La médaille

FOURTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES ANTONIN LAVERGNE

The Medal

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE appearing twenty times a year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

To learn what the Cahiers de la Quinzaine are, it suffices to send a money order for three francs fifty to M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris. One will receive as samples six cahiers of the second and third series.

We place this cahier in the trade; we sell it for one franc.

The Cahiers have published by the same author: Jean Coste, or The Village Schoolteacher, twelfth cahier of the second series, a large cahier of 216 pages, priced at three francs fifty, out of print, now sold only in complete collections.

Just published by the same author, on sale at the cahiers bookshop: Jean Coste, or The Village Schoolteacher, new edition, Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques — Librairie Ollendorff — a fine volume of 314 pages, bound cloth cover illustrated by H. Goussé, three francs fifty.

THE MEDAL

I was recently rereading the savory preface that Daudet wrote for Life of a Child, that fine and simple book, fragrant with our luminous and aromatic South, authored by the peasant Batisto Bonnet.

Through my window, with its misted panes, I could see a shrunken, misty, and lusterless sky, from which fell the dull light of a northern winter — that dreary light, that dying light which, by contrast, recalls to me more vividly, and not without nostalgia, the bright mornings, the warm afternoons, the transparent evenings of my sunlit homeland.

My soul warmed by this evocation, I slipped into reverie and relived the happy years when, like most of my countrymen as children, I knew of French only the few words stammered and translated, like the words of a foreign language, on the benches of our school.

And old impressions, memories, tenuous and wavering at first, rose from the troubled limbo of my memory, shook off their misty shroud of forgetfulness, slowly took shape, and, as in a sudden burst of sunlight, appeared at once in all their brilliance and sharpness — like bright, gilded pictures on a black background. Then from the spindle where the hours of the past are tangled, some of the distant days — so very distant — that preceded my adolescence unwound and shone before my eyes, and I wish to tell you of the events evoked by Daudet’s magical prose and having to do with the sonorous and dear language of the Langue d’Oc.

I

I was then between eight and ten years old, I believe. Aniane, that old town in Lower Languedoc, founded by Saint Benedict in the time of the ancient emperor “with the flowering beard” — Aniane, that town where I was born and where I still have so many deep affections — Aniane had, at that age of my free and cherished childhood, M. Lassalle for schoolmaster.

“Lou mestré” (the master) or “nostré moussu” (our sir), as we called him, had taught in many villages of the region before coming to crown his already long career in this advantageous post, in this rich country of vineyards and olive trees, where the fertile plain of the Hérault begins.

To be sure, M. Lassalle was no elite educator, no paragon of schoolmasters. Little concerned with pedagogical innovations, he knew the routine of his trade and used the old methods: a stick-in-the-mud, if you will, and very narrow-minded, as will be seen.

But if he cared not a whit about making our studies appealing, if he did not chatter all day long to chew the work for inattentive pupils, if he resorted more readily to our memory than to our judgment, he had nevertheless a certain experience, knew how to make us work hard, and obliged us to learn our lessons by heart without skipping a single syllable. Did one stumble just three times, no more, during a recitation, he had a way of looking at us from under his brow that gave us a shiver and sent us, quite crestfallen, back to our seats, without seeking any excuse or escape. Head in hands, we would immediately plunge our noses into the book until the lesson was perfectly learned. Except for the incorrigible — who did not have an easy time of it, however — one did not ordinarily repeat the offense.

No, one did not fool M. Lassalle, who had a habit of telling us:

“I am too old a monkey for anyone to teach me what grimaces are.”

Aged between forty-five and fifty, M. Lassalle was a rather tall man, thin, with prominent cheekbones; the drooping tips of his gray moustache surrounded, like a crescent, his thin mouth and square chin; in the depths of his hollow eyes, under the thick brush of his eyebrows, shone a sharp, hard, and implacable gaze that held us immobile during class, and in the hours of anger, fascinated us like a kite’s eye upon a brood of trembling fledglings.

M. Lassalle spoke little and in a thin but severe voice, so as to spare his tired bronchial tubes. It is true that the slaps his dry hand dealt out, the ferule strokes he lavished on grave occasions, made us dread him to the point of not even daring to stir in his presence.

