Pierre Mille: Three Hundred Years Hence

(1922)

 

 

Henny was not very sure what the rusty bar or iron or steel was that Pousse, the blacksmith, had just thrown on to his charcoal fire. It had strange ringlets on either side running from top to bottom. Gripping a piece of the bar, already red hot, in strong pincers, one of Pousse’s sons turned it over and over in front of the cutter. Standing beside the antique patched leather bellows, his younger brother stimulated the fire.

Pousse’s wife came in with a bucket of water. She was almost as tall and strong as her husband. Her breasts hung loose in a sort of hempen sack, her only garment. She had sabots on her feet.

“That’s good,” said the blacksmith. “Put it down here.”

He breathed out and picked up his hammer, but then set it down again. “It’s large nails you want, is it?” he asked Henny. “What for?”

“Yes, big ones,” the young man replied. “For the partition in the stable, between the cattle and the pigs. It’s rotten—the pigs get through and disperse the cows’ straw. Big nails, like this one...” He held up some long pointed objects with four faces, almost as completely oxidized as the steel bar.

“Those were made back in the day, by machine,” said the smith. “They only worked like that—by machine—the ancients. Things like that aren’t forged any more, now. They’re from way back…hundreds and hundreds of years. How many? Who can tell? It was my father’s grandfather who learned to be a smith again, on his own, here…where did you find them, the things you’re showing me? In the roof of that old building—the church, as they call it?”

“I’ve been there, but there’s nothing left. Nothing at all—except the big roof-beams.”

“Yes, the rest’s gone. It’s all been taken away, so many different people have been there. And it’s the same with those big houses—the so-called châteaux. You know the one at Toué? I went there the other day, with one of our crews. We took the last stones. They’ll serve to reinforce the town walls, to the west. They aren’t strong enough.”

“I know. That’s where They got in, last year.”

“As I remember better than you, thanks to these,” said the smith, pointing to his twisted leg and then, with another gesture, to a minuscule circular blue scar on his shoulder.

“And They killed my son!” said the woman. “Oh, if we only had guns. They have them!”

“There are a few left,” said Henny, “but what about powder? And even if we had powder, the rifles only take cartridges made of copper, or some other metal in thin sheets. Where can we find that?”

“I could take care of that well enough,” the smith affirmed. “It’s the powder, as you say, that’s lacking. They have it!”

“Not much,” said Henny. “Not many guns, either—because it needs heaps of things to make guns: coal, iron, steel, complicated machines, and workshops for all that...”

“They have them, though!”

“Yes. Milot, who lived with them because he wanted to work in their laboratories, but whom they wanted to kill, and came to hide here, says that it’s always like that, that it’s one of the laws of humanity. He says that he read in a very old book, written in ancient French, that all industries, since the beginning of the world, for clothing, houses, means of transport, have gone from heights to depths, that they had periods of decadence after periods of perfection. The arts too...”

“The arts?” the smith repeated, not understanding. It was a word that had lost all significance or him.

“All the arts and all the industries,” Henny went on, “except the making of weapons. People always continued to make weapons, always inventing them, always improving them, ever since the first man. That never stopped.”

“I can understand that,” said the smith. “It’s not like that for us, but the Others! The only means they have of eating is to take by force what we Fieldfolk produce to eat ourselves. It seems that everyone knew how to read before. Me, naturally, I don’t know—but you ought to read that book to us in the winter evenings, when you come to our house with your Jène.”

 “I’ve never read it myself. I don’t have it. I told you that it was Milot who told me these things. If I had it, it wouldn’t do any good, since it’s written in an ancient language. You wouldn’t understand…any more than we understand the people who are three days’ march away.”

They were speaking a disfigured French, from which certain consonants were beginning to disappear, or had already disappeared, and in which vowels were transposed. Three centuries before, Henny had been pronounced Henri, and Jène had been Jeanne. Cheuzi had been Chousy, near Compiègne. And they did not know that some of the words they  pronounced—those signifying the meat produced by cattle, sheep and poultry, and also those relating to war and fortifications—were Russian or even Chinese words, deformed.65

All of that was too difficult for the smith’s slow and uncultivated mind to comprehend. He returned to the nails.

