The Man Who Planted Trees
By Jean Giono
For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the
good fortune to be able to observe its performance over many years. If this
performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity,
if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and
that, in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no
mistake.
About forty years ago I was taking a long trip on foot over mountain heights
quite unknown to tourists, in that ancient region where the Alps thrust down
into Provence. All this, at the time I embarked upon my long walk through
these deserted regions, was barren and colorless land. Nothing grew there but
wild lavender.
I was crossing the area at its widest point, and after three days’ walking, found
myself in the midst of unparalleled desolation. I camped near the vestiges of an
abandoned village. I had run out of water the day before, and had to find some.
These clustered houses, although in ruins, like an old wasps’ nest, suggested
that there must once have been a spring or well here. There was indeed a spring,
but it was dry. The five or six houses, roofless, gnawed by wind and rain, the
tiny chapel with its crumbling steeple, stood about like the houses and chapels
in living villages, but all life had vanished.
It was a fine June day, brilliant with sunlight, but over this unsheltered land
high in the sky, the wind blew with unendurable ferocity. It growled over the
carcasses of the houses like a lion disturbed at its meal. I had to move my camp.
After five hours’ walking I had still not found water and there was nothing to
give me any hope of finding any. All about me was the same dryness, the same
coarse grasses. I thought I glimpsed in the distance a small black silhouette,
upright, and took it for the trunk of a solitary tree. In any case I started toward
it. It was a shepherd. Thirty sheep were lying about him on the baking earth.
He gave me a drink from his water gourd and, a little later, took me to his cottage in a fold of the plain. He drew his water–excellent water–from a very
deep natural well above which he had constructed a primitive winch.
The man spoke little. This is the way of those who live alone, but one felt that
he was sure of himself, and confident in his assurance. That was unexpected in
this barren country. He lived, not in a cabin, but in a real house built of stone
that bore plain evidence of how his own efforts had reclaimed the ruin he had
found there on his arrival. His roof was strong and sound. The wind on its tiles
made the sound of the sea upon its shore.
The place was in order, the dishes washed, the floor swept, his rifle oiled; his
soup was boiling over the fire. I noticed then that he was cleanly shaved, that
all his buttons were firmly sewed on, that his clothing had been mended with
the meticulous care that makes the mending invisible.
He shared his soup with me and afterwards, when I offered my tobacco pouch,
he told me that he did not smoke. His dog, as silent as himself, was friendly
without being servile.
It was understood from the first that I should spend the night there; the nearest
village was still more than a day and a half away. And besides I was perfectly
familiar with the nature of the rare villages in that region.
There were four or five of them scattered well apart from each other on these
mountain slopes, among white oak thickets, at the extreme end of the wagon
roads. They were inhabited by charcoal-burners, and the living was bad. Families,
crowded together in a climate that is excessively harsh both in winter
and in summer, found no escape from the unceasing conflict of personalities.
Irrational ambition reached inordinate proportions in the continual desire for
escape.
The men took their wagonloads of charcoal to the town, then returned. The
soundest characters broke under the perpetual grind. The women nursed their
grievances. There was rivalry in everything, over the price of charcoal as over a
pew in the church, over warring virtues as over warring vices as well as over the
ceaseless combat between virtues and vice. And over all there was the wind,
also ceaseless, to rasp upon the nerves. There were epidemics of suicide and
frequent cases of insanity, usually homicidal.
The shepherd went to fetch a small sack and poured out a heap of acorns on
the table. He began to inspect them, one by one, with great concentration, separating
the good from the bad. I smoked my pipe. I did offer to help him. He
told me that it was his job. And in fact, seeing the care he devoted to the task, I
did not insist. That was the whole of our conversation. When he had set aside
a large enough pile of good acorns he counted them out by tens, meanwhile
eliminating the small ones or those which were slightly cracked, for now He examined them more closely. When he had thus selected one hundred perfect
acorns he stopped and we went to bed.