Now, M. Lassalle had a hatred — a hatred that would have seemed strange, absurd, in a schoolmaster of peasant origin, but which was explained in him, a son, brother, nephew, father, uncle, and cousin of schoolteachers who taught and spoke French, nothing but French: it was the hatred of patois, a hatred all the more fierce, all the more exasperated, because in spite of the incessant recommendations and adjurations of our master, we knew and could only speak patois among ourselves and outside school.

So when, in turn, we read aloud our composition exercises, all studded with barbarisms, Frenchified words, and heteroclite expressions and turns of phrase, M. Lassalle’s pale face turned green, while in the shadowed hollows bristling with his bushy eyebrows, his eye kindled and crackled like a fire of vine-shoots at the bottom of a cave in the Cévennes. A convulsive trembling shook his hands; shivers of anger racked his bony frame beneath the long black frock-coat, polished at the elbows.

“There it is,” he would hiss, teeth clenched, in his voice as sharp and dry as his person, “there it is, your wretched, your abhorred, your accursed patois! I kill myself teaching you our beautiful French language. And this is what I get: a gibberish of gypsies, of caraques, as you say. Are you French or Iroquois, yes or no?”

And his arms stretched forward, with his terrible gaze he would freeze us to our places.

“Poor little wretches,” he would resume, while tremors of pity made his pallid voice quaver, “poor little wretches that you are! why persist in using this horrible, this vile patois! But that is how cart drivers, hooligans, nobodies talk. Look at respectable people: they express themselves in French. I myself — do I ever use a word of your dreadful jargon? I would rather sew my mouth shut.”

It was true. Unlike many of his colleagues who, rightly or wrongly, speak to the peasant in his language or a French mixed with dialect phrases to make themselves better understood, M. Lassalle used only purely orthodox turns of phrase and words. He would have thought it beneath him to address anyone in Languedocien, even the good old women of our parts, who likewise understood him with great difficulty and often just nodded at the “moussu” by way of response.

As for me, the reflections I turned over in my little head only half agreed with M. Lassalle. I loved too well the sweet and singing speech of Oc, used around me by parents, friends, and neighbors, not to be a bit offended by our master’s severe and unjust judgment. My family were neither hooligans nor coarse cart drivers: poor perhaps, and peasants, but honest, esteemed by all, and even of an old family risen from the soil! Whatever the respectful fear M. Lassalle inspired in me, all my affections protested against his insulting words.

But on the other hand, I also knew very well that the children of the rich spoke French — an often dubious French, to be sure! — and that certain village parvenus, most eager to see their progeny do them honor, professed before their sons and daughters the strange contempt, the disdain, sometimes comical, always ridiculous, for this fallen language, which yet they alone used themselves! So that, out of vanity, though reluctantly, I struggled all day long to Frenchify my sentences. Yet I was so clumsy that after many painful attempts, I always returned, almost unconsciously, to the dear language that had cradled me with its pretty, bright songs, in which I thought and which I had to translate with such difficulty, alas!

II

One morning, arriving in the schoolyard, we saw him walking in a path of his little garden, looking quite radiant. He often rubbed his hands vigorously with satisfaction, while keeping an oblique but joyful eye on our noisy games. An extraordinary thing: he entered his classroom, when the time for the return came, humming! To hear him speak patois himself would not have astonished us more. M. Lassalle humming a tune in the exercise of his grave functions — no, you cannot imagine all that this had, for us his pupils, of the unusual, the unprecedented, the prodigious! We also noticed that his face, so severe, was softened by a smile that gladdened us all, for punishments rained down more or less heavily on our heads, depending on the master’s mood.

What a delightful morning! and how pleasant to listen distractedly to the sparrows chirping in the courtyard and fighting, with great beats of wing and beak, over the breadcrumbs we had let fall while breakfasting!

M. Lassalle’s gaiety did not waver for an instant. I even believe, if I recall correctly, that between two lessons he continued to hum! We could not get over it, and the class was less silent than usual.