“Well then,” he said, “these you’ve bought me—where did you find them?”

“At home. In a wing of the house that’s falling into ruin. I’m demolishing it bit by bit, and putting aside anything that might be useful.”

“Yes, everyone does that. But what happens when there’s nothing left to demolish? People haven’t seen the end of their troubles. What will our children do?”

“Your grandfather already asked himself that question, and we’re still going. Whatever happens, humans live on; they adapt in order to live, free to get thinner, like plants in poor ground.”

“That’s true,” the smith agreed, simply. “Better to live poorly than die.”

At that moment, his eldest daughter came in, carefully carrying two large earthenware pots.

“You’ve come from the potter’s? You were there a long time. Were you watching the pots turn?”

“Not just that, for sure,” she said, calmly. At eighteen, more powerful than beautiful, well set on her solid hips, with a cheerful expression, she was rounded by pregnancy.

“You’re right,” the smith concluded. “As long as the young ones continue to make love, the world will go on.”

Passing their scorched hands over their leather aprons, his two sons approved, laughing heartily.

“We make even more children so it’s said. The old ones say so.”

“It’s probable,” Henny replied. “We no longer work the land as in the old days, with machines; we can no longer get what we lack from elsewhere, and have to produce everything ourselves, so we need more children. Then again, They kill them...and more of them die without being killed: there are no more doctors.”

“Yes there are” said the smith. “There’s old mother Jette. She knows about healing.”

“Before,” Henny affirmed, “there were doctors.”

The smith shrugged his shoulders; he was better adapted than Henny, in whom the miserable shreds of culture and tradition he had received from his family sometimes inspired an ardent regret for the long-gone days that were becoming legendary.

The man who was striking his anvil, his face illuminated by white flashes of superheated metal, remained placid. He was a man without memories; he found his way of life tolerable, having known no other. From the bucket into which he had thrown them, still red hot, he took out a few dozen roughly-hammered nails, their heads flattened with a final blow of the hammer, somewhat similar to those that had once been found driven into the walls of Roman ruins or the most ancient Christian churches, but even more primitive in appearance. His were the produce of an industry that had begun again, hesitantly; the others of an art that many generations had been able to transmit.

Henny put them in the satchel he wore at his side. “What do you want for them?”

“Do you have any eggs?”

“Yes—Jène looks after the coop very well. The hens are laying.”

“Four dozens nails makes four dozen eggs.”

“You don’t give your work away!”

“Do you think it’s easy to get iron? You have to go a long way along the track nowadays—it’s a long time since that was taken. It’s run out...”

Henny recognized then the provenance of the rusted metal bar, with it’s strange ringlets running from top to bottom, which the smith had just cut in order to obtain the raw material for his work; it was from a railway track. Such was the mine from which the surrounding country had supplied itself for three hundred years.

In the beginning, the local inhabitants had destroyed the tracks out of prudence, to prevent the Enemy—the people they called the Town-Stealers—from making use of it to reach them. Now, it was a long time since the locomotives had even been heaps of scrap iron; they had been taken apart piece by piece. One of them had been wrecked a few leagues away. The memory had lingered because the villages had fought a battle over the copper tubing.

Copper! An almost-irreplaceable metal for making the stills in which alcohol was brewed. Cheuzi had come out ahead, and it was his competence in repairing the apparatus that had made the smith one of the most important men in the neighborhood. The community—one might almost say the tribe—of Cheuzi was richer in consequence; the surrounding villages, which had no stills, bartered wheat, livestock and animal-hides tanned by oak-ash and bark in exchange for the precious alcohol—for alcohol was almost all that remained of civilization!

