the assize court (thirty-three of them in absentia), which required the jury to answer seven thousand eight hundred questions and led to twenty-three death sentences. On the night of the execution, the executioners of Chartres and Dreux came to blows underneath the blood-stained scaffold while sharing out the condemned men's effects.
So, in connection with a murder which had just been committed over at Janville, Fouan proceeded to relate for the umpteenth time the dreadful events at Millouard: and he had just reached the point when Red Auneau himself was composing his ballad of lament in gaol when the women were horrified by noises in the street, the sound of footsteps and pushing mingled with oaths. Pale-faced, they listened intently, terrified that they might see a sudden invasion of black-faced men. Bravely, Buteau went to the door and opened it:
‘Who's that?’
And they saw Bécu and Jesus Christ, who, having quarrelled with Macqueron, had just left the tavern, taking their cards and a candle with them to finish their game elsewhere. They were so drunk and the others had been so frightened that everybody laughed.
‘All right, you can come in,’ Rose said, smiling at her great scamp of a son. ‘Your children are here, you can take them with you when you go.’
Jesus Christ and Bécu sat down on the ground next to the cows, placed the candle between them and went on with their game: ‘Trumps and trumps and still more trumps!’ But the conversation had moved on and they were now talking about the boys of the village who would be drawing lots for military service, Victor Lengaigne and three others. The women had become serious, they were talking slowly and sadly.
‘It's no joke,’ said Rose, ‘no, it's no joke at all for anybody.’
‘Yes, war's a dreadful thing,’ said Fouan in a subdued voice. ‘It's the ruination of agriculture… When the lads go off, it's the strongest who go, you can see it when there's hard work to be done; and when they come back, well, they've changed, their hearts are no longer in ploughing. Cholera's better than war.’
Fanny stopped knitting.
‘Well, I don't intend to let Nénesse go,’ she declared. ‘Monsieur Baillehache explained how to get round it, something like a lottery; several people club together and everyone contributes a certain amount and those whose number turns up are able to buy themselves out.’
‘You have to be rich to do that,’ remarked La Grande sharply.
But Bécu had overheard a word or two, between two games.
‘War? War makes a man of you, by God!… If you've never been, you can never understand, that's life, bashing each other about. What d'you think, eh? Those wogs down there…’
And he gave a wink with his left eye while Jesus Christ grinned with a knowing air. They had both fought in Africa, the gamekeeper at the beginning of the war, the other man later on at the time of the recent uprisings. So in spite of the difference in time, they both had common memories: cutting off Bedouins' ears and threading them on a string; Bedouin women with their bodies rubbed all over in oil whom you picked up behind the hedgerows and stuffed in every hole. Jesus Christ in particular would often tell a story which used to bring big guffaws from the peasants: a great cow of a woman as yellow as a lemon whom they'd made run about stark-naked with a pipe stuck up her behind.
‘For Christ's sake,’ said Bécu, addressing Fanny, ‘do you want Nénesse to be a cissy?… I'm going to make quite sure that Delphin goes into the army.’
The children had stopped playing. Delphin was looking up; his round, sturdy head already made him seem a proper peasant, young though he was.
‘No,’ he said bluntly, looking obstinate.
‘What did you say? I'll teach you what courage means, you unpatriotic little sod!’
‘I don't want to go into the army. I want to stay here.’
The gamekeeper was about to strike him when Buteau intervened.
‘Leave the child alone! He's right. Do they need him? There are plenty of others… Anyway, is that how things ought to be, to have to go away from home and get your mug bashed in for a lot of stupid rubbish… I never left the village and I'm none the worse for it!’
He had in fact been lucky in the draw; he was a real land-worker and loved it; he had never gone further than Chartres or Orléans or seen anything beyond the flat horizon of Beauce. And he seemed to be proud of it, proud at having his roots in his own patch of land, bound to it like a stubborn hardy tree. He had risen to his feet; the women were watching him.
‘When they come back from military service they're all so thin,’ Lise said quietly and timidly.
‘And how about you, Corporal?’ old Rose asked. ‘Did you go to foreign parts?’
Jean was a young man who preferred to think rather than talk. He had been quietly smoking his pipe, which he now slowly removed from his mouth.
‘Yes, I went quite a long way… But I didn't get as far as the Crimea. I was on the point of going when they took Sebastopol… But later on there was Italy…’
‘And what's Italy like?’
The question seemed to surprise him, he hesitated and searched his memory.
‘Well, Italy's no different from here. They grow things, they've got woods and rivers. It's the same as everywhere.’
‘So you took part in the fighting?’