Around eleven o’clock, at the blessed moment of taking flight like the sparrows in the yard, we at last learned the answer to the riddle. Already we were preparing to slip our arms through the straps of our satchels, when M. Lassalle held us back with a gesture on our benches and fixed upon us his joyful but increasingly uncomfortable gaze. Without knowing why, an inexplicable anguish tightened my throat as at the sight of an unexpected danger.

“My friends,” our master finally exclaimed, “I have one more little word to say to you… it won’t take long.”

Silence fell — oh! a silence heavy with apprehension of an unknown and all the more formidable peril. We all sensed that something extraordinary, threatening to our peace, was about to happen.

Standing on his platform, M. Lassalle had just inserted his long, bony fingers into his vest pocket. Then with a sharp, triumphant gesture, he raised his hand in the air and, without saying a word, like the priest with the host, he presented to us, between thumb and forefinger, a round, black object, resembling a checker piece. Our good children’s eyes quickly recognized one of those old coins, bearing the effigy of Louis XIV, Louis XV, or Louis XVI, as many still remain in our countryside. The relief had almost vanished under the patina and verdigris of time, and a secular grime, accumulated in the hollows, blurred the worn features of the sovereign.

Slowly, in the hieratic posture of the celebrant showing the monstrance to the kneeling faithful, M. Lassalle moved his hand from right to left, left to right, and at the same time, at the corners of his thin lips, he wore such a mocking smile that, without yet understanding, my little heart contracted with dread.

“Well, well!” he finally murmured, with an acidulous laugh, all charged with menace, “well, well! doesn’t this ‘medal’ mean anything to you!”

It was indeed by that word that we were in the habit of designating all those old coins with which we played at button-toss.

“Well, well! with this, I have you, my friends… Ah! you persist in speaking that odious patois. Well! this medal, so easy to hide, this medal, which will circulate furtively from hand to hand, puts my mind at rest forever… With this good old sou, no more cheating. Whether I am present or absent, in Aniane, in Montpellier, in Senegal, or at the poles, those who transgress my orders, who scorn my advice and are constantly patois-ing, will be well and truly caught. An invention, isn’t it? a stroke of genius, well, well!”

With eyes wide open, we understood less and less. Was it a talisman, a fairy medal? The air of supreme derision lighting the pale and often morose face of the master held us there, breathless.

“Es baou!” (He’s mad!) — murmured near me one of the boldest of my schoolmates.

Calmly, in a tone that betrayed no madness, M. Lassalle explained to us his Machiavellian plan, which appealed to our worst instincts. But the aim pursued was so noble! It was we ourselves who were going to watch, spy on, and inevitably denounce one another.

The silence was glacial. For my part, I felt myself on the rack. Henceforth the invisible, agonizing threat of severe punishments would hang over our heads.

Here it was:

On certain days, the medal would be entrusted by him, in secret, to a serious pupil who would hand it to the first schoolmate he heard speaking patois. That one would try to do the same, and so on, from one to another, until the day the master reclaimed it and distributed punishments aplenty to those in whose hands it had passed. The pupil chosen by the master was also obliged to get rid of the medal at all costs, if he did not wish to be punished himself for “having betrayed the trust placed in him.”

It was further decided that whoever last had the medal in his possession would not only be given a double imposition, but would also spend the entire day in detention on bread and water. So each had an interest in not being the last one so ill-fated!

How sad we were that day, leaving school, one may guess. Especially as M. Lassalle, giving us no respite, had hastened to tell us:

“I have just now, in secret, given another medal — different from this one — to one of your schoolmates whom I esteem. Go then, beware, and sin no more. I shall be without pity for the guilty! Next Monday, I shall attend to this.”

“Who has the medal? who has the medal?” we whispered, once ranks were broken, already forming hostile groups.

And the guessing went at full gallop. Is it Jacques? is it Paul? — so many obsessive and unanswered questions. The holder of the terrible old coin did not betray himself.

From then on, we watched one another, looked at each other askance. There was much less spirit and openness in our games. Each companion became dangerous. For no matter how carefully one watched oneself, habit prevailed, and involuntarily, in the heat of play, some patois exclamation or word would escape one of us, in which case “the one who had the medal” would take advantage of it to hand it at once to the bewildered culprit.