Sometimes, to procure it, they went as far as trading their ploughs: ploughs that had reverted to the swing-ploughs of the earliest times, which were all that the smith could forge—so he denounced the poor quality of his tools and his rivals’ lack of skill. The result of that was that some of the artisans of the people who had fallen back into barbarity still retained, by virtue of the shadow of competition, a certain desire to work well, a reside of patient ingenuity.

 

To get back to his house, Henny went along the fortifications. All the villages were fortified now, in a rudimentary fashion, but which rendered them capable of resisting an assault by horsemen without firearms—which was, fortunately, more often the case than not.

These villages, which had diminished in number, were also more populous than before; the smaller ones, less capable of resisting attacks, by virtue of their situation, had been abandoned. That was why Cheuzi, which had only had five hundred inhabitants in the days of civilization, now had more than fifteen hundred. At the confluence of two rivers, the course of which protected it from the north-west to the north-east, only open to the south, it had become a small town gathered and heaped up within its boundaries, no more extensive in surface area than before, composed of narrow and tortuous streets with houses of two or three stories—but behind each one of them, so far as was possible, an interior courtyard was reserved for animals, agricultural implements and stored crops.

A few houses from the old times survived, especially those that had been built before the era of the Great Scourge, going back to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but the economical constructions of later eras had collapsed. New ones had been built in their stead, which the very incapability of the builders had rendered more massive. They had plain wooden shutters, pierced with opening to let the light through, with no glass windows—for these peasants could no longer obtain glass, considering even fragments of it as a precious substance that served for ornamentation. Eventually, it had become customary to replace stairways with retractable ladders, so as to oppose assaults more effectively and take refuge on the uppermost floor, where foodstuffs were stored and as much as was feasible of the crops they produced.

Henny stopped in at the house of his nearest neighbor, Pafot. He needed a hand to repair his pig-pen. The custom of benevolent mutual aid had been gradually introduced, by necessity, among the Fieldfolk; save for a few indispensable artisans—smiths, weavers, potters—there were no more tradesmen; everyone obtained his nourishment by working the land. That was a further encouragement to fathers of families to increase the number of their children, to profit from their arms. Then again, it was necessary to supply the weavers with hemp or wool, ready spun, and to ferry clay to the potters. The division of labor is a city thing. It has never been established in rural areas in any era, and since the great crisis it had entirely disappeared.

Pafot, who would once have been called Parfond, told Henny that he was bringing in his hay, but that he would send him a “prisoner” the following day. That name was given to a category of inhabitants that had effectively become the community’s slaves: captives taken in the battles that the village was often obliged to fight. They were employed in work of general interest, or hired out to individual Fieldfolk. A considerable number of them were Russian, German or even Chinese, but if by chance—which happened fairly frequently—a daughter of Cheuzi accorded them her favors, the children they engendered were born free, as the concept of true slavery had disappeared from custom.

That was one of the rare traditions that the Fieldfolk had retained, unsuspectingly, from the forever-abolished era in which it had been deemed that no man should, in any circumstances, become the property of another. Gradually, however, these alliances were modifying the type of the race, and simultaneously hastening the deformation of the language. It was not uncommon now for Cheuzis to have canthused eyes, prominent cheekbones and more-or-less triangular faces. This evolution had been accentuated after the sack of Cheuzi two generations before, when the village had been taken by the Town-Stealers; many men had then been killed and almost all the women raped by the revolutionaries’ Chinese mercenaries.

Singularly enough, however, these people of a new race continued to call themselves French; the idea that the country—a country whose limits and configuration they did not know—was theirs, and only theirs, stuck in their minds, obscure but profound and ineradicable.

They were the people of France.

 

After visiting Pafot, Henny went back to his own house. The door, made of roughly-but solidly-assembled thick planks sealed with heavy crossbeams was secured by night, or in case of necessity, by a strong wooden bar, and closed by day by a knotted cord. There were no longer any locks; that was contrivance too skilled even for the proud smith.

Henny undid the knot.