‘Yes I did some fighting, of course.’
He was sucking at his pipe again, in no hurry to talk, and Françoise looked up, her lips parted, expecting a story. All the women were interested and even La Grande rapped the table again with her stick to stop Hilarion from whining, as La Trouille had hit upon the idea of slyly sticking a pin into his arm.
‘Solferino was a hot spot, all right, although it was raining, goodness me how it rained… I hadn't got a dry stitch on me, the water was pouring down my back into my shoes. We certainly got wet and n
o mistake.’
They waited but he had nothing to add; that was all he had seen of the battle of Solferino. After a minute's silence, he went on in his quiet, sensible way:
‘Well, war's not as bad as people think. You draw lots, don't you? You've got to do your duty. As for me, I left the army because I'd sooner be doing something else. All the same, it can be a good thing for someone who doesn't like his job and hates the idea of an enemy coming in and mucking us about in our own country.’
‘All the same, it's a nasty business,’ concluded old Fouan. ‘Everyone ought to defend his own home and that's all.’
Once again silence fell. It was very warm, a damp, living heat that seemed all the stronger because of the powerful smell of the cows' litter. One of the two cows, which had stood up, was dropping her dung and they heard the regular plop-plop as it spread out on the ground. In the gloom of the roof-timbers they could hear the mournful chirruping of a cricket, while the shadows of the women's nimble fingers busy with their knitting seemed like giant spiders' legs dancing along the wall in the all-pervading blackness.
But when Palmyre tried to snuff the candle she did it so awkwardly that it went out. There were startled exclamations, the girls laughed while the children pushed a pin into Hilarion's backside; and they would have been in trouble but for the candle of Jesus Christ and Bécu, who were drowsing over their cards; with its aid they relit the other one, despite its long wick, which had spread out like a red mushroom. Terrified at her clumsiness, Palmyre was trembling like a little girl expecting a thrashing.
‘Well now,’ said Fouan, ‘who's going to read us this, to finish the evening? Corporal, you must be good at reading printed books…’
He had been to fetch a greasy little book, one of those books of Bonapartist propaganda which every village and hamlet in France had been flooded with under the Empire. This one had turned up from the pack of some itinerant pedlar and it was a violent attack on the old monarchy, a dramatized history of the peasantry before and after the Revolution, under the doleful title The Misfortunes and Triumph of Jacques Bonhomme.
Jean took the book and without any urging started to read in the flat drone of a schoolboy ignoring any punctuation. They listened with rapt attention.
First it was the story of the Gauls, a free people reduced to slavery by the Romans and then conquered by the Franks; the latter, by establishing the feudal system, turned slavery into serfdom. And then the long martyrdom of Jacques Bonhomme began, the martyrdom of the tiller of the soil, exploited and exterminated through the centuries. While the townspeople revolted, founded communes and achieved status as a middle class, the peasant, isolated and possessing nothing, not even himself, did not succeed in freeing himself until later, by buying with his own money the freedom to be a man; and only an illusory freedom at that, for the landowner was hamstrung by vicious and ruinous taxes, his tenure was always precarious, his property burdened with so many tolls and levies that he was left with little more than stones to eat. Then followed a terrifying catalogue of all the dues the wretched peasant had to pay. No one could draw up an accurate and complete list because they were legion; an icy blast that blew from the king, the bishop and the lord all together. Three ravening beasts were devouring the same body: the king had the quit-rent and talliage, the bishop had the tithes, the lord taxed and filled his coffers with everything. And now the common man no longer owned anything, neither land nor water nor fire nor even the air he breathed. He had to pay and keep on paying, pay to live, pay to die, pay for his deeds of contract, his herds, even his pleasure. He paid in order to channel the rainwater from the moat into his land, he paid for the cloud of dust raised by the feet of his sheep along the paths in the summer, during the droughts. Anyone who failed to pay in cash paid with his body and his time, talliable and liable to forced labour at his lord's pleasure, forced to plough and harvest and reap and prune the vine and clean out the moat of his castle, to build and maintain the roads. And then there were payments in kind; and the rights of banality, the mill, the oven, the winepress, which cost him a quarter of his crops; and then watch and guard duty, which, when dungeons were abolished, were commuted into money payments. And then there were the rights of capture, purveyance and lodging, so that when the king or the lord passed through, cottages were ransacked, coverlets and palliasses seized, the inhabitants driven out of their homes and doors and windows wrenched from their frames if the occupant failed to take himself off quickly enough. But the tax most loathed, the one which still aroused the bitterest memories in every hamlet, was the hateful salt tax, with the storehouses full of salt and every family forced to buy a certain quantity of it at a fixed price from the king, an arbitrary and iniquitous revenue that caused rebellion and bloodshed all over France.