Soon we all spoke French, except for a few stubborn heads who cared nothing for detentions and impositions and who, nevertheless, hastened, once the medal was in their possession, to give it treacherously to schoolmates caught in the act, so that these might keep them company at school.

At the end of a month, it became intolerable. No longer to have the freedom to communicate among ourselves, in our dear patois — that was really too much!

We resorted to cunning.

Soon we would meet in groups of four or five, and after having solemnly sworn that none of us had the medal, confident in the word given, we would flee far away, to a secluded spot, to play in complete safety. Often, to be more secure, we would scale the steep, clayey slope of the hillock and take refuge in the shady paths of the Grove. But despite so many precautions, once settled in an isolated clearing, we spoke only in whispers, fearing to reveal our presence and always keeping our ears pricked. Among the thickets where bushes, brambles, and climbing plants entwined between the slender trunks of the pines, a thousand sounds rustled: leaves brushed by a bird’s flight, gravel sliding on the slopes, or the dry snap of twigs under the flight of a rabbit startled by a shadow. All these tremors of the bushes and greenery alarmed us, threw us into a panic, for we always dreaded seeing a schoolmate’s mocking face suddenly emerge from a clump and hearing his jeering voice cry:

“Here’s the medal for you.”

It was only after a moment of anxious waiting that we returned to our games and dared speak patois again — in whispers, as if in church, and with the stern specter, the cold and detested figure of M. Lassalle before our eyes, telling us the next day:

“So-and-so, a hundred lines neatly written and detention for speaking gibberish.”

No, one no longer had fun as in the old days. Mistrust grew, invaded us like a weed. And all the more so because traitors, despite the oath sworn, would join us and, without any shame, would suddenly slip us the terrifying medal.

Every evening, especially, on going to bed, in the remote bedroom of the family house, when I felt myself defended by a triple rampart of bolted doors, what delight to speak patois with my family! Not without apprehension, it is true, which was perhaps an added charm. At the crack of a piece of furniture or the floor, at the sound of a mouse trotting in the attic, at the pouncing of the cat upon it, at the noisy scampering of the rabbits in the warren, I would stop short, nearly white, expecting to see the bedroom door fly to pieces or the wall open like Ali Baba’s rock, to reveal a schoolmate presenting the horrific coin.

My happiest days I spent away from Aniane, four kilometers from school, in a hamlet, Le Mas de Daumas, where a brother of my mother lived and where I often went to stay a whole week. There, rid of my obsessive worry, drunk with freedom, I would wander along the stream, bordered by meadows and vineyards, that flows at the foot of the hamlet in a narrow valley between two wooded and stony hills. Then, far from school, far from M. Lassalle, far from any treacherous schoolmate, I spoke patois, nothing but patois, to the trees, the clouds, the birds, even the rocks, caressed by pure air, bathed in golden light, free in soul and body, in that charming and danger-free solitude.

III

However, after about a year of this regime, we had had enough. We had grown during that time; we now belonged to the top class: it was our turn to be entrusted with the much-loathed medal.

That year, during M. Lassalle’s absence on holiday, the medal had made innumerable victims; no one emerged unscathed: all of us had been struck more or less; some had had it as many as twenty times and more. So upon the return, for an entire day M. Lassalle distributed punishment upon punishment.

Holocaust and martyrology! Not a day in October without legions of the punished; no more recesses, no more normal outings: from morning to evening, everyone had so many impositions to do that mountains of exercise books were blackened.

We were ripe for great resolutions. We consulted among the “older ones.” Conspirators and revolutionaries, we held nighttime councils on a solitary threshing floor. Plots were hatched in the shadows. At all costs, we had to escape servitude, overthrow the tyranny of the old coin. We swore to lose the medals that would be entrusted to us.

But our hopes were dashed. No matter how many old coins we mislaid, M. Lassalle found others. His supply never ran out.

Then we acted by cunning, legally. All the “older boys” swore — on a moonless night, on the steps of the church of the White Penitents — to keep in their possession whatever medal M. Lassalle entrusted to them, to prevent its circulation — that is, to no longer listen for patois words, to tolerate them, and to brazenly affirm, on the day of the inquiry, that everyone was now speaking excellent French, purged of all dialect words and turns of phrase.

