Dix contes écrits dans le Nord
Ten Stories Written in the North
Pierre Hamp
SECOND CAHIER OF THE TENTH SERIES
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE, appearing sixteen times a year, PARIS, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor.
A Good Man
There was, in this town on the Belgian border, a pardoned convict, very calm, with that calmness of little girls with strict parents who sit very still for a long time and, living in dread, do nothing without asking permission.
You could recognize him from afar by his quiet gait; he was the man of the town who walked most slowly, buried in his wool sweater with pockets deformed by the habit of thrusting his hands deeply into them. Not much interested him anymore, and he loved his memories; you could see this from his face, as tranquil as his gait: the worked-over face of a man who had had a hard life; his clear, sad eyes looked above people, even when he spoke to them, which was rare. He earned his living at a foundry where he had sometimes worked in his youth, before being sent for twenty years to Cayenne. He was taken back because the countryside bore him no grudge for having been a convict, and everyone agreed that he was a good man. He did not willingly tell his story, for he feared large audiences and attracting attention to himself. His fear of the gendarmes was great, but without hatred, and one could see clearly, though he never said anything about it, that he hated the customs men. With the gendarmes he was human; with the customs men he was a wolf.
Every Sunday he came to drink a glass at the same little-frequented tavern, at the widow Triquet’s, who kept a small bar where the workers did not drink because she forbade them to spit on the floor.
There, the old convict treated himself, not so much to the beer, which was as bad as anywhere, but because he drank it as he had not drunk for twenty years: seated in his own way, master of his gestures and his time.
One Sunday when he was thus seated, a traveling salesman at the next table asked the barmaid in a whisper who this silent old man was. She replied:
“It’s Lecocq.” That telling the other nothing, she raised her voice, by that habit of simple minds who believe that the meaning of words increases with their volume: “Lecocq, the former convict. He is a good man,” she added, seeing the other draw back his chair.
Lecocq stood up, removed his fur cap, and said gently:
“Yes, sir, I am a good man.”
The salesman frowned and looked at him without goodwill.
He repeated:
“I am a good man, sir. It was the bullet of Coutiches that caused everything.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir… My brother and I were the two cleverest smugglers in the country and we had never wished harm on anyone. Our father too had been a smuggler, and our grandfather. We were taught the trade very young. Then new customs men came to the captaincy, and the old ones told them they would never be able to catch us. It seems that made them laugh, and one morning, on a road through the wood of Coutiches, they fired at us from two hundred meters — a rifle shot that made my brother’s leg bleed. He sat down on our bundles and I ran to the ditch that was smoking. Seeing me come, the two customs men who were hidden there ran off to boast of having made the Lecocqs put down their bundle.
“I came home with the two loads and my brother leaning on me.
“When we had drunk a beer and bandaged his wound, anger took hold of us. From the edge of a hole, at two hundred meters, to fire on us who had never harmed anyone!
“I went to the captaincy. There was only a little young man there, new to the area, writing behind a window grill. I pounded on the door, first with my fists, then with my feet. Back in the middle of the street, I remember that I felt the pavement very dry under my shoes and I reflected that it would be very good for fighting. The little young man, who had stopped writing, watched me as one watches, when one is a child, something one greatly fears but has never seen. I shouted: ‘Come out of there! I don’t have a rifle; I’m not in a hole! Come on out, those who fired on us!’
“I asked the neighbors for stones — they were all on their doorsteps. At our place, there was always a sack of coffee that we sold retail. When it was a poor person, he took a handful; for a woman, we measured the handful ourselves because of her smaller hand.
“The neighbors gave me the pebbles from their gardens and I threw them through the windows. Nobody came; so I went away, and the people I passed said: ‘Well done, Lecocq!’
“That calmed me a little, but I would still have liked a good fight. My brother said to me: ‘Good! Wait till I’m healed!’
“That afternoon, the son of a smuggler comes running: the gendarmes were coming to arrest me. I take some bread and I go through the gardens, jumping all the hedges better than their horses, which chased me until nightfall. While they camped on the border, I come home and carry my brother to Belgium. Leaving was awkward, but after half an hour, as he was no longer moving, it went easily.
“When they came back from chasing me, the gendarmes also came to arrest him, wanting at least one of us. They searched every house, and in every house people said: ‘Those lads have wings… those lads have pluck…’
“Perhaps, you see, if the people here had held their tongues, instead of goading the gendarmes, I would not have done twenty years of hard labor.
“And the two of us, when we saw that the customs wanted us dead or alive, we should have gone to Antwerp to take a ship for America.
“The Belgian gendarmes had orders to arrest us. For three weeks, the time to heal my brother, we had to live in a haystack where, the more we stayed, the more the hole we enlarged seemed small to us, and we were afraid, in enlarging it, that everything would collapse.
“Every two days, a farmer friend brought us food and took away the hay.
“My brother healed, we began again to carry bundles between Tournai and Douai. We slept in the woods.
“One night, it was as quiet as a cemetery; you could hear nothing but the grass and the branches. My brother gets up and says:
“‘Someone walked.’ It was true, someone was walking. He shouts: ‘Who goes there?’
“Then in the trees, very close:
“‘Don’t shoot, Lecocq. It’s Vanderbecq!’
“‘What news?’
“‘I’ve come looking for work. Nothing to do for a week.’
“He had already carried loads for us.
“‘Good! We’ll give you a bundle,’ said my brother. ‘Show yourself.’
“And shots ring out. I fall. My brother picks me up, but the customs men and gendarmes were all around us. He left me to deal with them. It went on a long time. When they carried me away, there were two customs men and a gendarme to carry as well.
“All the others were swearing about my brother, whom they had not caught. They tended my broken leg in the hospital, and I was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor for rebellion, attempted murder, and smuggling.
“Vanderbecq had told. But it could not have been otherwise: what had made us, undid us. When the gendarmes caught him the next day, asleep in a ditch, he gave them a name for every blow they gave him. It is our custom, here, in the North, that none of us will tell anything except under blows. So the gendarmes beat him until he was empty. It’s a matter of honor.
“As for me, I learned at the trial that they had killed my brother in a barn. I never asked how. He had always said: ‘If they take me, I’ll kill myself.’ But I would rather think they killed him.”
The remaining nine stories in this collection depict life among the working people of France’s northern industrial region — smugglers, miners, factory workers, and their families. The full French text is available at the Archive.org link above.