There was peace in being with this man. The next day I asked if I might rest
here for a day. He found it quite natural–or, to be more exact, he gave me the
impression that nothing could startle him. My rest was not absolutely necessary,
but I was interested and wished to know more about him. He opened the
pen and led his flock to pasture. Before leaving, he plunged his sack of carefully
selected and counted acorns into a pail of water.
I noticed that he carried for a stick an iron rod as thick as my thumb and about
a yard and a half long. Resting myself by walking, I followed a path parallel to
his. His pasture was in a valley. He left the dog in charge of the little flock and
climbed toward where I stood. I was afraid that he was about to rebuke me for
my indiscretion, but it was not that at all: this was the way he was going, and
he invited me to go along if I had nothing better to do. He climbed to the top of
the ridge, about a hundred yards away.
There he began thrusting his iron rod into the earth, making a hole in which he
planted an acorn; then he refilled the hole. He was planting oak trees. I asked
him if the land belonged to him. He answered no. Did he know whose it was?
He did not. He supposed it was community property, or perhaps belonged to
people who cared nothing about it. He was not interested in finding out whose
it was. He planted his hundred acorns with the greatest care.
After the midday meal he resumed his planting. I suppose I must have been
fairly insistent in my questioning, for he answered me. For three years he
had been planting trees in this wilderness. He had planted one hundred thousand.
Of the hundred thousand, twenty thousand had sprouted. Of the twenty
thousand he still expected to lose about half, to rodents or to the unpredictable
designs of Providence. There remained ten thousand oak trees to grow where
nothing had grown before.
That was when I began to wonder about the age of this man. He was obviously
over fifty. Fifty-five, he told me. His name was Elzeard Bouffier. He had once
had a farm in the lowlands. There he had had his life. He had lost his only son,
then his wife. He had withdrawn into this solitude where his pleasure was to
live leisurely with his lambs and his dog. It was his opinion that this land was
dying for want of trees. He added that, having no very pressing business of his
own, he had resolved to remedy this state of affairs.
Since I was at that time, in spite of my youth, leading a solitary life, I understood
how to deal gently with solitary spirits. But my very youth forced me to
consider the future in relation to myself and to a certain quest for happiness. I
told him that in thirty years his ten thousand oaks would be magnificent. He
answered quite simply that if God granted him life, in thirty years he would have planted so many more that these ten thousand would be like a drop of
water in the ocean.
Besides, he was now studying the reproduction of beech trees and had a nursery
of seedlings grown from beechnuts near his cottage. The seedlings, which he
had protected from his sheep with a wire fence, were very beautiful. He was
also considering birches for the valleys where, he told me, there was a certain
amount of moisture a few yards below the surface of the soil.
The next day, we parted.
The following year came the War of 1914, in which I was involved for the next
five years. An infantryman hardly had time for reflecting upon trees. To tell the
truth, the thing itself had made no impression upon me; I had considered it as
a hobby, a stamp collection, and forgotten it.
The war over, I found myself possessed of a tiny demobilization bonus and a
huge desire to breathe fresh air for a while. It was with no other objective that I
again took the road to the barren lands.
The countryside had not changed. However, beyond the deserted village I
glimpsed in the distance a sort of greyish mist that covered the mountaintops
like a carpet. Since the day before, I had begun to think again of the shepherd
tree-planter. "Ten thousand oaks,"I reflected, "really take up quite a bit of space.
I had seen too many men die during those five years not to imagine easily that
Elzeard Bouffier was dead, especially since, at twenty, one regards men of fifty
as old men with nothing left to do but die. He was not dead. As a matter of
fact, he was extremely spry.
He had changed jobs. Now he had only four sheep but, instead, a hundred
beehives. He had got rid of the sheep because they threatened his young trees.
For, he told me (and I saw for myself), the war had disturbed him not at all. He
had imperturbably continued to plant.
