33 Days Read Online Free Page B

innocently as if he were contemplating the horizon. Among this group of faces, I discern one that’s livelier, more defined. This must have been what a young Voltairelooked like, which is to say, Voltaire at forty-five. This face shows more curiosity than the others, and more guile. His eyes aren’t sizing me up, they return my gaze.
    We are the heroes of fewer than three nights without a bed. Down deep, I think a bed is a good thing. But I’m not so stupid. I too am not without guile. I know how to dissimulate when necessary. I ask only for a roof against bad weather and a little straw.
    Abel Delaveau (here I’m giving his real name) was our host. I washed myself with water from his well; we shared meals at his table and slept in a bedroom of his house, a real bedroom, in a bed, a real bed. I contemplated with surprising enthusiasm the 1880 clock on the mantel, the framed photographs and the red underside of the eiderdown.
    When I was a child I read beautiful stories about hospitality. The guest is sacred for the biblical patriarch, in the Greeks’ Iliad , in the Bedouins’ tents. Abel, Monsieur Abel as he is often called in Chapelon, I had no reason to envy antiquity thanks to you. Hospitality exists in modern times and is even more beautiful because it is not a rite but a gift.
    The courtyard of the farm, filled with the setting sun, with calm, with silence, is enormous and enclosed by a wall. The house, the barns, the stable, the cowshed look beautiful together. In the facade of the house a gothic fragment has been preserved, as one might respect a swallows’ nest. I was with Abel Delaveau only long enough to say thank you. A few words about the war changed everything. I’ll recount the conversation later. At this point in my story I’ll leave it. I’ll only say that we felt there was a common language between us. We both detested the war beyond just its effects on our relatives and our interests; we both faced it with surprising acceptance and both knew that if Hitler was responsible, he wasn’t as important as he was made out to be and he hadn’t invented himself without help.
    I’ve often been uncomfortable chatting with laborers, never with a peasant. Sometimes a peasant picks words with his fingertips, like picking a stalk of wheat, or a single kernel. A city dweller learns from peasants to recognize wheat and oats but can’t discuss cereals. A worker learns from newspapers and city life the game of passionateabstractions, of juggling fake weights. When in a crowd, he can’t make out the reality, the abstraction and the emotion he’s being inoculated with.
    Simply put, Abel Delaveau had read. A government official, as I’ll describe him for simplicity’s sake, asked me, “Are you sure he assimilated what he had read?” and his question was quick and sharp, as if my assertion had infringed on something at the core of his being. Many French baccalaureates consider this sort of “assimilating” one of their privileges. I knew university faculty members who had assimilated nothing at all.
    I thought for a moment about Émile Guillaumin, ‡ to whose home the writer Valery Larbaud brought me one day. But I did not have time to get to know Guillaumin the peasant. I can still see him stabling a cow. The same modesty that kept us from giving in to a conversational tour littéraire perhaps kept him from giving a tour paysan . But Abel Delaveau was a peasant in full, by heritage and by choice, and an enthusiastic one. I’ve never met another like him. Especially because he is not at all immured by his work on the land.
    That first evening in Chapelon I didn’t know that “return to the soil” would soon become a fashionable, prescriptive refrain. Bureaucrats and academics now utter it regularly, proving only that they have no aptitude for anything besides unskilled manual labor. What they call “the wisdom of peasants” is nothing but a reflection of their mental laziness or their preconceptions.