M. Lassalle, like all tyrants who believe they have imposed obedience to repressive and unjust laws by force and who, in their deceptive security, no longer hear the popular anger bubbling beneath the apparent calm of the surface, gradually fell asleep on the pillow of trust. It was a radiant day when this belief took hold in him. Finally an hour came when, before the full class, plunged into a rapture mingled with the malice of having so well deceived so shrewd a master, he decreed, his face beaming, in pompous dithyrambic phrases, that the medal was henceforth useless, that the habit — “that second nature” — had been acquired.

And in the triumphant vision of the future, he prophesied, in short order, with a tremor in his voice, the death, the annihilation of the gibberish, of the abhorred patois, thanks to his efforts and those of his colleagues to whom, through a pedagogical journal, he was going to communicate the marvelous success of his method…

Pécaïré! the poor man!

At the hour of dismissal, we filed out with hypocritical faces before the delighted master, who responded to each of our salutes with kind words. We made our way sedately to the Roc, and from there, in a tumultuous band, shouting cries of joy, we took the path to the Brèche. As if storming a fortress, we climbed the steep slope of the Grove, traversed it from end to end, and soon all the “older boys,” after descending a broad avenue, found themselves gathered in a meadow below, surrounded by clumps of tall trees. There, to the singing of a patois round, we celebrated our victory and our reconquered liberties, after several years of hard servitude. It was decided, however, that we would use French exclusively at school and in its vicinity, for fear that M. Lassalle might be set off again.

From that day, trust, cordiality, and high spirits returned to our dealings and our games, and more than ever, among ourselves, we spoke with delight that dear, proscribed langue d’oc — for one loves all the more the beings and things for which one has suffered.

THE LETTER OF SUMMONS

That Wednesday, as was his custom, M. Bastoul, the schoolmaster of Sallèles, opened his door upon the day that, still uncertain, trembled about the things of the world. On account of the freshness, he turned up the collar of his jacket, then, having taken a pinch of snuff, shook himself vigorously. At last, at a slow pace, in a dawdling manner, he entered the little garden adjoining the schoolhouse.

The village seemed to sleep; not a human sound. Yet in the depths of the yards, hens were already clucking and roosters trumpeted reveille at full throat. Soon, from the closed stables rose the jerky neighing of horses and mules who, seeing in these first diffuse gleams the empty manger, demanded the morning feed and struck the packed earth floor with their hooves.

A May dawn gave a pearly tint to the eastern rim of the sky where, alone, the morning star still pulsed with a bright but increasingly pale gleam. Little by little, the reddish tint of the ferruginous soil appeared — a tint that, no doubt, had given the whole surrounding upland its significant name: las Rufas. Seeing the neighboring hills, the fallow fields, the whole purple-colored countryside light up now, one would say it was a battlefield whose earth is soaked and reddened with blood, but from which the dead and wounded have been removed during the night.

Life was awakening everywhere as the light spread. From his garden, M. Bastoul could see, over there, in violet distances, the plain of the Hérault, all planted with vines over which floated an impalpable iridescent mist, quickly dispelled by the first rays of the pink sun.

M. Bastoul had been a schoolmaster at Sallèles for more than twenty-five years. Of simple tastes, he had many times refused to leave, even for more advantageous posts, this Cévennes village where he had married and where his interests and habits had held him ever since. Very proud of his plant collections, he cultivated them carefully and loved them with passion. Like many of his colleagues who live isolated in their villages, M. Bastoul was an ardent botanist.

At this moment, he had eyes and thought only for his flowers with their brilliant and varied corollas, for his shrubs moist with dew. Before going back inside, M. Bastoul wanted to cast a glance at his beehive at the end of the garden. Active and buzzing, the bees went back and forth from the hive to the hills and the valley where a thousand tiny flowers opened, rich in nectar and fragrance. Far from being alarmed at the schoolmaster’s approach, they fluttered around him, and some alighted, almost caressing and grateful, on the friend who took such care of them. And he, gently, sang to them that word which charms, it is said, the bees, sensitive like women to all praise:

“Bélas! bélas! bélas!…” (Beauties! beauties! beauties!…)

After which, M. Bastoul slowly went back up toward the schoolyard, where the shrill voices of children were chirping.