The oaks of 1910 were then ten years old and taller than either of us. It was
an impressive spectacle. I was literally speechless and, as he did not talk, we
spent the whole day walking in silence through his forest. In three sections, it
measured eleven kilometers in length and three kilometers at its greatest width.
When you remembered that all this had sprung from the hands and the soul of
this one man, without technical resources, you understood that humans could
be as effectual as God in other realms than that of destruction.
He had pursued his plan, and beech trees as high as my shoulder, spreading out
as far as the eye could reach, confirmed it. He showed me handsome clumps
of birch planted five years before–that is, in 1915, when I had been fighting
at Verdun. He had set them out in all the valleys where he had guessed–andrightly–that there was moisture almost at the surface of the ground. They were
as delicate as young girls, and very well established.
Creation seemed to come about in a sort of chain reaction. He did not worry
about it, he was determinedly pursuing his task in all its simplicity; but as we
went back toward the village I saw water flowing in brooks that had been dry
since human memory. This was the most impressive result of the chain reaction
that I had seen. These dry streams had once, long ago, run with water.
Some of the dreary villages I mentioned before had been built on the sites of
ancient Roman settlements, traces of which still remained; and archaeologists,
exploring there, had found fishhooks where, in the twentieth century, cisterns
were needed to assure a small supply of water.
The wind, too, scattered seeds. As the water reappeared, so there reappeared
willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, flowers, and a certain purpose in being
alive. But the transformation took place so gradually that it became part of the
pattern without causing any astonishment. Hunters, climbing into the wilderness
in pursuit of hares or wild boar, had of course noticed the sudden growth
of little trees, but had attributed it to some natural caprice of the earth. That
is why no one meddled with Elzeard Bouffier’s work. If he had been detected
he would have had opposition. He was indetectable. Who in the villages or in
the administration could have dreamed of such perseverance in a magnificent
generosity?
To have anything like a precise idea of this exceptional character one must not
forget that he worked in total solitude: so total that, toward the end of his life,
he lost the habit of speech. Or perhaps it was that he saw no need for it.
In 1933 he received a visit from a forest ranger who notified him of an order
against lighting fires out of doors for fear of endangering the growth of this
"natural"forest. It was the first time the man told him naively, that he had ever
heard of a forest growing of its own accord. At that time Bouffier was about
to plant beeches at a spot some twelve kilometers from his cottage. In order
to avoid traveling back and forth–for he was then seventy-five–he planned to
build a stone cabin right at the plantation. The next year he did so.
In 1935 a whole delegation came from the Government to examine the "natural
forest."There was a high official from the Forest Service, a deputy, technicians.
There was a great deal of ineffectual talk. It was decided that something must
be done and, fortunately, nothing was done except the only helpful thing: the
whole forest was placed under the protection of the State and charcoal burning
prohibited. For it was impossible not to be captivated by the beauty of those
young trees in the fullness of health, and they cast their spell over the deputy
himself.
A friend of mine was among the forestry officers of the delegation. To him I
explained the mystery. One day the following week we went together to see
Elzeard Bouffier. We found him hard at work, some ten kilometers from the
spot where the inspection had taken place.
This forester was not my friend for nothing. He was aware of values. He knew
how to keep silent. I delivered the eggs I had brought as a present. We shared
our lunch among the three of us and spent several hours in wordless contemplation
of the countryside.
In the direction from which we had come the slopes were covered with trees
twenty to twenty-five feet tall. I remembered how the land had looked in 1913:
a desert.... Peaceful, regular toil, the vigorous mountain air, frugality and, above
all, serenity of spirit had endowed this old man with awe-inspiring health. He
was one of God’s athletes. I wondered how many more acres he was going to
cover with trees.