The dwelling must once have been a fairly large residence, consisting of two adjacent buildings run together. One of them, in ruins, no longer bore more than the framework of its roof; the other had been maintained, repaired by Henny’s ancestors and by himself, to the meager extent of the means art their disposal. As elsewhere in the village, the glazed windows had been replaced with plain wooden shutters. The majority of the interior doors were missing.

In winter, it was much more difficult to heat the edifice than the houses of a different sort that the Fieldfolk had learned to construct, in which large chimney-hoods accommodated massive heaps of firewood; these hearths of the civilized era, designed for a different combustible material or only maintained or appearances’ sake—for traces of a central heating system had been found in the cellars—could only put out a feeble warmth.

Several hundred years before, it had been possible to find, in the rural regions of France, ancient châteaux fallen into ruins and transformed into farms: where once there had been tapestries and furniture testifying to a concern for elegance, frivolity and beauty, revealing in the carved relief of wood, the gilt of old frames and the evocation of painted figures, one no longer saw anything but harnesses hanging on the walls, onions drying in a corner, a crude table, long and stout, devoted as much to the concerns of cooking as eating, and coarse chairs and benches. Henny’s house was like that. He experienced no shame in consequence, having never seen anything else, living as everyone else around him lived.

“Jène! Jène!” he shouted.

No reply. At first, he did not feel any anxiety. Cheuzi was not under threat at present. He knew that his wife was healthy, happy and cheerful.

She’s still with her chickens, he thought, or even in the stables.

The hens greeted him with the round and disdainful gaze that they reserve for humans, and the unpredictable gait that always takes them to the place one is convinced they ought not to go. In the stable, the cows, lying in their straw, raised their heads momentarily, then continued ruminating; it was only the master, a human of whom it as unnecessary to be afraid. That observation sufficed them. But Henny did not see Jène anywhere, not even the ancient flower-garden, where only vegetables grew now.

He went back into the house, and went up the rickety stairway to the first floor. Then anguish gripped his heart.

“Jène!”

He breathed again. From above, stifled by the bundles of hay that filled the grain-loft, from further away than the grain-loft itself, from a garret into which he could not remember every having gone since childhood, a voice replied.

“Is that you, Henny? Wait—I’m coming!”

Very young, still almost a child, Jène climbed over the bales heaped up to the ceiling unhurriedly, moving both slowly and surely, like a true peasant, as of habit.

“My little Jène! You frightened me! I couldn’t find you...”

He told himself that he had had no reason to be alarmed, and reproached himself. The people of the present era lived in perpetual expectation of the worst, knowing from experience that the next minute could never be free of peril—but all those around him were hardened to it. As Père Pousse, the smith, had said, it was sufficient to be alive. People only escaped one danger to confront another!

Well, that was the very condition of life, as wild animals—those hunted by humans and beasts of prey alike—must doubtless conceive it. From the first moment to the last, there was always the threat of imminent death—and yet they adapted to that incessant horror; their palpitations ceased abruptly with the cause that gave birth to them; they played, they made love.

Henny’s sensitivity, however, was keener; almost alone, perhaps by virtue of an atavistic return, he knew the poignant sentiment that his distant ancestors had experienced: apprehension—futile, even pernicious apprehension, the inhibitor of the instinctive reflexes of defense and conservation. Henny was frightened, like a man of old, a lover of old: his little Jène!

The people of the civilized era had not known the power of such symbioses. What had then united a male with his mistress, with a woman, was pleasure, and sometimes—increasingly rarely—children, but everyone had continued to live a separate, independent existence. For Jène and Henny too there was pleasure and desire, but they also had the imperious injunction of the land from which they obtained their nourishment. It demanded, in order to allow itself to become fecund, a man and his wife, laborer and housekeeper, incessantly attentive to the cares of the stable and the poultry-coop, economical and also prudent with what virile arms brought in.

“What were you doing, Jène? I looked for you everywhere. The idea that you might be up there…what’s that you’re hiding?”

