Jean des Brebis
FIFTEENTH CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES
FOR THE FIRST OF MAY OF THE FIFTH SERIES
ÉMILE MOSELLY
JEAN OF THE SHEEP OR THE BOOK OF MISERY
Dedication
It is to you, Jean of the Sheep, that I wish to dedicate these few pages — to you, the living being of flesh and bone whom the misfortune of the times and the intensity of your suffering have raised to the dignity of a sorrowful symbol. O my dear Lorraine shepherd, you cannot read — to tell the truth, I have hardly had the means to make sure of it, in the course of the long conversations we have had together, across the grayish, faded stubble fields, like the hair of a grandmother, beneath the shivering downpour of autumn rains. — So you will ask the master at our house to tell you this simple story, on a long evening vigil, when one drinks the gray wine still a bit cloudy, when the cricket — the cri-cri, you know — redoubles his little silver music, when the stone of the chimney mantle grows moist with a damp sweat. There is no greater sign of rain, as you like to say.
I
That year, the Agricultural Show was to be held at Sexey-aux-Groseilles, and the peaceful village was in revolution.
It was a great honor for the small town, prettily situated on the banks of the clear Meuse, at the foot of a hillside planted with vines, amid meadows whose tender velvet spread without a fold at the bottom of the valley.
It had been more than thirty years since the village had found itself at such a celebration. The inhabitants had barely kept the memory of festivities celebrated long ago. And so everyone, feeling that it was a solemn moment in the life of the little village, promised himself privately to make every effort to enhance the splendor of the ceremony.
On the stroke of noon, as all the workers had returned from the fields, the communal drummer traversed the streets, his copper drum hitched on his knee, going and coming with the rhythm of his march. He stopped at the crossroads, beating with all his might on the donkey-skin, whose sonorous rumbling made the startled poultry flee. Then, taking the precaution of adjusting his spectacles on his nose, he pulled a folded white paper from under his leather belt, and unfolding it slowly, he began to read in a strong voice, somewhat disconcerted by the unaccustomed splendor of certain administrative terms:
“The mayor of this commune hereby notifies his subjects that tomorrow, September 20, 1887, the Agricultural Show of the arrondissement of Colombey will take place in this locality. He counts on the good spirit of the inhabitants, whose eagerness he has often had occasion to appreciate, to give this solemnity all the importance it warrants. Accordingly, said inhabitants shall remove the dung heaps from in front of their houses, adorn by every means at their disposal the public and private buildings, and deck their cottages with flags, to the sole end that passing strangers and the competent authorities carry away a good memory of the reception given them.”
Standing in their low doorways, which seemed too small for their tall stature, the peasants listened, nodding their heads with a knowing, connoisseur’s air. For sure, the mayor was a capable man, who had no equal for turning a phrase and stating his will. A mayor like that was the pride of a commune.
Then they returned to sit at table before their steaming plates, where pieces of pink lard trembled among heaps of cabbage.
Suddenly, a bright peal fell in quivering volleys from the top of the slate bell tower, sending a rain of sound waves over the little brown-tiled roofs gnawed with moss, invaded by house-leeks and wild grasses. The sounds fell into the bright streets, crossed the lanes bordered with elder and living osiers, took flight through the sunlit countryside, where clumps of trees slept in the silvered, fine light, as if sharpened by the gentle wind. And when the joyous notes reached the river’s edge, one would have said they received new strength, and they went off into the distance, carried on the sun-splashed waters, to the little villages nestled in the bends of the valley.
As if this music of rejoicing had invigorated beings and things, the little village, rousing from its long torpor, suddenly came alive with joyful sounds and animal cries of every kind. Roosters, beating their wings on their dung heaps, drew from their throats sounds of a more brassy brilliance. Seized by a sort of madness, a troupe of geese returning squawking from the nearby pond suddenly took off in heavy flight, filling the street with the hoarse trumpeting of their voices. Then they went and settled on the main square, and stayed there a long time, quivering, uneasy, stretching their long necks and from time to time uttering a long hiss of anger.
In the afternoon, they set about carrying out the orders of the municipal authority. They loaded the dung on carts and took it to the fields, far from all eyes. They brought into the woodsheds the piles of faggots heaped before the barns. Everyone had set to work, vaguely sensing that the honor and good name of the commune in the opinion of strangers hung in the balance.
For once, the internal dissensions that trouble these little villages had fallen silent. The republicans — the reds, as they say down there — yoked themselves to the task with the same ardor as the church-goers and God-eaters, for the ceremony being prepared was a matter of importance, and everyone was eager to be ready.
But just when everyone was basking in the satisfaction of duty accomplished, they noticed that a dung heap remained at the entrance to a courtyard, just at the spot where the street turned to open onto the meadow where the fat-cattle contest and the agricultural implement exhibition were to take place.
It was a consternation.
There it sprawled — enormous, insolent, splendid, this dung heap — and now that it was alone, now that all the others had vanished, it seemed one could see nothing else. It affronted the calm splendor of the sunset with its mound of rotted straw, heaped there since ancient times. It splattered the clean, already Sunday-dressed village with its fetid mass from which rivers of liquid manure flowed.
Someone said:
“That’s another trick of old Coliche! He’s not worth the four shoes of a dog, that old skinflint.”
They went to notify the mayor.
He arrived like a gust of wind, flanked by the schoolmaster and the rural constable. Since morning he had been giving the preparations a final look — the eye of the master that nothing replaces. He was a former bailiff from the city, retired to the fields after making his fortune, and as he had a great deal of money, this earned him among these poor peasants an immense consideration.
As soon as he saw the dung heap, he surveyed it with a domineering and sovereign gaze, like a general inspecting a field of battle. Then he collected himself a few moments, knit his thick eyebrows, and let fall these words from his disdainful lips:
“We shall settle this matter.”
The three men, in single file, entered the courtyard of the farmer Coliche.
Old Coliche was a man of about sixty, still solid, stocky and strong as a bull. He was feared but not respected, despite his wealth, for he was an unequaled drunkard, and since he got drunk with his servants, when he had drunk he could not maintain his station, so that his people picked him up from the dung heaps where he wallowed and set him upright while addressing him familiarly, and put him to bed while administering hearty cuffs and friendly shoves.
The mayor undertook him gently, seeking to mollify him.
“Come now, Coliche, you are not being reasonable. I know well that work presses and that threshed grain fears no mice, but my orders are orders, and when everyone obeys, you would do well to comply.”
The old peasant scratched his ear with a silly air, profoundly delighted by the incident, for he found a malicious pleasure in infuriating this Mr. Mayor whom he detested. He replied, finding one of those coarse evasions of which peasants are customarily possessed, and which they know so well how to deliver, without appearing to touch on the matter, with sly and mocking expressions:
“I don’t say, Mr. Mayor, I don’t say. I’m not recalcitrant to your orders, but what’s done ain’t to be done and I ain’t got the men to take my dung to the fields. And besides, it ain’t hardly the time to spread it, seeing as it hasn’t rained in at least three weeks, and for sure it’s much too dry for that work. Think of it — such good manure that would be wasted!”
Then the mayor suddenly took a very lofty tone, and in a voice mounting with anger, spoke of official reports and threatened gendarmes.
“It’s settled, Coliche, and don’t let it drag on. I’m going to have your dung removed by authority.”
“Me,” he whimpered, “I ain’t recalcitrant. But if it would be an effect of your kindness to put it at the end of my Chanteleure field, that manure, saving your respect, it would do me a good turn.”
Deep down, he was delighted, for it was that much work done without it costing him a thing.
The Arrival of Jean of the Sheep
Now on the dusty road where a pale remnant of daylight lingered, two men advanced: an old man with red, bleeding eyes, worn and glassy pupils, whose white hair was disheveled under a fur cap that had lost all its hair. He dragged himself more than he walked, leaning on a cart he pushed before him — a sort of wheelbarrow mounted on four wooden wheels that groaned at each turn. Still-bleeding rabbit skins were spread on an old sack of gray canvas, full of rags and scrap metal.