Before leaving, my friend simply made a brief suggestion about certain species
of trees that the soil here seemed particularly suited for. He did not force the
point. "For the very good reason,"he told me later, "that Bouffier knows more
about it than I do."At the end of an hour’s walking–having turned it over in his
mind–he added, "He knows a lot more about it than anybody. He’s discovered
a wonderful way to be happy!"
It was thanks to this officer that not only the forest but also the happiness of
the man was protected. He delegated three rangers to the task, and so terrorized
them that they remained proof against all the bottles of wine the charcoalburners
could offer.
The only serious danger to the work occurred during the war of 1939. As
cars were being run on gazogenes (wood-burning generators), there was never
enough wood. Cutting was started among the oaks of 1910, but the area
was so far from any railroads that the enterprise turned out to be financially
unsound. It was abandoned. The shepherd had seen nothing of it. He was
thirty kilometers away, peacefully continuing his work, ignoring the war of ’39
as he had ignored that of ’14.
I saw Elzeard Bouffier for the last time in June of 1945. He was then eightyseven.
I had started back along the route through the wastelands; but now,
in spite of the disorder in which the war had left the country, there was a bus
running between the Durance Valley and the mountain. I attributed the fact
that I no longer recognized the scenes of my earlier journeys to this relatively
speedy transportation. It seemed to me, too, that the route took me through
new territory. It took the name of a village to convince me that I was actually in
that region that had been all ruins and desolation The bus put me down at Vergons. In 1913 this hamlet of ten or twelve houses
had three inhabitants. They had been savage creatures, hating one another,
living by trapping game, little removed, both physically and morally, from the
conditions of prehistoric humanity. All about them nettles were feeding upon
the remains of abandoned houses. Their condition had been beyond hope. For
them, nothing but to await death–a situation which rarely predisposes to virtue.
Everything was changed. Even the air. Instead of the harsh dry winds that
used to attack me, a gentle breeze was blowing, laden with scents. A sound like
water came from the mountains: it was the wind in the forest. Most amazing of
all, I heard the actual sound of water falling into a pool. I saw that a fountain
had been built, that it flowed freely and–what touched me most-that someone
had planted a linden beside it, a linden that must have been four years old,
already in full leaf, the incontestable symbol of resurrection.
Besides, Vergons bore evidence of labor at the sort of undertaking for which
hope is required. Hope, then, had returned. Ruins had been cleared away,
dilapidated walls torn down and five houses restored. Now there were twenty eight
inhabitants, four of them young married couples. The new houses, freshly
plastered, were surrounded by gardens where vegetables and flowers grew in
orderly confusion, cabbages and roses, leeks and snapdragons, celery and anemones.
It was now a village where one would like to live.
From that point on I went on foot. The war just finished had not yet allowed
the full blooming of life, but Lazarus was out of the tomb. On the lower slopes
of the mountain I saw little fields of barley and rye; deep in the narrow valleys
the meadows were turning green.
It has taken only the eight years since then for the whole countryside to glow
with health and prosperity. On the site of ruins I had seen in 1913 now stand
neat farms, cleanly plastered, testifying to a happy and comfortable life. The old
streams, fed by the rains and snows that the forest conserves, are flowing again.
Their waters have been channeled. On each farm, in groves of maples, fountain
pools overflow onto carpets of fresh mint. Little by little the villages have been
rebuilt. People from the plains, where land is costly, have settled here, bringing
youth, motion, the spirit of adventure. Along the roads you meet hearty men
and women, boys and girls who understand laughter and have recovered a
taste for picnics. Counting the former population, unrecognizable now that
they live in comfort, more than ten thousand people owe their happiness to Elzeard Bouffier.
When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources,
was able to cause this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I
am convinced that in spite of everything, humanity is admirable. But when I
compute the unfailing greatness of spirit and the tenacity of benevolence that it must have taken to achieve this result, I am taken with an immense respect
for that old and unlearned peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God.
Elzeard Bouffier died peacefully in 1947 at the hospice in Banon.
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20 de outubro de 2002
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