She had just come to a halt, radiant with a singular joy that he could not recall having read in her features for years. Subjected to hard and monotonous labor, the daughters of the Fieldfolk became serious very young. The period of their adolescence scarcely inspired a sort of animal coquetry in them, that of their initiation into the pleasure of transports in which there was more excitement than gaiety. The Fieldfolk, it is true, had recovered a taste for singing that their ancestors had lost, but their emotional songs—even those into which they tried to put some joy—were merely passionate, and they did not usually dance in pairs, but in groups from which a single male or female dancer would occasionally detach themselves.

Jène, one of the region’s rare blondes, appeared slender but solid. Her mind had its reason, her blood its violence; she was both impetuous and logical. A long time before, the difficulty of obtaining sufficiently thin steel needles—stout ones were still made, in raw iron, hammered and then sharpened on a whetstone—had caused women to renounced tailored clothing. Jène’s chemise, in hempen fabric, was merely a sort of sack with sleeves, open to allow her bronzed and vigorous neck to pass through. Her skirt, made of a pale russet wool—the natural color of the sheep’s fleece, because it was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain dyes for coloring, was composed of two unstitched pieces that overlapped one another slightly on the left side. Her feet were bare, like Henny’s and almost all Fieldfolk in summer, unless they wore sabots to work in the fields. In winter, they wrapped strips of woolen cloth around their sabots.

With her rounded, sunburned perfectly-shaped arms, Jène was hiding something behind her in a triumphant, ecstatic manner.

“What is it?” Henny asked. “Come on, show me!”

At that moment, penetrated by the contagion of the playfulness discovered in her entire attitude—he felt as young as she was. He was, indeed, only a few years older. But Jène persisted in hiding the object she as clutching so jealously from his view.

“Guess!” she said to him. “You told me that there was nothing in that room at the back of the grain-loft—me, I have a better memory! I thought I remembered having seen some kind of box there when I was very small—and suddenly, as if in a dream, I saw, I was sure, absolutely sure, that the thing, under its layers of dust, was leather! Leather, you understand? Hard leather, such as is no longer made, tanned as no one any longer knows how to tan!

“I went up into the room. The box was closed by an iron catch, not a knotted cord. It must be old, then—very old. But the catch was all eaten away by rust; I broke it with a single blow of a wooden mallet. And it was full of things, inside! Dresses—can you imagine? So light! What were they made of?  Clouds with gold, pink, the green of trees, the blue of the sky. Yes, clouds! They fell into dust when I tried to unfold them—but at the bottom, in a pretty case that had protected it, there was this! Look, Henny, look!”

They had come back downstairs, and were in the large hallway at the bottom of the steps. With a seemingly amorous gesture, Jène opened what she called the “case” to display two small high-heeled dancing-shoes in silvery white satin spangled with gold, with rhinestone rosettes.

“How shiny they are! How they shine! And they can be even shinier!”

She rubbed a few soapwort leaves between her hands, plunged them into water, rubbed the rosettes with them, and then rinsed them with impure water. The stones, resuscitated, emitted little gleams, reflected in her eyes.

There is an incantation in certain things. Suddenly rediscovering a sentiment of devotion, a need to pay homage to the feminine grace that had vanished generations  before, Henny, clad in his coarse woolen  cloak, went down on one knee and made as if to put the frail objects on the bare feet of his wife, who was standing in front of him, enthusiastically, as if she were already dancing.

“You’re mad, Henny, mad! And silly! Oh, silly! On my bare feet, dressed as I am! That can’t be—they weren’t made for that, I’m sure of it. You’ll see.”

He witnessed the miracle of coquetry that surged forth, the sumptuous coquetry of olden days. Jène went to search in a heavy chest, made of slats of oak assembled with difficulty, for her most beautiful, finest roll of hempen cloth, measured as much as necessary with her eyes and arms, and detached the piece with a decisive gesture.

“You’ll see,” she repeated. “You’ll see! What a pity it’s too small!”

The women of the era collected fragments of glass preciously. An intact window-pane was a treasure for which people might trade an ox; it was the rarest gift that a lover could give his mistress. By placing beneath the pane a fragment of zinc, also recovered from the rubble, one obtained a mirror with unsteady, wretched reflections. Jène possessed one of those mirrors; she had always been very proud of it. Today, however, she mourned its insufficiency.

An instant more, and she was naked, in all the charm of her youth, the ardor of the blood that flowed in her veins, and a neat, strong grace that rose from her round knees up her long thighs to her polished abdomen, which rounded in the shape of a lyre to the pink tips of her breasts: vigorous, healthy, made for desire and possession.

On another occasion she would have been proud of that charm, but she was no longer thinking about it; she was no longer thinking that she might be beautiful in the nude; she was only nude in order to dress herself. A woman does not give herself to her costume; she learns to give herself, much later, when she has savored the appetites she arouses.

Over the curve of her hips, and her forward-leaning torso Jène unrolled the beige cloth—that poor, humble fabric. Its folds had to accompany the form of her body—an instinctive science informed her of that—held by only one or two of the bone clasps that had taken the place of pins. She found the right placement: a knot over her right shoulder, the left breast uncovered, the other disappeared beneath the surge of candid folds.

She reflected, biting her lip. “No,” she said, “that’s not right yet...”

She found a means to lower the cloth at the back, quite low between the two shoulders, drawing it forwards half way to the two firm, round globes. Turning continually around the imperfect and insufficient mirror, she became impatient at never being able to see herself in full.

“You’re beautiful!” the wonderstruck Henny affirmed. “You’re very beautiful, I assure you. How strange that is! I didn’t think you could be so beautiful!”

She combed her hair with a boxwood comb that Henny has fashioned with his own hands one winter evening at the smith’s house, meditated again, and secured it over her forehead with a double string of red berries.

“Now,” she said. “Now!”

“The little shoes, the lovely shoes!” Henny proposed, intoxicated.

“On my bare feet? You don’t have any idea…no, wait!”

Taking the finest strips with which she bound her ankles over her sabots on icy and snowy days, she wrapped them around her legs, all the way to the knees, slightly interlaced. Their hue fused with the hem of the sort of stola that her feminine genius had just reinvented. Then, sitting down like a queen, she said: “You can put the shoes on me now!”

He knelt down for the second time.

“How small they are! How small they seem! Will you be able to walk in them? It’s impossible…unbelievable!”

She took a few hesitant steps, embarrassed by the high heels, which disconcerted her, then recovered her self-confidence, bowed, walked and danced, drunk with joy, as if her young head was in the clouds.

“Aren’t I beautiful!”

She repeated: “Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!” She chanted the word, the incantatory power of which she felt emanating from her entire body And, by virtue of a contrast that he felt bitterly, rendered gauche, humiliated to the point of anger in his woolen cloak and the woolen undercoat that she had knitted with her own hands, Henny felt ugly, dirty, coarse, inferior to her, at the very moment that he felt a furious desire to carry her away, to take her, to have her all to himself, underneath him, without any longer seeing her but conserving nevertheless in his eyes the image of that tall, slender woman, splendid, as he had never seen her before.

He only had to take one step, though, make a gesture; she fell into his arms. She had understood, at the same time as the exasperation of his senses, his timidity; she experienced, in consequence, an immense satisfaction, stronger and more delightful than the strongest and most delightful ecstasy, for which, however, she was prepared. She was not taken, this time; she gave herself. That was a new, unknown sensation for Jène, the revelation of the power that womankind had once possessed, which exited her to the point of frenzy.

Suddenly, though, as he was about to become her master again, the master who takes, tears, violates, she pushed him away with her extended arms, and cried: “Henny! Henny!”

“What?” he said, interrupted but brutal.

“Henny, they must have existed—those things, all those things? The time of joy and beauty, the time when women were beautiful, as I’ve just tried to make myself beautiful? And that, my costume, was only a semblance, a lie that would have made them laugh if they were to come back... Henny, Henny, what was there in those times, and why does it no longer exist?”

 

Thus it was that the great revolt began among the Fieldfolk, which shook the power of the Town-Stealers.