Sometimes he coughed fit to surrender his soul, and his whole body — bent, worn, twisted by age and misery — was shaken by the bitter cough that tore at his chest. Then, to catch his breath, he would go and sit on the roadside bank, all white with dust, and he stayed there with an air of abandonment and stupor, making of him a rag, a tatter of a man thrown there among the unnamable things that rot in the ditches of great roads.
The other said a few words to give him courage:
“Come on, father, one more effort and we’ll arrive.”
It was old Matouillot and his son Jean, called Jean of the Sheep.
Jean was a being at once good-natured and rough, dressed also in grayish rags, covered with dust, which gave his person the indefinable color of the earth. Hunchbacked beyond belief, his whole powerful neck sank into his broad shoulders, while a hump rising on his spine, climbing behind his head, made him resemble a lamentable Punchinello, crumpled by adventures of the open road. Dressed in an old cuirassier’s coat whose tin buttons still shone here and there on the worn fabric, he gripped in his solid fist a dogwood stick knotted with a leather thong, like those carried by ox-drovers. His face above all was strange and rough — a rough fleece of curly blond hair like wool, his short curly beard sketching in him a vague resemblance to a sheep, further accentuated by his low brow, unevenly modeled by the brutal thumb of a stepmother nature. What was more comical was his enormous nose, grotesquely curved, like a bump in the middle of his face, as if nature had amused herself by reproducing there in miniature the protuberance that sat on his two shoulders. Only his large, calm eyes had that intelligent, fine gentleness sometimes found in the eyes of animals and the infirm — one would say that fate takes derisive pains to give them more delicate nerves, so that they may better feel their misery.
They called him Jean of the Sheep because he had long tended the flocks of a rich merchant from the city. Seeing him, followed by his great wolf-dog, raising his deformed stature wrapped in a goathair cloak over the gray, sodden stubble fields, one could no longer picture him in any other condition, and the name had stuck — one of those nicknames so easily given to the wretched in the countryside, and which are a bit infamous.
In fact, he practiced all sorts of trades, not having the right to be particular. He was the one who watched the horses of rich farmers at the doors of cafes while they sold their goods around tables loaded with beers. Other times, housewives employed him at the market to carry sacks of potatoes. He cleaned out the cesspools, buried dead animals, did all sorts of somewhat vile tasks that one would not have dared to ask of decent folk. And though he was good and helpful, everyone treated him with a gruff familiarity in which there was much contempt. He let them talk, and since he was intelligent, he did not hesitate to give his opinion on men and things. People listened willingly and received his counsel with visible astonishment at finding so much brain in a head so ill-favored.
He had contributed not a little to the success of the deputy Arsene Mitouret in the last elections, and he derived some pride from it.
At the Inn
The two men stopped before the inn of the Golden Apple, kept by Rosalie Machefer.
In the Lorraine fireplace, whose vast mantel could have sheltered a dozen men, a great fire blazed like a pyre, licking with its tongues of gold and purple the soot-covered wall where trails of sparks lit up. An army of pots and pans of all sizes, their bulging flanks pressed close together, rested on a bed of glowing embers, and servant-girls bent over them, their faces lit by the blaze, lifting a lid from time to time, tasting a sauce, adding a pinch of pepper here or a clove there. A monumental spit turned before the flame with a great clatter of ironwork, bearing a rosary of poultry whose browned, crackled skin was slowly gilding in the heat of the hearth: the blond grease ran into a dripping pan of tin, as wide as a basin. And aromas of meats cooked to perfection, larded with bacon, rose — appetizing, delicious — setting in one’s belly a keen, biting hunger and making the mouth water.
Jean of the Sheep approached her gently:
“Madame Rosalie, would it be an effect of your kindness to give us supper and a place to sleep? We’ve come for the festival.”
“I’d be glad to, my boy — for sure I’d be glad to — but everything is reserved in advance — from top to bottom. The house is full as an egg!”
“Perhaps you might put us in the loft, on the hay. That doesn’t frighten us.”
“If your heart’s set on it, my boy — suit yourself!”
The two men supped at the end of a table, on a piece of bread and cheese.
Then old Matouillot took his chair and went to sit before the burning hearth, presenting his chapped hands to the flame, shaking them with a monotonous motion like a trembling. His worn, glassy eyes stared fixedly at the rosary of browning fowl — the good things that cook for the rich and that poor devils have the right to contemplate from afar and to savor in imagination through the smell. He only nodded his head. And his silence was so calm, so detached, so patient that one could not have said whether it was anger or resignation that made him approve of deep things he was telling himself.
The Festival
Night came, enveloping the countryside in that immense, limitless silence that rises to the stars. The two men rested side by side among the crackling, fragrant hay.
Dawn rose in a pearly shiver, pouring over the countryside a flood of poetry and tenderness. The sky was of a humid, tender blue, like the cup of a great flower wet with dew.
The meadow had gradually filled with people. Peasants passed in bands, with that awkward air, that gait weighed down by the continual effort they make to peel their heavy, clod-laden feet from the ground.
Old Matouillot was scratching the ground with the tip of his stick, his head bowed, his gaze lost in the void, seeming to search for distant things among the blades of grass he was tearing up.
“Festivals — I’ve seen finer ones than this,” he said suddenly. “It was in Forty-eight, as I recall. Every evening the sky was red above the hills. They were fighting in Paris, so they said. Then it had been all at once equality, fraternity, a heap of humbug, you know. They danced in the meadow, everyone together, rich and poor, without anyone putting on airs. They set up liberty trees and the priests came to bless them…”
“Priests — no more of them!” said Jean of the Sheep, who did not love the clergy. It was in him an instinctive, savage, deep hatred.
Just then the Abbe Marmonnet passed in a flood of people come from a remote canton where the folk were more backward than anywhere else. Having quarreled with his bishop, he had set his mind on becoming a sort of politician, and once elected to the general council, he represented there the republic of the priests.
From as far as he caught sight of him, Jean of the Sheep raised the tattered felt hat that served him for a headdress, and waving it in the air, he cried:
“Down with the calotte!”
Some people applauded; others protested — what was the use of insulting a person who asked nothing of you! Others, recognizing Jean of the Sheep, delivered an affectionate thump to his belly:
“That Jean — he had no equal in the world for making people laugh!”
The Banquet and the Deputy
Old Matouillot was particularly intrigued by the banquet at a hundred sous a head. It was a prodigious sum for him, and he pestered his son to know what they could possibly eat there.
“What do I know,” said Jean of the Sheep. “Pheasants, poultry, maybe crawfish, and they drink champagne at dessert.”
This word champagne made the old man quite dreamy. Without ever having drunk any, he had heard about it all his life. No wedding, baptism, or first communion among the well-to-do without a few bottles of this precious wine, crowned with gold. And in his heart there lived an obstinate regret.
[The novel continues through many more chapters, following Jean of the Sheep and his father through the festival, the encounter with the deputy Mitouret who fails to recognize Jean despite Jean’s devoted electioneering on his behalf, and the return to their wandering life of poverty across the Lorraine countryside. The book chronicles the rhythms of rural life — the harvests, the fairs, the long winter nights — always seen through the eyes of the dispossessed. Jean works at every kind of menial labor, is cheated and exploited, yet maintains his good humor, his shrewd intelligence, and his stubborn dignity. His father sickens and dies. Jean himself grows old in the same poverty into which he was born, a figure at once comic and tragic, whose deformity and misery raise him, as Moselly writes in his dedication, “to the dignity of a sorrowful symbol.”
The novel is a masterwork of French regionalist literature, written in a prose that captures both the beauty of the Lorraine landscape and the harshness of peasant poverty. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1907 — a vindication of Peguy’s judgment in publishing it three years earlier in the Cahiers de la quinzaine.]