‘My father,’ Fouan broke in, ‘could remember salt at nearly a franc a pound… Ah, those were hard times!’
Jesus Christ was chuckling in his beard. He tried to bring the conversation round to the more salacious rights, such as the jus primae noctis, which the little book was content modestly to hint at.
‘How about that? The lord stuck his thigh into the bride's bed and then on the first night he'd stick…’
They prevented him from finishing his sentence. The girls, even Lise with her round belly, had blushed violently while La Trouille and the two young scamps stuck their fists into their mouths to stifle their laughter. Hilarion, open-mouthed, was not missing a single word, as if he understood.
Jean continued his reading. Now they were hearing about justice, the threefold justice of king, bishop and lord, crucifying the poor peasant as he sweated over the soil. There was common law and written law and, above all, there was the capricious law of the strongest: no guarantee or appeals, nothing but the supreme power of the sword. Even in later centuries, when the voice of equity was raised in protest, offices were bought and justice was sold. And it was worse when armies had to be recruited, a blood tax which for many a long year was confined only to the lower orders; when they fled into the woods the peasants would be fetched back in chains, driven along by gun butts and enrolled in the army like galley-slaves. They would never gain promotion. A younger son of a noble family used his regiment as a business, rather like a commodity which he had bought; he would put the rank and file up for auction and send the rest of his human cattle off to slaughter. Then finally there were the hunting rights, the right to have a dovecot, the right to shoot rabbits, rights which, even now they have been abolished, have still left a ferment of ill feeling in the hearts of the peasantry. Shooting game was the old feudal prerogative, a fanatical insistence on hereditary rights which gave the lord authority to hunt whenever he wanted and made the villein liable to death if he had the temerity to shoot over his own ground. The wild beast or bird kept in confinement beneath the open sky for the pleasure of one man; fields penned into royal hunts which any game was free to devastate while the owners were not allowed to shoot even a dunnock.
‘That's understandable,’ muttered Bécu, who used to talk of shooting poachers like rabbits.
But Jesus Christ had pricked up his ears at the sound of the word ‘shooting’ and was whistling between his teeth with a facetious air. Game belonged to anyone who knew how to kill it.
‘Oh deary me,’ Rose said simply, with a big sigh.
They were all sad at heart and were slowly becoming oppressed as when they listened to a ghost story. Nor did they always fully understand, and this added to their disquiet. Since those things had happened in the past, they might well happen again in the future.
‘Go on your way, poor Jacques Bonhomme,’ Jean droned on in his schoolboy voice. ‘You must sacrifice yet more sweat and blood, the end of your tribulations is not yet in sight…’
Indeed, the whole calvary of the peasant was now unfolded. He had suffered from everything, from man, from the elements and from himself. Under the feudal system, when the nobles set out on the rampage, he was hunted, pursued and carried off as part of the loot. Every p
rivate war between one lord and another ruined him, if it did not kill him, his cottage was burnt down, his field laid waste. Later on came the big companies, the worst of the scourges that devastated the countryside, those bands of mercenaries at the service of anyone who could hire them, sometimes for and sometimes against France, killing and burning as they passed and leaving nothing but waste land in their wake. Though towns might hold out, thanks to their walls, the villages were swept away in this mad hurricane of massacre which blew from one end of a century to the next. There were centuries of blood, centuries during which our flatlands, as they were called, resounded with one single, massive cry of pain, of raped women, battered children and hanged men. Then, when there was respite from war, the royal tax-collectors were sufficient torment for the poor wretches on the land, because the number and burden of the taxes was as nothing compared with the brutal capricious methods of collecting them: talliage and salt tax were farmed out and taxes, unjustly allotted in accordance with the merest whim, exacted by armed troops who turned revenue collection into a war levy; so that hardly any of the money reached the coffers of the state, having disappeared on the way, stolen little by little by every dishonest hand through which it passed. And then famine played its part. The idiotic tyranny of the laws hampered trade, prevented the free sale of corn and so brought about dreadful shortages every ten years, either through years of drought or excessive rain, which seemed like punishment from on high. A storm which flooded the rivers, a rainless spring, the slightest cloud or ray of sunshine could affect the crops and carry off thousands of men; terrible seasons of famine, sudden excesses of all sorts, dreadful periods of destitution during which men nibbled the grass beside the ditches, like beasts of the field. And, inevitably, after the wars and famines would come the epidemics which killed off those who'd been spared by hunger or the sword. It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside.