Fifteen years had passed since I was at Virelogne. I returned there in the autumn to shoot with my friend Serval, who had at last rebuilt his chateau1, which the Prussians had destroyed.
I loved that district. It is one of those delightful2 spots which have a sensuous3 charm for the eyes. You love it with a physical love. We, whom the country enchants4, keep tender memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often which have stirred us like joyful5 events. Sometimes our thoughts turn back to a corner in a forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard6 filled with flowers, seen but a single time on some bright day, yet remaining in our hearts like the image of certain women met in the street on a spring morning in their light, gauzy dresses, leaving in soul and body an unsatisfied desire which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that you have just passed by happiness.
At Virelogne I loved the whole countryside, dotted with little woods and crossed by brooks7 which sparkled in the sun and looked like veins8 carrying blood to the earth. You fished in them for crawfish, trout9 and eels10. Divine happiness! You could bathe in places and you often found snipe among the high grass which grew along the borders of these small water courses.
I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead of me, Serval, a hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of lucerne. I turned round by the thicket11 which forms the boundary of the wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.
Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat, covered with vines, with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a dead house, with its skeleton standing12 bare and sinister13?
I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day, the good woman had given me a glass of wine to drink and that Serval had told me the history of its people. The father, an old poacher, had been killed by the gendarmes14. The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry fellow who also passed for a fierce slayer15 of game. People called them “Les Sauvage.”
Was that a name or a nickname?
I called to Serval. He came up with his long strides like a crane.
I asked him:
“What's become of those people?”
This was his story:
When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years old, enlisted16, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not pity the old woman very much because she had money; they knew it.
She remained entirely17 alone in that isolated18 dwelling19, so far from the village, on the edge of the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of the same strain as the men folk—a hardy20 old woman, tall and thin, who seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The women of the fields laugh but little in any case, that is men's business. But they themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy21, gloomy life. The peasants imbibe22 a little noisy merriment at the tavern23, but their helpmates always have grave, stern countenances24. The muscles of their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.
Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which was soon covered by the snows. She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat. Then she returned to her house. As there was talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her shoulder—her son's gun, rusty25 and with the butt26 worn by the rubbing of the hand—and she was a strange sight, the tall “Sauvage,” a little bent27, going with slow strides over the snow, the muzzle28 of the piece extending beyond the black headdress, which confined her head and imprisoned29 her white hair, which no one had ever seen.
One day a Prussian force arrived. It was billeted upon the inhabitants, according to the property and resources of each. Four were allotted30 to the old woman, who was known to be rich.
They were four great fellows with fair complexion31, blond beards and blue eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue32 which they had endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had remained kind and gentle. Alone with this aged33 woman, they showed themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense and fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at the well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great swishes of water their pink-white northern skin, while La Mere34 Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup. They would be seen cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up all the housework like four good sons around their mother.
But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a roll of black hair upon his lip. She asked every day of each of the soldiers who were installed beside her hearth35: “Do you know where the French marching regiment36, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it.”
They invariably answered, “No, we don't know, don't know a thing at all.” And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness—they who had mothers, too, there at home—they rendered her a thousand little services. She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the peasantry have no patriotic37 hatred38; that belongs to the upper class alone. The humble39, those who pay the most because they are poor and because every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true cannon's prey40 because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries41 of war because they are the feeblest and offer least resistance—they hardly understand at all those bellicose42 ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those pretended political combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the conqueror43 with the conquered.
They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere Sauvage:
“There are four who have found a soft place.”
Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she observed, far off on the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling. Soon she recognized him; it was the postman to distribute the letters. He gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case the spectacles which she used for sewing. Then she read:
MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you sad news. Your boy
Victor was killed yesterday by a shell which almost cut him in two.
I was near by, as we stood next each other in the company, and he
told me about you and asked me to let you know on the same day if
anything happened to him.
I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you
when the war is done.
CESAIRE RIVOT,
Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.
The letter was dated three weeks back.
She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet. She thought: “There's Victor killed now.” Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful, torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never again! The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the son. He had been cut in two by a cannon-ball. She seemed to see the thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments of anger.
What had they done with his body afterward44? If they had only let her have her boy back as they had brought back her husband—with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!
But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the village. She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.
They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a fine rabbit—stolen, doubtless—and they made signs to the old woman that there was to be something good to east.
She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came to killing45 the rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was not the first. One of the soldiers struck it down with a blow of his fist behind the ears.
The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the blood which she was touching46, and which covered her hands, and which she felt cooling and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot, and she kept seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody47, like this still palpitating animal.
She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful. They devoured48 the rabbit without bothering themselves about her. She looked at them sideways, without speaking, her face so impassive that they perceived nothing.
All of a sudden she said: “I don't even know your names, and here's a whole month that we've been together.” They understood, not without difficulty, what she wanted, and told their names.
That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with the addresses of their families, and, resting her spectacles on her great nose, she contemplated49 that strange handwriting, then folded the sheet and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told her of the death of her son.
When the meal was ended she said to the men:
“I am going to work for you.”
They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to them that thus they would not be so cold; and they helped her. They heaped the stacks of hay as high as the straw roof, and in that manner they made a sort of great chamber51 with four walls of fodder52, warm and perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.
At dinner one of them was worried to see that La Mere Sauvage still ate nothing. She told him that she had pains in her stomach. Then she kindled53 a good fire to warm herself, and the four Germans ascended54 to their lodging-place by the ladder which served them every night for this purpose.
As soon as they closed the trapdoor the old woman removed the ladder, then opened the outside door noiselessly and went back to look for more bundles of straw, with which she filled her kitchen. She went barefoot in the snow, so softly that no sound was heard. From time to time she listened to the sonorous55 and unequal snoring of the four soldiers who were fast asleep.
When she judged her preparations to be sufficient, she threw one of the bundles into the fireplace, and when it was alight she scattered56 it over all the others. Then she went outside again and looked.
In a few seconds the whole interior of the cottage was illumined with a brilliant light and became a frightful57 brasier, a gigantic fiery58 furnace, whose glare streamed out of the narrow window and threw a glittering beam upon the snow.
Then a great cry issued from the top of the house; it was a clamor of men shouting heartrending calls of anguish59 and of terror. Finally the trapdoor having given way, a whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft, pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like the immense flame of a torch, and all the cottage flared60.
Nothing more was heard therein but the crackling of the fire, the cracking of the walls, the falling of the rafters. Suddenly the roof fell in and the burning carcass of the dwelling hurled61 a great plume62 of sparks into the air, amid a cloud of smoke.
The old “Sauvage” stood before her ruined dwelling, armed with her gun, her son's gun, for fear one of those men might escape.
When she saw that it was ended, she threw her weapon into the brasier. A loud report followed.
People were coming, the peasants, the Prussians.
They found the woman seated on the trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.
A German officer, but speaking French like a son of France, demanded:
“Where are your soldiers?”
She reached her bony arm toward the red heap of fire which was almost out and answered with a strong voice:
“There!”
They crowded round her. The Prussian asked:
“How did it take fire?”
“It was I who set it on fire.”
They did not believe her, they thought that the sudden disaster had made her crazy. While all pressed round and listened, she told the story from beginning to end, from the arrival of the letter to the last shriek65 of the men who were burned with her house, and never omitted a detail.
When she had finished, she drew two pieces of paper from her pocket, and, in order to distinguish them by the last gleams of the fire, she again adjusted her spectacles. Then she said, showing one:
“That, that is the death of Victor.” Showing the other, she added, indicating the red ruins with a bend of the head: “Here are their names, so that you can write home.” She quietly held a sheet of paper out to the officer, who held her by the shoulders, and she continued:
“You must write how it happened, and you must say to their mothers that it was I who did that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage! Do not forget.”
The officer shouted some orders in German. They seized her, they threw her against the walls of her house, still hot. Then twelve men drew quickly up before her, at twenty paces. She did not move. She had understood; she waited.
An order rang out, followed instantly by a long report. A belated shot went off by itself, after the others.
The old woman did not fall. She sank as though they had cut off her legs.
The Prussian officer approached. She was almost cut in two, and in her withered66 hand she held her letter bathed with blood.
My friend Serval added:
“It was by way of reprisal67 that the Germans destroyed the chateau of the district, which belonged to me.”
I thought of the mothers of those four fine fellows burned in that house and of the horrible heroism68 of that other mother shot against the wall.
And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the flames.
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1
chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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2
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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3
sensuous
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| adj.激发美感的；感官的，感觉上的 | |
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4
enchants
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| 使欣喜，使心醉( enchant的第三人称单数 )； 用魔法迷惑 | |
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5
joyful
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| adj.欢乐的，令人欢欣的 | |
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6
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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7
brooks
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| n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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8
veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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9
trout
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| n.鳟鱼；鲑鱼(属) | |
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10
eels
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| abbr. 电子发射器定位系统（=electronic emitter location system） | |
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11
thicket
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| n.灌木丛，树林 | |
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12
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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13
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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14
gendarmes
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| n.宪兵，警官( gendarme的名词复数 ) | |
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15
slayer
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| n. 杀人者，凶手 | |
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16
enlisted
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| adj.应募入伍的v.（使）入伍， （使）参军( enlist的过去式和过去分词 )；获得（帮助或支持） | |
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17
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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18
isolated
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| adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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19
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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20
hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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21
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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22
imbibe
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| v.喝，饮；吸入，吸收 | |
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23
tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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24
countenances
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| n.面容( countenance的名词复数 )；表情；镇静；道义支持 | |
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25
rusty
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| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
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26
butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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27
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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28
muzzle
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| n.鼻口部；口套；枪(炮)口；vt.使缄默 | |
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29
imprisoned
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| 下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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30
allotted
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| 分配，拨给，摊派( allot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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31
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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32
fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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33
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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34
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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35
hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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36
regiment
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| n.团，多数，管理；v.组织，编成团，统制 | |
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37
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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38
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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39
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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40
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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41
miseries
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| n.痛苦( misery的名词复数 )；痛苦的事；穷困；常发牢骚的人 | |
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42
bellicose
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| adj.好战的；好争吵的 | |
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43
conqueror
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| n.征服者，胜利者 | |
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44
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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45
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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46
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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47
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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48
devoured
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| 吞没( devour的过去式和过去分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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49
contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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50
loft
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| n.阁楼，顶楼 | |
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51
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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52
fodder
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| n.草料；炮灰 | |
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53
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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54
ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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55
sonorous
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| adj.响亮的，回响的；adv.圆润低沉地；感人地；n.感人，堂皇 | |
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56
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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57
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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58
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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59
anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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60
Flared
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| adj. 端部张开的, 爆发的, 加宽的, 漏斗式的 动词flare的过去式和过去分词 | |
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61
hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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62
plume
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| n.羽毛；v.整理羽毛，骚首弄姿，用羽毛装饰 | |
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63
tinted
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| adj. 带色彩的 动词tint的过去式和过去分词 | |
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toll
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| n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟) | |
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65
shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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66
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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67
reprisal
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| n.报复，报仇，报复性劫掠 | |
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68
heroism
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| n.大无畏精神，英勇 | |
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